Perhaps I shouldn’t have run all of those years ago.
Maybe I should have been patient with her.
Nicole seems so...broken now.
Damaged.
Hurt.
She seems afraid, and before I can convince myself that it’s a terrible idea, I grab her and wrap my arms around her tightly. Instantly, she relaxes against me. She doesn’t cry or shake or shiver. She doesn’t fight me on this. She just lets me hold her and after a minute, her hands come up to touch me, too.
“I’m scared, Lee.”
“I know. It’s okay to be scared. Reece won’t be able to hurt you again, okay? I won’t let him. He’s getting the help he needs. Cameron and Wilson are making sure of it.”
“It’s just not Reece,” she whispers. “It’s...”
“Your ex?”
She nods, and this time I pull back to look at her.
“Tell me,” I say.
“I don’t want to,” she whispers.
“What did he do to you, Nicole?”
She just shakes her head.
Patience.
I remind myself.
I need to be patient with her.
Nicole is in a delicate place. She’s fragile right now. She’s been through so much and unfortunately, I can tell her journey isn’t over yet. Dragons aren’t exactly known for forgiving or forgetting.
They aren’t the type of creature who are just going to “get over” the fact that she worked for an organization hell-bent on destroying shifters.
I need to go another way, I realize. If I ask Nicole about her boyfriend, she’s just going to clam up. She’s not going to want to tell me anything at all. She knows me well enough, even after all of this time, to know that I won’t just let this go. She needs to know that I’m going to keep her safe, though, and the only way I can let her know that is if I get her talking.
So I try a different approach.
“Tell me about Lucky,” I say.
Bingo.
She’s instantly flustered. Yeah, she wasn’t expecting me to ask about them.
“What about Lucky? Why...what do you want to know about them?”
“A few months ago, they were capturing dragons in the forest, Nicole. They were hurting them. We lost some really wonderful men and women. They even tried to steal a baby,” I shake my head at the dark memory.
“That’s how Peggy came to be here,” she says.
“Cameron’s wife? Exactly. She saved a baby. She brought it back to us and found her way here. Now she’s a part of the clan for life, basically. She’s one of us now.”
“Lucky hurt Reece, too,” she whispers. “They captured him, right?”