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Kade just sat here, shaking his head. No one understood. Cash was paired and it had stuck. He would never know what it felt like to have a mating bond stretched so thin. “I wish Seth would’ve never sent me that video of her,” Kade said. “She was going to make the same goddamn decision either way, and I got chewed up in the process and I wish he wouldn’t have ever even let me know she was still in Sister’s Edge. I can’t save anyone who loves their cage.”

“Maybe it’s not a cage to her,” Cash said. “Maybe it’s just home.”

“I’m home,” he gritted out angrily. “I’m home. Fuck that place, fuck that cage, I am home. I was supposed to be her home!”

Cash rubbed his knuckles across his cheek and Kade couldn’t watch it. He couldn’t watch his friend tearing up. “You’re being weak,” he gritted out, desperate to get Cash to stop with the emotions.

“Nah, that’s you.”

Kade jerked his pissed off attention to Cash. “Don’t get me worked up right now, man.”

Cash stood. “You want to fight? Do you need it? Would that make it better if we bleed each other?”

Kade considered pummeling the shit out of Cash, but his friend was standing here, tears in his eyes on Kade’s behalf, and he’d never seen him cry before. He was hurting for him. Kade couldn’t punish him for that. Not now.

Cash pointed a finger at Kade. “You’re weak for sitting here pouting and not doing something about it.”

“What do you want me to do?” Kade demanded, standing. “Go take her?”

“We did it before.”

“And do what with her? She doesn’t want to be here! She doesn’t want to be with me! She doesn’t want this goddamn bond!” he yelled, ripping at his shirt.

Cash pulled out his phone and turned it toward him. A picture of the night at the bar was pulled up. In it, Jess was sitting in Kade’s lap. Her cheeks were flushed after just having sung a karaoke song with Harley, and she was smiling at him. He was grinning too, in the middle of talking to her, and her eyes were locked right on him. She looked happy. “She sure was good at pretending.”

Cash huffed a laugh. “No one is that good.” He turned to leave and made his way down the porch stairs.

“What are you saying?”

“Go figure out why the hell she really left.”

“She wrote me a note. She told me why!”

“Oh yeah?” Cash yelled, turning on him. “Why did she put it into a note, Kade. Did you think about that? Why didn’t she tell you in person?”

“Because…” He shook his head, searching for an answer.

“Because she didn’t want you to hear the lie in her voice when she pretended you weren’t enough. You are. You want to fix it? Fucking fix it. You didn’t build that bond by yourself. That ain’t how it works.”

Cash spat on the grass and walked away.

Kade was pissed. He hooked his hands on his hips and yelled a curse, and then dragged his glare back to where Cash had disappeared around the corner of his cabin.

Was he right?

He ran his hand down his beard. He hadn’t shaved in a while. A quick pace across his porch and back didn’t settle anything inside of him.

Fucking Seth.

Heart beating hard against his sternum, Kade pulled his phone out of his back pocket. Seth.

He still had the unknown number Seth had texted from.

Kade still had a connection to Sister’s Edge.

He just stared at that open text thread for a few moments, considering doing something so stupid.

Hope was dangerous for a man like him, but he did want closure. Destroying doubt would make it easier to break this damn bond.