without any friends?”
“Yes, I did it just recently!” I cried.
“I sent this to Alex.” He held up my phone, showing me a picture of me trussed up and passed out on the cement. I groaned. If those were the last pictures ever taken of me, I was going to be so pissed. “And the coordinates for this stupid wreck of a building. He should be along shortly.”
“You really are the worst,” I told him. “And how do you know he’s going to come for me?”
He smirked again. “Even if he doesn’t show up in time to save you, losing you will break him. He won’t want to stay in a place where he lost you. And when he’s gone, I’ll go after Nik’s Gigi and her sister. They’re very stubborn women, they won’t tolerate being limited. There will be an opening and I will take it. I’ll get Cal, Nik, Jane Jameson, Dick Cheney, her whole stupid so-called family. I’ve heard how her weird little family responds when one of their own in threatened. I can sweep the lot of them off of the board, set myself up a nice little fiefdom here in the backwoods.”
A wolf growl rippled out from my chest. The idea that he would attack my friends, take advantage of how much they loved each other for his own gain, his own convenience, was infuriating. How dare he? How dare he use people’s feelings against them? He was going to go after my family—my real family. The people that loved me for no other reason than myself. He was going to take them away. I had to make him think that there was nothing to gain in keeping me. I had to make him think that Alex didn’t care, that it was easier just to let me go. Or at least stall him long enough to work this stupid tape loose.
I thought of all I stood to lose—Alex, the love of my life, the only person I’d ever met who seemed to truly understand me and want me in spite of it. Dick, my surrogate father-slash-brother figure who would be so upset when he realized I’d been hurt. He would blame himself for not protecting me. Andrea, who would have to spend so much time comforting him. Jane, who had helped to give me a place, a family, a life of my own. If he killed me, I would miss out on that beautiful, chaotic life I’d started to build, and the thought of that was enough to make the tears burn my eyes.
I sniffled and to his growing horror, the tears tumbled down my cheeks in twin rivers. “Well, the joke’s on you because I’m not one of their own. I never was. They only kept me around because I was Alex’s and he lost interest a few days back. He said he was finished with me, bored.” I paused to give a bitter laugh that wasn’t entirely false. “And now that he’s done with me, I’m not even part of my pack anymore. You went to all the trouble of kidnapping someone you can’t even ransom.”
I giggled and I’m sure it sounded like madness. I wriggled my wrists, loosening the tape, flexing the muscles.
“But I saw them. I saw how they were with you. The smiling. The laughter. The disgusting amount of hugging.”
“They’re like that with everybody who dates within their circle, but once you’re out, you’re out.”
Greg shook his head. I guess I wasn’t selling my heartache well enough. I hadn’t found those words. “That whole group just folded you right in like there was a space waiting for you. How do you do that?”
So, selling my broken heart wasn’t going to get through to him. But his absolute bewilderment that violence and betrayal did not result in friendship? That I could work with. For a moment, I almost felt sad for him. I knew what it was like to be lonely, to want acceptance.
“I tried to be nice when I met them?” I suggested. “I listened when people talked? And I didn’t try to kill them or set their stuff on fire?”
“What’s your point?” he asked, shaking his head.
I stared at him for a long moment, trying to contain the urge to call him a litany of colorful names. I took a deep breath and kept my voice calm. “Honestly? I don’t know. It’s never happened for me before. Most of the time, I’ve been pretty lonely. I don’t fit in with