Page 37 of Empire of Carnage

Did she miss me like I missed her?

Doubtful.

All I ever did was say the wrong things, all I ever did was underestimate her.

I still couldn’t figure out why she wanted me around. The more I dwelled on it the more I went down a dark spiral of self-loathing. Fuck I needed out of it. I kept bouncing around from desperately wanting to be worthy of her to hating myself because I knew I could never be.

“You good?” Zerkos asked and I stopped in my tracks, realizing I was anxiously pacing back and forth in the small conference room.

“Yeah, I…Uh…I need some air.” I nodded at him and pulled my phone out, dialing the number and holding my breath while I waited with a heart full of hope.

The video-call connected on the first ring.

“Hey,” she said, all breathy like she was just now finishing up the little scene we’d watched her and Mateo entwined in.

“Hey,” I said shakily as I walked out of the farmhouse and sat down on the porch swing.

She wrapped herself up in a blanket and found a chair to cocoon herself in.

“Weird being away from each other, right?” she asked like she knew exactly what I was feeling.

I didn’t care what anyone else said.

There was no trauma like shared trauma.

And there was no shared trauma like watching the person you loved go through something you wished you could prevent.

We were the same side of the coin printed on both ends.

Her and I…

We’d always have violent images of each other’s pain painted on the back of our eyelids every time we closed our eyes to go to sleep.

Was I grateful?

No, I wasn’t fucking grateful.

But had Guillermo turned me into mincemeat any further, I didn’t think she’d be looking at me the way she was right now. I was ugly now, but I was, at least, still within the threshold of “ugly enough to feel sorry for.”

“Ronan quit the Crows.” I wasn’t sure why I told her instead of letting him tell her.

I just wanted to talk to her, and I didn’t want to deal with the silence. Sometimes I called her and just stared at her face. She was okay with that too. She would just breathe and awkwardly laugh every now and then while waiting for me to say anything at all.

“What?” Her eyebrows furrowed harder than I’d ever seen before.

“I probably should have let him tell you that. I guess that was my way of telling you that I did too.”

“Wait, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“I mean, I guess it’s not that we quit the Crows, I guess really the Crows are done. We’ll be bringing some men back with us.” I corrected myself.

“This is crazy, what happened?”

I tried giving her as much clarification as I could, going over the meeting and explaining in detail everything that had happened the last few days while we’d been in Grimm’s Reach.

“I never intended for either of you to have to pick between me and the Crows,” she said, seeming deflated.

“You didn’t. We made choices on our own. This wasn’t on you. Okay?”