“We were attacked,” Ryder said finally.
My heart leapt into my throat. Before I could stop myself, I reached out for him. Hand on his arm, my heart settled a little. Just knowing that he was whole helped ease the sudden fear chilling my core.
I couldn’t take this anymore. That sense of dread that I’d picked up while talking to Candi still hadn’t left. It kept telling me that there was something I needed to do and that I was going to regret not doing it, even though I had no idea what it wanted of me. Guilt gnawed at me, too. Not just because Ryder was attacked.
Kelsey had gotten pulled into it this time. That call had been a ruse with Kelsey as the bait. Though I should have felt sorry for her, the only thing on my mind was Ryder.
He drove us back to the apartment where I couldn’t stop pacing. The heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach made me restless. What could I do? Go back to Candi and get stabbed again? That wasn’t really something that I wanted to risk. Just looking at the cake on the counter made my stomach hurt until I pushed it off the counter and into the trash bin.
“Ness,” Ryder said softly.
“What is this?” I snapped. I spun on him. “What am I feeling?”
His brows lifted in the center, a look of pained compassion overtaking his usually brooding countenance. It broke me. My eyes began to burn. I clenched and unclenched my fists while my hound writhed inside me. She shook herself in an attempt to break free of me.
Ryder cupped my face in his hands. “I think you’re overwhelmed. Are you sure you’re not having an anxiety attack?”
I held onto his wrists like lifelines as I sucked in a deep breath and tried to reset myself. It didn’t work. The feeling wouldn’t go away. I wished the ice in my chest would protect me from this creeping dread, but it was busy with the ritual arcana.
Ryder pulled away but didn’t let go of me. Instead, he led me to the couch where he sat down and pulled me into his lap. I rested my head against his shoulder. The position reminded me of the night he almost died, the poison stealing him away from me.
Now, his heart thumped strongly, though a little frantically. Was he afraid for me?
I needed to calm down, too. There was too much on my plate. The weight of the world rested on my shoulders. While that weighed me down, there was an enemy lurking inside of me, waiting to take control from me at any moment.
Yeah, there was a lot going on. It made sense that I had hit my limit.
“Tell me about your family,” I said to Ryder. “I want to know about all the good things.”
He dragged in a deep breath. For a moment, I thought he would tell me to ask something else. Then, Ryder let out a ragged laugh. I could almost feel him falling back into his past where times had been easier. I went with him because I was eager to taste a bit of that sunshine, too.
“I miss my brother more than I let on,” Ryder began. “I miss having his brain on my side. Morgan got stuck in his own thoughts too often, but I was always there to pull him out. Now that I’m here, I can’t help but wonder if he’s stuck inside his own head again. He doesn’t have anyone who can help him like I did.”
I sank deeper into Ryder’s arms. “Not even Bri?”
Though I knew she was Ryder’s mate, I didn’t see why she wouldn’t be able to help Morgan, too.
Ryder ignored the fact that I brought her up again. He moved past her like a runner sprinting over obstacles. I shouldn’t have been surprised. With the feelings building inside me, I knew I couldn’t keep them under wraps forever. Now, if only I could figure out how he felt, too.
The way he avoided talking about Bri confused me. But he didn’t give me time to think about it before he moved on to a story about his brother. Ryder’s words pulled me into a scene that’d taken place long before we’d ever met. He took me back to a time when his father had still been alive and well, his family thriving in the Colorado mountains.
“We were trying to use our wings without fully shifting,” Ryder explained. “Neither of us had been able to summon them in our human form yet. Morgan thought that if we jumped from a cliff that we would sprout them as we fell—like a survival response.”
“Oh my god,” I said. “You acted like baby birds trying to fly for the first time.”
Ryder’s laugh reverberated under my ear. It filled me with warmth until I remembered to hold tight to the icy feeling in my chest. Damn these feelings. Damn Alvin’s machinations.
“Young and dumb, I brought Morgan up into the mountains to give it a try. We didn’t tell anyone we were going up there. If anything had happened, we would have been screwed.”
“You’re telling me neither of you got hurt from this?” I looked up at him questioningly.
He grinned. “I never said that. Let me continue before you jump to the end.”
Ryder explained how he and Morgan had climbed the cliff face. He called it a warm-up. I called it insanity. We didn’t argue the differences.
At the top of the cliff, Morgan had balked. He’d questioned their thought processes and tried to come up with a new way to achieve what they wanted. Morgan had the right idea, in my opinion. Of course, Ryder proved that he was more balls than brains as he told me how he’d taken his brother’s hand and thrown them both from the cliff.
This version of Ryder didn’t match the man I’d come to know. Life had given him reason to pause and consider the consequences. The man who’d boldly thrown himself into everything now stopped to think, much like his brother.