Filed To Story: Absent Luna of the Lycan King Novel (Ivy & Kyson)
“Stand down!” Azalea snarls at him, and he freezes just as Damian comes rushing around the corner with Clarice and Liam. Everyone stops staring at Gannon while Azalea tries to calm Tyson down.
“Where is she?” she demands, fury blazing in her eyes. Gannon’s eyes darted to our bedroom door, and
I looked behind me before turning back to look at Gannon. Azalea gasps, knowing he must have done something terrible for her to run and hide in our room.
“I didn’t mean it. I would never hurt her. She tried to leave me,” Gannon says, clutching his hair. I watch the fall and rise of Azalea’s chest, her eyes trained on the door before she moves toward it. She passes
Tyson to me as she moves toward the door.
She stops next to it and grips the door handle before looking at her hand, which is covered in blood. She looks at me horrified before her eyes go to Gannon before she growls, shoving the door open.
She slips inside the room, and I turn my head to look at Gannon. “What did you do?”
“I tried to change her,” he says, dropping to the ground and fisting his hair. My lungs compress in my chest.
“Gannon!” Clarice whispers, horrified, knowing precisely what that means.
“There was no way Abbie would have been ready for that after everything she had been through!”
Clarice scolds him.
“She wouldn’t stop fighting me,” he murmurs.
“Because you tried to fucking kill her!” I yell at him.
“No, she was trying to kill herself!” Gannon whispers as he clutches his hair, rocking back and forth on his heels.
Azalea POV
I could feel every beat of my heart through every pulse point in my body. I could hear it in my ears as the scent of her blood wafted to my nose. I follow her scent and the blood drops on the floor before finding
Abbie soaking wet and lying on the bathroom floor, her ear pressed to the tiles as she stared vacantly at the bottom of the sink basin.
“Abbie?” I whispered, my heart breaking at the sight of her. I hadn’t seen her like this in ages. Not since she first returned home and before was after what the butcher did to her.
Abbie doesn’t answer, and I watch a tear slip down her cheek. When I saw Gannon, I had first thought he hurt her, and I am sure he did, but not in the way I first thought. I thought he murdered her, but the moment I stepped into the bathroom, I realized she had hurt herself.
She had been through so much, and everyone breaks, though I didn’t think it would ever be Gannon that would cause her to snap. We were all waiting for it. I knew it would eventually come because at some point, everything weighing us down and suffocating us becomes unbearable. We just dealt with it in different ways.
Kyson, with his drinking, me with the way I shut down and turn everything inward. Liam with his sick games of torture and then Abbie. Abbie always fights hers because there is no comeback from the sort of vice she fights, and that is death.
I kneel on the tiles before lying down beside her, resting my head on the tiles beside her. She blinks at me, and by the hollow look in her eyes, I knew she was somewhere else, somewhere far away. A place that lives inside us and haunts us, plagues and destroys us, the past.
Moving my hand, I swallow as I place it on her cold cheek, brushing my thumb below her eye. Tears filled her eyes, but didn’t fall as she just stared back at me. “I can still feel it,” she murmurs.
“Feel what Ab’s?” I whisper.
“The noose. It’s still there, so tightly wound I can’t breathe,” she whispers. I touch the scar behind her ear, the one that matches mine, a death we almost shared.
“I can feel it growing tighter, digging into my skin and burning through my flesh, I can feel the way it slides over my skin, growing tighter and tighter. Feel my blood rushing in my ears. I don’t want to feel it anymore.”
“What happened?” I whisper, needing to know. I couldn’t help her if I didn’t know what put her back in this dark place. A place I had only escaped from recently myself.
“I can’t be what he needs me to be,” she says, sniffling. She wipes her nose on the back of her sleeve.
“He shouldn’t be punished because I am broken,”
“You’re not broken, Abbie,”
“But I’m not whole either. He deserves better than that. He deserves better than what I can give him. So does Tyson,” she says.
“And what does Gannon need, Abbie?” I asked, and her brows furrowed. “A mate. Someone to love him, that won’t hurt him like she did,” Abbie whispers.
“Who hurt Gannon?”
“She did. She didn’t want him, and I can’t have him. It’s the same.” her words confused me because I didn’t know of this woman she spoke of.
“Gannon wants you, Abbie. Tyson wants you. And me? I want you, Abbie,” I tell her, but she slips back away to some dark place again while I fight to bring her back. When I hear movement behind me, my eyes dart toward the door to find Gannon silently slipping into the room.
He moves behind her and sits on the edge of the bathtub. Abbie, though, doesn’t even notice him. She was not here in the present.
“I don’t know how to help her,” he admits through the mind-link. But I was as baffled as he was. I was no doctor, no shrink, and I knew Abbie would never spill her secrets to strangers. So I knew we wouldn’t get far with that suggestion.
I turn my attention to Abbie. She shivers, and her teeth chatter. She was drenched, soaking wet, and laying beside her had drenched me. Soaking my clothes with her blood, yet she had no open wounds. I lift her shirt slightly; she doesn’t even respond to me touching her when Gannon’s voice flits through my mind.
“She slit her wrists in the bathtub.l found a bottle of wolfsbane beside her. She drank it so she wouldn’t heal, I had no choice,”
“Wolfsbane? Where would she get that?” I ask him, but I see him shrug. “I never got a chance to ask her,” he replies, and my eyes flick back to her distant ones.
I grab her wrists, seeing the long thick scar running up each one, now closed, but by the thickness, I knew they were deep. I swallow and lift her hand, kissing her fingers.
“Come back to me, Abbie,” I urged, but she just blinked. So instead, I lay beside her, holding her hand and reminding her of every good little memory we shared. Talking to her just so she knew I was here until she returned to us. Hours I laid on that floor, hours Gannon remained next to the bathtub, and I could feel
Kyson nearby, yet couldn’t hear Tyson, so I figured Clarice or Liam had him.
“Abbie?” I whisper, and she blinks.
“More than my life,” I whisper for the hundredth time today, only this time she reacts, and her eyes move to look at me.
“We made a pact. You need to come back to me, Abbie, or I will come with you. No matter where, I will come with you. Remember that.” she shakes her head.
“You don’t want to go where I have been. The things I have seen, the things they did,” she whimpers.
“What they did, Abbie. They can’t hurt you anymore. I won’t let them. Gannon won’t let them. They aren’t coming back. They are gone. Everyone from the past is gone. They are dead. We are still breathing, so don’t let them win,” I tell her.
“They already did. They don’t have to live with what they did, but I do, and I will live with it for the rest of my life. I will live with it, not them, me. And me living with it makes them live with it. I can’t do that to
Gannon and Tyson, don’t you get it? I can’t, Azzy.” she says, sitting up. Her eyes burned with rage.
“I don’t want to live with it. I don’t want to force them to live with it!” she screams at me.
“I can’t, I can’t,” she breaks, and I suck in a breath when she suddenly loses it.
New Book: Veiled Desires of the Alpha King Novel
Dayson was the alpha of the largest pack in North America. Powerful figures from other packs sought to offer gorgeous girls as potential mates for Dayson. He steadfastly rejected these advances, he was not a pawn to be manipulated. But eventually there came a mysterious girl he could hardly say No. Who was she?