Novak Raven (Harper's Mountains #4)(33)

“Avery, it’s going to be okay,” he said. Desperately, he tried to hug her to his body, but his hands went right through her.

And just as the bedroom of 1010 showed from behind the clawed, bloody walls, Avery lifted her hollow gaze to him with a heartbroken sadness etched into her beautiful face. “I miss you.”

He blinked back the emotion in his eyes, and the room was gone. He was back in 1010, and Avery was sleeping peacefully, her face completely relaxed and happy looking.

What the f*ck?

Gripping the back of his hair, Weston stood and paced the room. That hadn’t been the future. She’d kept the darkness of her past to herself. Cut him out of that pain. He wasn’t supposed to see the past, right? He was a future-teller.

God, he could still feel the chill of the white room, could still here the soft echo of her whispered words, but it wasn’t real. Not anymore. How was she okay? If that’s how it had been for her, how was she still upright, still fighting? How was she still kind to people? No wonder she would rather be homeless than go back to Raven’s Hollow. He wanted to kill them all. He wanted to annihilate the entire f*cking flock for what they’d done to Avery. His Avery. He hadn’t been there to protect her, and still, she’d clung to him. To his letters. To his words. In the vision, she hadn’t looked that much younger than she did now. That had to be recent, and she was still holding his letters in her heart to get through the bad stuff. Shit.

He had to get out of here before he woke her. He was shaking with his need for violence and vengeance, and it would scare her. And goddammit, she’d been scared enough in her life.

He bolted from 1010, strode up the winding dirt road to his house. He couldn’t sleep or risk another vision. For f*ck’s sake, they even came to him while he was awake now!

“You look like two-week-old shit,” Ryder said grumpily from the front porch of their attached cabin.

Probably. He’d just watched the woman he cared about in a moment of torture. In a moment of breaking. He wasn’t okay at all. Heart banging against his chest, Weston ignored him and yanked the tackle box and one of the fishing poles from the side of his porch.

“We’re fishing?” Ryder said, standing with hope in his eyes.

But Weston couldn’t fish with Ryder this morning. He couldn’t stomach laughing at Ryder’s jokes when he’d seen Avery in The Box. Weston needed an hour, two hours, f*ck, and entire day if he could manage it. He needed time to wrap his mind around the fact that he could now see the f*cking past. Avery’s past. He wanted to puke just thinking about the empty hopelessness in her eyes.

“Not today. I need some time alone,” he muttered as he strode down the porch stairs. Like a coward, he kept his gaze diverted away from Ryder because he couldn’t shoulder hurting yet another person he cared about. He’d unknowingly helped destroy Avery by leaving her alone with the shitstorm of her life, and now he was disappointing Ryder. It was all too much.

His best friend didn’t say anything as Weston tossed his gear in the back of his truck. Thank God for small blessings because his head couldn’t handle anything extra right now. The f*cking past! Like the sight wasn’t bad enough already!

When Weston looked in the rearview mirror as he skidded out of his front yard, Ryder was standing there, looking pissed, with his arms across his chest. He felt bad for falling apart right now, he did, but Weston couldn’t deal with the amount of shit Ryder was going to give him. He couldn’t deal with apologizing and mending fences when he was reeling like this.

He would make it up to Ryder, but right now, he needed to get as far away from here, and away from that vision, as possible.





Chapter Fifteen


“Eh hem!”

Avery scrunched up her face at the grating sound of someone clearing their throat loudly. When she eased her eyes open, Ryder was sitting in the chair he’d pulled up next to the bed. He was petting long strokes down the back of a tiny cream Chihuahua he had cradled across his arm. Ryder’s bright gold eyes were narrowed to pissed-off little slits as he glared at her. The Chihuahua’s glare at her matched.

“What are you doing here?” she asked in a groggy voice.

Ryder snorted an offended sound. “What am I doing here? What am I doing here? I live here. I’ll ask the questions, thank you very much.”

“Ryder,” a small voice came across from a cell phone resting on the arm of Ryder’s chair. “Be nice.”

Ryder gritted his teeth and petted the tiny dog in his arms again. “This is Sprinkles, my princess, my hairy snuggler, the warmer of my toes.” He jerked his head toward the phone. “This is Sexy Lexi, my mate, the stroker of my boner, the keeper of my seed—”

“Ryder, she’d already met me,” Lexi said.

“—the future mother of my dozen owl babies—”

“Three max. Focus, Ryder.”

“—the human of my heart, with the perfect toes, and the perfect ears, and the perfect nubbins—”

“Wait, what are nubbins?” Avery asked, utterly confused.

Ryder’s eyes went wide like she had the brain of a one-celled amoeba. “They’re nipples, Avery Foley. Nipples.”

Lexi sighed so loudly into the phone, static blasted across the speaker.

Ryder petted Sprinkles again with the flat of his palm. “Lexi is at work but insisted on being here for this, to curb my rage.”