“So the guy next to him is Lee, huh?” Brayden said, breaking me out of my thoughts before they turned morose.
“Looks like it.” According to the caption, Lee was standing to Tor a.k.a. Tom’s left, but he wasn’t facing the camera as he passed a turkey to Tor, assembly-line style. Lee’s obituary, as well as most of the articles regarding his death, hadn’t contained photos, bar the ones of his family that seemed to be taken before he hit puberty. Did he really look like me, like his sister had said? I couldn’t tell in the black-and-white photo, even though he seemed to have light hair, but that was probably where the similarities ended. I normally went for dark-haired men, so Tor having a preference wasn’t exactly surprising. But Lee’s sister said they’d dated…and Tor never dated. Had she been lying about that? And if so, why? She’d told the truth about Tor’s real name, but there wasn’t anything online about Lee and Tom together. Then again, why would there be? It wasn’t like Brayden’s exes were listed on a website somewhere.
“Wonder why he changed his name,” Brayden said.
“I don’t know. Lots of people change their names. Celebrities do it all the time.”
“Salvatore’s a rich guy, but he’s not really on that level, Jesse. Why would a guy like that change his name?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know, but there had to be a good reason. “Maybe he changed it because the Wolfe’s Den doesn’t sound as catchy as Covington’s Den.”
Brayden tipped his head to the side. “Maybe… But don’t you think it’s a little weird that some random person came up to you just to tell you he dated her brother? Like, who does that?”
“I was just thinking the same thing.”
“And?”
I met his eyes. “I don’t know, but I feel like maybe she didn’t approve of their relationship. And from the way she first looked at us, I’m pretty sure I can guess why.”
“Ah.” Brayden nodded. “Small town, rich family, twenty-two years ago…smells like a homophobic problem.”
“Exactly. If people from his past gave him a hard time for it, I wouldn’t blame him for moving and starting over. I know I would.”
Brayden let out a heavy sigh and leaned over to shut the laptop. “Jesse. Regardless of who he was then, it’s who he is now that matters. Don’t go getting all sympathetic for that guy. You know. The one who almost killed you.”
“Will you stop saying that?”
“Just reminding you of the facts. I see you moonin’ over your phone. He’s not good for you, man. The sooner you get that, the sooner you can get over him.”
No, I wanted to say. There would be no “getting over him,” even as much as Brayden tried to convince me otherwise. What happened tonight had been a mistake, an accident, one I knew he’d never repeat, and though I was still a little shaken from it, it was more because of Tor’s reaction than anything else.
So I kept my mouth shut, because if I didn’t, the alternative would only lead to another argument, and I didn’t want to argue with Brayden. At least not tonight.
What I wanted was to understand the boy in the picture, and I wanted to know everything about what made him the man he was today. Because that was what you did when you cared about someone, right? You told each other your secrets and trusted each other, and you didn’t give up on them because you hit a bump in the road.
Maybe tomorrow I’d be ready to talk to Tor. Maybe it would be later this week. But one thing was for sure—I wasn’t giving up on us.
I should’ve known better. I should’ve known that if I sent my lamb away wounded, he’d seek shelter where he felt safest. And since I’d taken myself out of that equation, of course his next place of sanctuary had been up at Breakaway Point with Brayden Fairchild.
As I pressed my foot to the gas pedal of my Aston Martin and began the ascent up the steep mountainside, my mood matched the black sky looming overhead as storm clouds rolled in off the Pacific to cling to the dense forest bordering the treacherous curves of the narrow road.
It was Sunday night, a little over twenty-four hours since the entrance to hell had opened up in my condo and decided to try and reclaim me, along with my newest subject—and it had been close. It had almost succeeded in dragging Jesse down to its very depths, but before that happened, I’d been reminded of what exactly that place looked like.
Pale faces…
Blank eyes…
A face devoid of any emotion because the one I took the journey with no longer lived and walked beside me with the darkest secret a soul could house.
That was what hell looked like. I knew because I’d been there before, only to emerge from it more broken than I’d been going in, and alone. I couldn’t forget that. The first and only other time it had happened, I had emerged from the most corrupt part of my being—alone.