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“We followed him to a room, but when we entered the room, he had already snuck out a back exit,” Declan signed.

Fallon nodded as if he had suspected as much.

“Okay, let’s head to our room. Us seven are sharing one opposite Tonya and the others. We’ll discuss more there.”

We all nodded, recognizing we were garnering the attention of stragglers and their way-too-curious ears.

We moved to a hallway that once housed the classrooms but had now been reverted to sleeping chambers. Each door had two windows stacked in a vertical alignment overhead, allowing some semblance of privacy.

Reaching our designated room, Fallon stopped me with a hand on my shoulder.

“Would you and Ronan mind talking to the others?” He nodded towards the room across the hall. “Tell them what happened, but also tell them not to worry.”

Frowning, because the last thing I wanted to do was deal with virtual strangers when I could’ve been with Addie, I gave a brisk nod. What the leader wanted, the leader got.

Fallon said a few words to Ronan who nodded just as stiffly, hanging back to let the others past him. My brother gripped Addie’s arm lightly and whispered something that had a smile blending with her tears. Those tears exacerbated my rage.

No man - no person - was allowed to make her cry.

Not anymore.

“I don’t fucking like this,” Ronan seethed once the door was closed. “We should be with her.”

“Agreed, brother.”

We moved silently across the hallway, stopping at the door opposite. My hand froze on the handle.

“She’s going to be okay, right?” I asked Ronan quietly. After everything I had been through, everything I had dealt with, I needed a win. Addie was my fucking win.

Ronan clasped my shoulder. “She’s strong-willed. Resilient. She’s going to be okay.”

His words shouldn’t have relieved me that much, but they did. The tension drained from my shoulders, and I threw him a large, jovial smile.

Shaking off the last of my melancholy, I shoved open the door.

Surprisingly, Tonya, her brother, Jared, and her husband, Davis, were nowhere to be found. Neither were Kai and Doc. Tommy and Nick sat next to each other on a small sleeping mat, seemingly engaged in an intense conversation.

When they spotted us huddling in the doorway, neither of them blushed in embarrassment. Instead, Tommy raised one eyebrow and Nik glanced down at a colorful magazine.

“You need something, assholes?” Tommy asked snarkily.

Ignoring his sass, something he had a surplus of, I intoned, “Where are the others?”

“Fucking, probably.” He said that so crassly, so casually, that Ronan snorted in amusement beside me. That was coming from the same boy who was terrified of a girl’s boob. When we didn’t reply, Tommy continued slowly, as if speaking to an imbecile, “When a man and woman - or man and man or woman and woman - love each other very much-”

“Okay we get it,” Ronan broke in, disgust twisting his features. “The last thing I want to visualize is them banging.”

“Tonya and her husband left an hour ago. Her brother was supposed to stay with us, but he met a girl down in the cafeteria. Doc and Kai have been gone for hours.”

My lips pursed. These kids should definitely not have been left alone. I’d be having alongtalk with Tonya and the others later.

“You two staying out of trouble?” Ronan asked sternly, the playfulness all but diminishing from his eyes. I called it his dad face. Reserved for anyone under the age of fifteen.

Tommy rolled his eyes.

“Yes, bitch. Though...I’ll be the first to admit this is the first time I’d been in high school.” He sounded uncharacteristically sad just then. Wistful, almost. His eyes flickered to the teacher’s desk still pressed against the wall. The rest of the seats had been removed, but that one desk remained, posters taped to the front announcing the school’s musical (Peter Pan)and the theme for the senior prom (starry night).

“High school was fun,” Ronan admitted. “But I always got in trouble.”