Every Dawn Forever (9 page)

He opened the saved numbers he had inputted on his cell, found Jan’s, and handed it to her.  She pressed the button to dial the number and looked at him tentatively.  He smiled encouragingly, even though he didn’t feel like smiling.  Her contact with her cousin could only mean she would be leaving that much faster.  Only a day with her, and already she was the center of his thoughts.  He hadn’t liked leaving the house for the morning to work on their schedules for the next few weeks, even though he knew she was safe and under Crux’s watchful eye.

“Jan?”  Sydney asked, her voice trembling slightly.

With his extra-sensory hearing through his hyena nature, he was able to hear everything that was said.  He didn’t want to eavesdrop though, so he stood and motioned to Crux, and the two left her to have some privacy.

He opened the refrigerator and pulled out two sodas, handing one to Crux.  Popping the top, Orion said, “Did she say anything about her past while you were out walking today?”

Crux shook his head.  “Not really.  She told me about the pack she grew up in and their full moon celebrations.”

Sterling came up from the den, and when Orion explained that she was speaking to her cousin, he frowned deeply and leaned against the counter.  Orion was a little jealous that Sterling was the one that had been able to help her with her nightmares, but he didn’t begrudge him the time spent with her.  They stood in silence for several minutes, and then Sydney called for him.  He returned to the family room and found her crying, holding the phone out.

As Orion lifted the phone to his ear, Sterling came into the room, glowering like he could physically destroy whatever had made Sydney cry.  He stopped just a foot from her and held his hand out, and it hung there for a long moment before she fell into his arms and wept.  Orion forced himself to concentrate on the voice on the other end of the line.

Jan said, “Is Sydney okay?  She just started crying and I told her to find someone for me to talk to.”

Orion said, “My brother is helping her calm down.  She’s pretty shaken up.  My name is Orion Stone.  My brothers and I rescued her.”

Jan breathed out a sigh of relief.  “Thank you for helping my cousin, Orion.  I’m certain that I upset her further than she already was, but I asked if she wanted me to tell you what I found out and she said yes.”

“Okay,” Orion said, watching as Sterling maneuvered Sydney to the couch and sat down next to her.  Crux came in and knelt on the floor in front of her.

Jan wove a tale of a young woman who got pregnant and had a child that she never wanted.  She treated the child like dirt, never physically abusing her but hurting her all the same.  “I offered to let Syd come and live with me and join my pack when she was eighteen, but Maggie told me that she’d already made arrangements for Syd to live somewhere else.  When I pressed her about it, she refused to tell me any more and then stopped taking my calls.  I called the night of Syd’s eighteenth birthday, hoping to be able to talk to Syd about leaving her mom and coming to stay with me so she could have some freedom and be happy, and was told she was already off to college.  I called many times over the next year, trying to get answers, but never got any.  And then one day I got a call from the alpha of Maggie’s pack.  Maggie had been killed in a car accident.  I flew there with my mate and talked to the police, and they believed that it wasn’t an accident at all, that Maggie had been murdered.  I think that’s why Syd’s so upset right now.  She never knew that her mother had been killed.”

“Shit,” Orion said, glancing at Sydney.  She was curled up against the arm of the couch, resting her head on her bent arm and holding Sterling’s hand so tightly that her knuckles were white.

“Exactly.  There wasn’t much in the way of money except for a small insurance claim that would have gone to her mate, George.  He skipped town as soon as the police started investigating and they haven’t seen him since.  I immediately asked about Sydney, and after a while, with some help from the police, I got the alpha to tell me that Syd’s mom sold her to another alpha to become his grandson’s mate.  He didn’t know who the alpha was or where the pack was located.  Only George knew, and he was long gone.  I hired several private detectives, but it was like she just disappeared.  I worried,” Jan’s voice cracked and she paused for a moment before continuing, “I thought she might have been killed.  I couldn’t believe that Maggie did such a cruel thing to her.  If she were alive, I’d rip her to pieces.  But I wanted to thank you for rescuing her.  When the relo group called my alpha because a relative of mine was in trouble, I knew it was Syd.  I just wish she could come now.  As it is, we’re not going to be able to leave or have her come here until the end of October.  She said she was okay with staying with you guys that long.  Is it okay with you?  I can contact the relo group and ask them to find a pack for her to stay with.”

Orion’s beast roared in his mind and he barely managed to withhold the snarl.  “She’s welcome to stay with us, Jan.  We’ll take good care of her.”

“Good.  My mate has a contact that was going to make Syd fake identification so she could start her life over.  If you give me your address, I’ll ask the male to just send the items to you so she can have them now.”  She asked him to take a picture of Sydney and send it to her by text so it could be used to make the photo ID.

Orion gave her their address, and she promised to get it out as soon as possible. After reassuring her that Sydney was okay and promising to have her call in a few days, Orion ended the call and sat down on the coffee table, absorbing the information Jan had just shared.  Of all the scenarios that he’d considered for how Sydney had come to be in such a horrible situation, a cruel betrayal by her mother wasn’t even on the list.

“Sweetheart, I’m so sorry for everything that you suffered.”

Her eyes locked on his.  He saw the slight flex of her hand as she gripped Sterling’s even tighter.  “I don’t know what I would do if my mother were alive now.  I don’t know what I would feel like if she were still alive and had left me to rot.  I think…I think I like it better knowing that she’s been dead.  Does that make me a bad person?”

Crux growled.  “No way.  The only person who’s guilty of behaving reprehensibly in this situation is your mother.  You didn’t do anything wrong, and you’re allowed to feel whatever you feel.  We’ll never judge you.”

“I spent a long time thinking that I brought it on myself.  That I wasn’t a good enough daughter.  But I really think that she just hated me.  Hated me because I was born and she was saddled with responsibility when all her friends were busy partying.  I just don’t know why she wouldn’t let me leave.  I don’t know why she had to sell me.”  Lowering her head to her arm, she started to cry again, but never lost the grip on Sterling’s hand.

They sat with her until she was done crying, and then they tried to fix her something for dinner, but she wasn’t hungry and excused herself to bed.

When her bedroom door shut, they went to the kitchen to talk.  Sterling said, “If her mother wasn’t dead I’d kill her myself.  What kind of mother would sell her daughter to become a mate to someone she didn’t even know?”

Orion leaned back in the kitchen chair and scrubbed his hand over his face.  “I’ve heard some pretty shitty things before, but nothing like this.  She was with that asshole wolf for six years.  She seems fragile in some ways, but she was clearly strong enough to have survived abuse for so long.”

They talked about the coming week, deciding to alternate their gym shifts so that someone was always home with Sydney.  Sterling went downstairs to work out and Crux went into the office to check his email while Orion called Dante and spoke to him about their work plan.

“You’re welcome to bring her along to the gym whenever she has her identification, if you think she’d like to come work with you.  It sounds like she would probably enjoy getting out of the house and into the real world.”

“Thanks, Dante.”

“If you need anything at all, just let us know.  Alyssa’s looking forward to meeting her.  Maybe you can bring her to Sunday dinner?”

Orion agreed to speak to her about it and ended the call.

The next morning after breakfast, they took her out to a nearby mall and let her pick out clothes and shoes that fit her better than the things that Crux had gathered for her.  Other than sharing that she hadn’t been clothes shopping since before she was taken, she didn’t speak much except to remind them that she didn’t have any money.

Crux gestured towards a changing room at the back of the women’s department.  “We didn’t ask for you to pay for anything.  We promised to take care of you, and that means making sure you have clothes that fit, food to eat, and a roof over your head.”

She didn’t answer him, just stared at him curiously and then entered the dressing room.  It had taken two hours to get her clothes, undergarments, and shoes, but as far as Orion was concerned, it was time well spent.  Although they still didn’t know the specifics of her years of captivity, he knew that showing her that they genuinely wanted her to be happy was the start of building trust between them.  They had less than seven weeks before she would be heading to Alaska to live with her cousin.  It seemed like a long time on one hand, but on the other hand, he knew that giving her time to heal and find peace meant that the time might become unbelievably short.

As he watched her in the cosmetics store choosing makeup and bathroom products, delicately sniffing shampoos that Crux opened for her, he hoped that seven weeks was more than enough time for her to realize that they were her mates and choose to stay with them.  He wasn’t sure what would happen to them if she left.

* * * * *

By Friday, Sydney didn’t need Sterling’s presence to stop having nightmares.  He was glad she was sleeping soundly.  Even though he had liked being there for her, he hadn’t liked that she was still so tortured by her past.  A past which was still mostly a mystery to them.  After a mere week, she looked like a completely different person.  Her dark blonde hair had lightened with the time she spent outside, her fair skin tanning slightly to give her a healthy glow.  And she was starting to fill out little by little, thanks to all the food they heaped on her plates at mealtimes.

It had just been the two of them for dinner Thursday night, and Sterling had tossed steaks and tinfoil packets of seasoned veggies onto the grill.  He didn’t know much about cooking, but he could out-grill anyone.

“Take more, Little One,” he urged, holding the platter of grilled steaks towards her.

“I already have one,” she laughed, but he could see that she was hungry enough to eat two.

He pushed another one onto her plate.  “Now you have two.”

Orion and Crux were at the gym.  All week long, they’d taken turns, two of them going to work and one staying home with her.  Sterling preferred to stay home.  He trusted his brothers to keep her safe and happy, but he preferred to do it himself.

“What about your brothers?”

“They can fend for themselves.”

“You keep stuffing me full every meal and I won’t be so little anymore,” she chided, her smile revealing a small dimple in one cheek.

“You’ll always be my Little One.”  He spoke the words without thinking, and she froze, fork halfway to her mouth, brows drawn.

“Until I leave for Jan’s.”

He’d already said too much.  His brothers would be pissed at him for what they would view as him pushing her.

He couldn’t take the words back, and he didn’t want to.  He’d spoken more to Sydney in the last week than he had to his brothers in the last two months.  He cleared his throat and looked down at his plate.  Cutting through the thick, rare steak, he shrugged his shoulders, trying to sound unaffected.  “Here or in Alaska, you’ll always be ‘Little One’ to me.”

The conversation played over in his mind as he stared at the high ceiling of the den.  It was painted dark gray, the same color as the walls and the plush carpeting, so that it looked more like a den and less like a basement.  He didn’t mind sleeping in the den, but the last four nights he’d spent sitting up against the door frame while Sydney fell back asleep had been a little bit of heaven for him.  The only better thing would have been if she’d allowed him to hold her while she slept.  That would have been touching nirvana for him.  He’d lain awake for several hours now, part of him hoping that she’d need him, and part of him knowing what a selfish dick that made him.  Finally, he rolled over and closed his eyes, waiting for sleep to come.

By the time he showered and dressed in the morning, it was nearly ten, and he could tell by the scent of dishwasher soap that he’d missed breakfast.  It wasn’t that he was hungry, but he enjoyed eating meals with Sydney.  The reminder on Thursday that she was planning to leave with Jan in six weeks, just after the October full moon, had set his beast on edge.  Which probably accounted for his worthless night’s sleep.

Orion was leaning against the counter eating a bowl of cereal and reading something on his phone.  Next to him sat a priority envelope from a shipping company.  It was addressed to Dante.

He pointed to the envelope and said, “What’s that?”

“Syd’s new identification.”

“She see it already?”

Nodding, Orion dropped the spoon into the now-empty bowl and straightened.  He opened the envelope and dumped out the contents: an ID card, a birth certificate, and a social security card.  Sterling picked up the ID card.  It had the picture of Sydney that Orion had taken with his cell on Sunday after she spoke to Jan.  The name on the card was Brittany L. Thompson.