Queen of Quarantine (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep #4) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,235

thrown himself into trying to track his father down, but it was no use. He'd even admitted so himself. Troy had run far away and put himself out of our reach. Saint had even pulled the plug on his assets, locking off his access to most of his money, calling in all of the favours he'd accrued with the powerful people Troy may have tried to turn to for help. And with Royaume D’élite gone it seemed like the last of his contacts should have been gone too. But apparently not. Someone must have helped him. Either that or he'd had an escape plan in place for a situation like this and there was nothing but dead ends left in his wake.

He was gone.

His reputation was in tatters, his companies sold off, liquidated or now under the control of his son. He was wanted by the FBI, his face plastered all over the news and the most wanted lists and yet he'd just up and vanished. Like a ghost.

I guessed ruining his life was something. But it wasn't enough considering all he'd done.

Saint had sworn he'd never give up the hunt, but I wasn't sure what the point of it was. I needed to let it go. We all did. If we wanted any hope of moving on and building...something.

I ran a hand down my face and sighed, turning my gaze to Tatum and offering her a hand as her tearstained cheeks hurt my soul.

She accepted it, her fingers curling around mine as she let me draw her from her chair and pull her into my lap.

"I don't want to live in a world without Kyan Roscoe," she breathed. "I need him darkening my doorway. I need him riling me up and fighting with me. I need him being the worst kind of asshole and laughing while he does it. I just...need him."

She looked up at me like I might be able to offer her some kind of fix for this, but how could I? There was nothing I could do but share in her grief and try to figure out what the fuck we were going to do without him, how the hell we were supposed to do anything at all.

My throat thickened and I leaned down to kiss her, tasting our grief between our lips as I wrapped my arms tightly around her and tried to draw her pain and fear into me. I wished I could make it all okay. I wished I could do something to change fate or bargain with it.

Saint was silent, glaring at the door like it had personally offended him, his posture rigid and jaw tight. He was going to break. Not in the ways he had before. Without Kyan he would break in a way I knew he'd never come back from. It would destroy him. It would destroy all of us and I didn't see how we'd ever recover.

"I can't just sit here," Nash growled, standing suddenly and knocking his empty coffee cup flying. "I'm going to go for a run."

None of us replied. He'd been doing that a lot, even though the doctors had told him it would aggravate the healing brand on his thigh. I guessed he just needed the oblivion of real exhaustion. The kind you could only get from pushing your body to its limits and beyond. Maybe I should have been taking a leaf out of his book, but I hadn't been able to do it. I didn't want to be away from Tatum. Not now. I couldn't.

I didn't think I'd slept more than a few hours this entire week and my heart hadn't stopped pounding since we'd been forced to watch Kyan collapse in the snow, see his body fail him and were left helpless at his side while his life faded.

It wasn't right. He'd been so strong, so solid, so freaking permanent that I hadn't even contemplated a world without him in it. Yet now that was all I could think of. This endless abyss of time that stretched out before us which should have been so full of joy and possibilities and now held no appeal at all. What was the point to it without him to share in it with us? After everything we'd survived together, didn't we deserve a happily ever after?

The door opened before Nash could reach it and Tatum sucked in a breath as she turned to look at the man who had just stepped into the room