Page 31 of Oblivion
“No,” he said and looked at me. “You are going to establish contact with the Italians. We will need help in all of this, and the only people who hate The Syndicate and the Outfit more than we do are them. I’ll need you to play nice.”
“Nice?” I laughed. “Have you met me?”
“You can be charming when you put your mind to it. We all need this, Ophelia. They have connections and manpower. You know as much as I do that this isn’t just some silly mission we’re doing. This is a full-blown war. If we’re not careful, we won’t exactly be the winners.”
I chewed over the words I wanted to spill out. That I wasn’t about to sell my soul for a piece of information or soldiers, but I couldn’t because he had a point. We needed the Italians. I hated it, but if I didn’t want to involve Sons of Hades, I had to find help somewhere else.
“What do I need to do?”
* * *
Storm
The phoneI was holding cracked in my hand, and the sound pulled me back from the whirlwind of thoughts angrily dancing in my mind.
She was gone.
Just like that.
No goodbye. No apologies.
Just, gone.
I thought I would never experience the pain she graced me with when I saw her in that place with Kieran and Cillian, but knowing that she deliberately ran away—again, might I add—spoke volumes. She didn’t want me. She didn’t want to have a life with me. If I rubbed my knuckles any longer against my chest bone, I would give myself a bruise.
“Storm?” Atlas’s voice registered somewhere in the back of my mind, but I wasn’t ready for conversation.
My body was still too weak to do anything, and I fucking loathed the fact that I couldn’t just sit on my bike and go after her. Not out of love, no. She didn’t deserve it. She didn’t deserve to see that side of me ever again.
She'd managed to kill everything good I felt for her with her actions, and I’d be damned if I ever showed her even an ounce of compassion.
I was pissed when I woke up, anyone would be, but she was the only person I wanted to see. The one person I wanted near me wanted nothing to do with me, and that fucking sucked. My heart almost gave out when she stayed behind, fighting those soldiers, but I thought she would come back to me.
I thought she would come back home.
But it was obvious that Ophelia had no idea what the meaning of home was, and I was never home for her. No matter how much I tried to understand her, to show her that everything wasn’t as bad as she made it out to be, her mind was made up a long time ago, and there was nothing I could do.
I was done begging people to stay with me if that wasn’t what they truly wanted. I was done being soft toward her when all she gave me was pain and bad memories.
“Storm,” Atlas said again, wrapping his hand around my shoulder. I looked up, seeing him standing behind me with a concerned look on his face. “We need to talk.”
“If we’re going to talk about her, then I have nothing to say,” I said, handing him his phone. “She made her choice.”
Atlas winced at my words, “It isn’t about her.”
He looked at the rest of the people sitting in the room at the new house we got. Well, they got because I was fucking incapacitated, sleeping like a fucking princess in the hospital, while they fought the battles I should’ve been here for.
I looked at Creed, Felix, Skinny, Nova, Indigo, and Zoe, and thanked the universe for giving me these people who loved me enough to stay.
Indigo suddenly stood up, looked at Atlas, and came closer to us.
“We really need to talk,” Atlas gritted out, pulling me up.
I shook him off and could feel anger brewing up in my veins. “What the fuck, A?”
“You need to hear what I have to say, and you’re not gonna like it. But the three of us need to talk.” He looked at the rest of the people in the room and then back at me. “Alone.”
My eyes volleyed from him to Indigo. Whatever it was put an anger I hadn’t seen in a very long time in Atlas’s eyes. I turned toward the rest of the people occupying the room and said, “Everyone, out.”
