Page 93 of Contested Crown

“When this is all over, I think we are going to have to have a very serious discussion,” Cade said. His lip pulled slightly to the side, not even a smile, just a hint of something. He raised a hand to my cheek, brushing a thumb across the fine stubble that had grown over the past two days. “About whatyouthink your duties are and whatIexpect from my consort.”

I felt something twist in my stomach at his words. I enjoyed the hint of something more. What would he ask of me? What did Iwanthim to ask?

“Come on.” I turned, dislodging his hand.

Getting to the Mission without being seen turned out to be easy. Cade had already disguised the car, and we were still wearing glamours on our skin. We drove a twisted path through the city, the end goal Mission Street.

Like most major cities, Los Santos was divided into neighborhoods with their own cultures, their own citizens. At one time, the area around the Los Santos mission had been extremely wealthy. However, a major earthquake in the early 1900s had destroyed it and all the surrounding houses.

The city had taken the opportunity to rebuild the major Catholic Church closer to the water. For a lot of years, the entire area had been abandoned, a home for unmonitored children, vagrants, and a variety of feral cats.

As the city had expanded, the area had been rebuilt as affordable housing in the fifties and sixties, cheery apartment buildings that over decades had turned increasingly undesirable until now it was nothing more than narrow streets filled with apartments that were the last hope some people had of staying in the city.

Declan had four drug runners in the neighborhood, the single patch of turf so profitable that on a good week, it made more than some of his high-end clubs, with considerably less overhead.

“We’re here.” I parked the car behind a well-graffitied delivery truck. When we got out, I was glad we hadn’t bothered to look for new clothes. We fit in better with what we had on.

Cade looked around, and I wasn’t sure what he saw. From my experience in the area, I saw families, people with three or four roommates in a one-bedroom apartment, people who worked the night shift cleaning or bussed dishes at three different restaurants.

“What are we going to do? Walk around calling for her like a lost cat?” Cade sniffed, his annoyance clear.

“No. We’re going to wait.” I shoved my hands into my pockets, hunching my shoulders as I walked, just the right amount of defensive and annoyed, as though I had just finished working two consecutive shifts.

We crossed Primera Lane, walking through an abandoned lot until we found a semicircle of beach chairs. I gestured for Cade to take one, settling myself in another.

The cigarette butts nearby indicated that this was where most people from the surrounding apartment buildings came to smoke.

“This is going to be just as boring as staking out that restaurant, isn’t it?” Cade muttered.

“Probably even more boring,” I confirmed.

We waited as the sun crossed the sky, half an hour turning into an hour turning into two.

Cade dozed in the chair next to me, and I tried to think of anything else, tried to focus on what we were doing, but I kept coming back to the fact that heknew. He knew and didn’t want to talk about it, and what did that mean for our future?

Every time my mind let me settle, let me think,Okay, we’ll be together forever and just never talk about this one shared moment of history that defined us, I lost the train of it, an unhappy ache settling into my chest.

This couldn’t be it. I needed to talk to him again about it.

“Cade?” I waited for him to crack his eyes open. “About your parents. And”—I couldn’t bring myself to saymine—“the Castillos…”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said shortly, shutting his eyes.

“Ever or just right now?” I asked.

“Do I ever want to speak about my parents’ death? Do I want to talk about how the wolves that killed them were in on it with the man I considered a second father? Do I want to discuss if the entire narrative of my life has been a lie?” Cade’s face twisted. “No. Never.”

That settled it, then. I had to learn to live with it, learn to live with him thinking my parents were monsters and not ever being able to contradict him because he didn’t want to talk about it.

I was so distracted I almost missed him, but then I was out of the chair, moving quickly enough that I left Cade behind. On the street, I clasped my hand on the shoulder of a werewolf I knew well.

He blinked, startled, giving the impression of an innocent citizen, someone who didn’t belong in this neighborhood, in the life that he was living.

“Let’s talk, Earl.” I guided him back to the beach chairs, where Cade stood uncertainly, his body tense, his eyes looking between me and the wolf I was leading over.

“You… You can tell Declan… You can tell him…” Earl twitched under my hand, but in his defense, he didn’t even try to fight.

“Relax. I’m not here for Declan.” I pushed on his shoulder until he plopped down in one of the chairs, Cade and I both looming over him.