Page 109 of Restless Hawke

“Your mom passed away when you were young…”

She pulls back out of my hold, running her hands through her insanely disheveled hair. “She did.”

“Where’d you go after that?”

It hasn’t escaped me that she avoided the question—twice—at the table.

Whatever happened after her mother died, it isn’t anything she wants to discuss with me.

Which only makes me want to know more.

Losing a parent like that must be devastating. After Dad was shot, for those weeks when we weren’t sure if he was going to recover or what he would be like if he ever did, it felt like I had already lost him. And that was agony.

If he were actually gone, if we had to close him into the Hawke family crypt with Grandfather and Aunt Star, I might not have been able to survive it.

Yet Allegra did…and at such a young age. It had to have shaped her. Helped turn her into the woman she is today.

She averts her gaze, picking at some imaginary loose thread on the expensive sheets we now lie in. “I was mostly in boarding schools, bouncing around the U.S. and sometimes Europe.”

I slide my hands to her hips, squeezing tightly. “Which I already know.”

And I make it very clear with the look I give her that I’m not going to accept her telling me the same information and avoiding the ultimate question again.

Her lips curve into a sad smile. “You know…I envy what you have. A big family that loves you. Who all support each other. Who will always be there for one another, no matter what.”

The tears I thought I caught in her eyes at Sunday dinner suddenly make a lot more sense now, hearing how gut-wrenching those words were for her to speak.

My heart aches for the pain in her, for that little girl left alone in the world. “You never had that?”

She shakes her head. “My mom and I were close, best friends. But once she was gone…”

Her breath hitches, and I pull her to me, dragging her down across my body and allowing her to bury her face against my neck. A warm drop hits my skin, and I tighten my hold on her, pressing my lips to the top of her head.

I cling to her for several minutes, allowing her to cry, to release whatever emotions she’s had bottled up for so long.

Skimming my fingers along her spine, I think about her description of the family.

“You’re not wrong about the Hawkes, about us always being there and supporting each other…” I release a sigh, wishing I could go back and change it all. “That’s why what I did is so bad. It was the opposite of the very thing that makes us a family. I bet against Atlas in the title fight.”

She pulls back slightly, with red-rimmed, teary eyes meeting mine from below a furrowed brow. “Why?”

A question I’ve asked myself too many damn times to count.

“Because I was in the hole. Because I was spiraling. Because he was, too, after he got shot a few months earlier. He was recovering, and I knew him well enough to understand that it wasn’t going well. He was struggling.Hard.”

I let my mind drift back to all those training sessions that were too painful to watch. Seeing Atlas struggle withanythingin that gym just feltwrong.Everything about his injury and recovery felt like some bad dream none of us could wake up from, and it only seemed to be getting worse as I kept losing more and more money.

“I didn’t think there was any way he’d be ready for that fight, that he’d stand a chance. I thought it was a surefire way to make back everything I had lost. I bet against one of my best friends, my cousin, my family, and Hawkes don’t do that. We always betoneach other.”

She feathers her fingers across my cheek, then cups it in her warm, soft palm. “You made a mistake. We all do.”

“This mistake has the type of consequences I may not be able to recover from, thatwemay not be able to.”

“Everyone seemed fine at dinner.” She laughs, the sound washing away some of the sadness in her eyes. “The only tension was the way everybody kept grilling me.”

I chuckle. “God, that wasn’t even bad. You should see them when theyreallyget fired up. I think they were holding back slightly because they didn’t want to scare you off.”

“Have they done that before? Scared people off?”