A little lightbulb of understanding popped on in my head.
“You’re the one who let them in that day, weren’t you? You’re damn lucky they were caught early or else you would have had their deaths on your hands.”
I didn’t like Pack Ricci as far as I could throw them, but I also didn’t want to see them be shot and killed on my account.
“No I didn’t, Perrie, I swear. But Elio mentioned something—”
I cut him off. “Elio? You talk like you’re friends or something.”
Romey started to say something else, but my temper was already stoked and I was done listening to a little brother who wouldn’t even stand up for me.
“I’m going to go back to Rhodes now. If you see me on campus, do me a favor and continue to ignore me.”
Turning on my heel I hurried away from him, ignoring him when he called after me.
“Not quite the sweet reunion you thought it would be?” Rhodes asked when I stormed past him towards my next class.
“Shut up.” I snapped, shouldering my bag of film. The good mood that had been built up by making a new friend earlier was gone now and I just wanted to make it through the day so that I could go home and sulk in my nest.
Sixteen
“And you haven’t been feeling exhausted or had any unusual bruising? Nosebleeds?” Eli Stedmeyer asked Perrie, only half-paying attention to her as he glared at me over her head.
It was easy to forget what a small world the city felt like until two parts of your life suddenly intersected in one of the most unexpected ways. I was definitely going to kill Edison for this later on.
When Perrie told me that it was time for her six month check with her doctor, I’d called Edison and asked if he wanted to go with her and he’d declined with a mysterious chuckle. At the time, I’d just figured the man was exhausted from doing all of the work that I usually helped him with.
He’d been out of the house for two weeks now, trying to fix the shit that had hit the fan the night of the wedding.
After the drunken reception shootout which had ended with one of the older branch members dying, we’d been alerted that one of our weapons shipments had been intercepted somewhere along the route and our guys on the ground had been wiped out completely.
From what he could tell thanks to the body of one of the perpetrators being left at the scene, all signs pointed to the Japanese being the ones to ambush our guys and take one of the largest shipments of weapons we’d had in a year.
But that was too easy a blame to shift and Edison was trying to do all of the groundwork before we brought it to Shuuhei Saito who’d been one of our closest allies since both of them took over around the same time two years ago.
I wished I was there with him—I didn’t like the idea of him being out there without me to have his back—but Edison insisted that I stay back with Perrie and make sure the first couple of weeks of her classes got off to a good start.
On that front, at least, I thought things had been going pretty well. She’d made friends and seemed engaged with all of her classes, not to mention the literal hours I stood around outside of the campus dark rooms while she developed the old camera film for her photography professor.
The only dark spot seemed to be the ever hovering presence of Perrie’s brother.
I wasn’t sure what was said between the two of them that day, but now when they saw each other on campus they pretended like the other didn’t exist.
It bothered Perrie, I knew it did, but it wasn’t my business to question her about it so I’d been letting her stew over it. I didn’t have any siblings and neither did Edison, so I had no idea if that was the normal way of things or if the relationship had been irreparably damaged by Perrie’s marriage to Edison.
Kind of how it seemed like my friendship with Eli was about to be permanently fucked up.
“No, everything seems normal. My stamina is returning the way you told me it would,” Perrie told the doctor, oblivious to his glares at me as he prodded at the lymph nodes on her neck.
Eli flinched at the word stamina, like he was trying to figure out if she meant stamina because somehow Perrie was now Edison’s wife or if it meant she was working out.
“She swims and does self-defense,” I couldn’t help but say, jumping into the conversation to defend Edison’s honor as much as was possible at this point.
Though, if I was being honest, he’d also done things that I knew Eli would lose his shit over.
I’d been trying my best to forget the sound of Perrie’s moans on the night of their wedding, but sometimes when I closed my eyes to get what little sleep I could, it was one of the last things I heard before dreams of her and Edison writhing together on soft white sheets filled my head.
“I see,” Eli muttered gruffly, his green eyes glaring at me so hard that I was glad that my friend was a pacifist or else I was worried he was going to throw himself across the room at me. “Well, I’m going to have the nurse come in and do the old song and dance with blood draws and we’ll get an EKG and some other scans done just to be sure, but from what I can tell everything looks good.”
Perrie seemed to be pleased with that because she turned and shot me a bright grin before she seemed to remember that it was me she was smiling at and her expression dropped.
I tried not to let it hurt my feelings. Feelings I shouldn’t be having in the first place. Leave it to fucking Edison to get into my head and then disappear into thin air to leave me in close proximity with the exact object of said head-fuckery.
“Mr. McCreary, can I speak to you outside for a moment?” Eli jerked his head towards the door and I winced, knowing this moment had been coming ever since we’d walked through the door and the nurse had handed him an updated chart with Perrie’s new married name on it.
“I’ll be right back,” I told Perrie who nodded at me absentmindedly as she watched the nurse start to take vials of blood from her arm.
Once we were in the hallway, Eli rounded on me. “What the actual fuck is going on, Rhodes? Why is one of my patients married to Edison—specifically Perrie Chandler?”
“Keane,” I corrected like an idiot, watching my friend’s face turn an even deeper shade of red.
“Don’t be coy with me, asshole,” Eli hissed loud enough for a group of passing nurses to shoot us strange looks. He lowered his voice for his next words. “Explain to me what is going on before I call omega protective services on the both of you.”
Those were fighting words and had it been anyone other than the formerly scrawny kid we’d roomed with our freshman year of college and I would have put a bullet through his brain.
“Watch it,” I warned, giving him a gentle shove away from me.
