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“I—I was raised in the Southside. By people he paid to raise me because he seemed to have an obsession with my mom. They sold me to betas and were going to sell me permanently to Alpha Niall,” I babble, trying to keep Reyna here with me longer. “Butthen I ran away and ended up on the Northside and found a really nice pack who took me in.”

Her eyes narrow and she purses her lips.

“This Northside pack… they treat you good? You like them?”

“I love them!” I say, vehemently. “And they love me. I—I want to get back to them.”

“A girl like you doesn’t belong in a place like this. Let alone forced into it.” She nods her head slowly. “Okay, tell me this. What’s the name of your Northside pack?”

My heart starts fluttering in my chest.

“The—the Ward pack! They’ll be looking for me, can you—can you reach out to them? Tell them where I am so they know where to find me?”

She stands abruptly and I feel the cold concrete walls closing in on me as she makes her way to the door.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she says, her voice low.

“Please—please Reyna,” tears fill my eyes again even though I don’t want to cry again. “Maybe—maybe they can help you too! Get you out of here so you don’t have to work in a place like this.”

Her smile is twisted and bitter. So is her sharp laugh. “Some of us choose this life, Bambi. Good luck.”

She knocks on the thick metal door, and just like that, she’s gone.

CHAPTER 42

Madden

“Hey, the situation could be a lot worse,” Chase says from one of the armchairs beside my hospital bed. He’s leaning over, his elbows on his knees, and I can tell by the set of his jaw and the bite of his words that he’s trying to convince himself too.

“Luna is gone,” I growl, my voice low. “How the fuck could this be worse?”

His eyes lock onto mine.

“You could be dead, man. We thought you were, for a second there, before Archer found your pulse. We found you slumped over the steering wheel in a ditch.”

I rub my temples, trying to get rid of the pounding headache from my concussion. Luckily, I came out of that car accident alive, but if the fire department took any longer to get me out, I may have drowned in my own blood. One of my broken ribs apparently punctured a lung.

“Yeah,” I sigh. “Sure. But still. I wish they’d just let me out already. It’s not like there’s anything more they can do for me other than pump me full of drugs.”

“Hey, man, they’re just looking out for you.”

I still feel like shit, especially since the rest of them are staying in the hospital with me. The nurses let us drag in two extra armchairs so we could all stay in the same room. It reminds me of our college days.

I think we need it, the closeness. Our home just got destroyed.

“You guys don’t have to stay with me, you know,” I say under my breath. My recent failure at keeping Luna safe has brought old insecurities to the surface. Insecurities like maybe the three of them would be better off without a Southsider as deadweight.

Kane looks up from his laptop, shrugging. “The only other place we’d wanna be is the police station trying to find answers, and those guys are sick and tired of seeing us.”

“Relax, Madden, we want to be here,” Archer reassures, the dark circles under his eyes matching the rest of ours. “It’s not like we can go back home while it’s under construction.”

I lean my head back and close my eyes. The light from outside is starting to get to me, but I’m too much of a pussy to ask someone to close the blinds.

My phone starts vibrating beside me. A number flashes on my screen that I don’t recognize.

“Hello?”

“I’m calling from a payphone,” A woman’s voice says, her voice pitched low. She sounds frustrated. “I don’t know what fancy tech shit you guys have on the Northside, but you’re not going to be able to figure out who I am from tracking the call.”