Unforgivable (Their Shifter Academy Book 4) Read online

  He nodded. For a few seconds, silence stretched between us. Then he said, “You know, today, it’s been three months since we lost Silas.”

  “To the day?” My eyebrows arched. I wouldn’t have expected Penn to know that.

  “To the day.”

  I was finally close enough for him to catch my hips, and he pulled me close, between his thighs. “I miss him too, you know.”

  “We all do.” I chewed my lower lip. “I’ll try the spell again. See if there are any signs of life.”

  “Just don’t get caught.” Penn’s lips tilted up. “It’s a good night for it, though. The cadre that are back are getting rowdy. Apparently everyone needs a drink tonight.”

  “If you know it’s been three months since we lost Silas,” I said, “then I bet Ty does too.”

  Lost Silas. As if we’d misplaced him. The memory of his face as he plunged off the bridge rose again like a ghost, and I shuddered. The academy had erupted into chaos, both friends and enemies hunting for him.

  I’d tried spells to find Silas, but there was no sign of him on Earth. Whether he was home or in the afterlife, I couldn’t know.

  Penn started to say something, but I interrupted him.

  “You think our cadre will get rowdy?” I demanded. “I can’t imagine Rafe having fun. And Lex…”

  Lex acted the same as ever, but I was sure there was something different, something bothering him.

  “You’re changing the subject,” Penn said fondly, reaching to tuck a wayward stand of blond hair behind my ear. “And yeah, it is very hard for me to imagine Rafe putting away tequila shots or getting down to the music.”

  Penn briefly pretended to dance, which never failed to bring a smile to my face. The way the man moved his hips was sexy, but he always made a ridiculous face when he danced, as if he couldn’t just relax into it. “But maybe one day.”

  “I just want things to be normal,” I admittedly softly. “Everything with Ty is weird now, and I miss him.”

  “Yeah,” Penn agreed. I knew he missed Ty too. But he added, “There was never a normal, Maddie. It’s been hard the whole way through for all of us, hasn’t it?”

  My lips pursed to one side. “You know how Lex says you ruin pep talks? You ruin your own, too.”

  “No,” he said, his voice certain. “The point is, it’s always hard. And we always find our way. You and Ty will figure this out, Mads. I’ve got faith in you.”

  “Do you have faith in him?” I asked skeptically.

  Penn made a see-saw motion with his hand, his brows lifting the way they did when he said something sarcastic.

  “If I know him,” he said, “Ty’s going out to the bridge tonight. He wants to be alone, and the dorm won’t be angsty enough for him. Not when he blames himself.”

  “You think I should go to him?”

  “I think you should go get him. No matter how much he wants to be left alone to wallow in angst and self-loathing.”

  Penn kissed me goodbye, then hesitated before kissing me again, a little deeper this time. I let my hands slide up his shoulders, feeling his lips caress mine open. The two of us traded a heated kiss before we broke apart.

  “Try to bring my brother back with you,” Penn said, resting his forehead against mine.

  I thought he was going to say something about how we needed Ty and he needed us, but Penn added, “It looks like Clearborn had our bar restocked with the good liquor again, and I don’t want to race Jensen to the bottom of a bottle of Patron on my own.”

  My lips tilted up at the sides. “You’re a rascal, Penn.”

  But he was also a good friend and one hell of a boyfriend.

  Penn kissed my forehead and then slid off my desk, heading past me to the door. “Better wear your coat. It’s going to be cold out there.”

  Yeah, it was going to be cold out there with Ty, and that wasn’t just because of the weather. Penn flipped me a light-hearted wave over his shoulder.

  Twenty minutes later, I reached the bridge over the white water river. It finally stopped raining. It was as if the weather itself was conspiring with Clearborn to enhance our misery.

  When I saw a lean figure leaning against the bridge under the moonlight, even though I knew better, my heart lurched in my chest.

  It’s not Silas, I reminded myself, and I started across the bridge. The water rushing far below was loud in my ears. The noise reminded me so much of the last time I was out here. I hadn’t come back since that night when I sobbed into Rafe’s chest as he held me tight.

  Ty felt me coming and turned. When he saw me, a look of resignation came over his face that made me ache.

  I rested my elbow on the rail right beside him. “Hey.”

  “Hi, Maddie.” He looked back at the river. The steady breeze ruffled his hair above his handsome face in profile. “Come to call me an asshole again?”

  “Do I need to? I assumed you knew.” My voice came out acerbic, and I blew out a breath. “I don’t want to fight, Ty. I came out here to talk.”

  He rested his back against the rail, his hands in his pockets, and raised his eyebrows at me.

  Apparently, I could talk. He wasn’t promising he’d answer.

  “Do you come out here a lot?” I ran my hand over the wooden rail. The paint was peeling, the wood rough under my palm.

  He shrugged. I thought he wasn’t going to answer at all, then he said, “I don’t have a lot of free time.”

  “Clearborn’s keeping us busy.” I picked absently at the splintering wood. “What do you think of him?”

  “I think Lex was right that night.”

  I tilted my head to one side, confused, and he added, “We should’ve gone to Clearborn. Told him what we heard about Duncan’s plan. We assumed they were going after you.”

  There was the faintest bitter edge in his voice when he said you.

  Penn said Ty blamed himself for what happened to Chase and then Silas, but maybe he blamed me too.

  “We were wrong,” he went on. “Clearborn could have called off the exercise. He might’ve been able to see Garmond’s plan. Clearborn knew him.”

  I shook my head. “We made the best choice we could with the information we had—”

  “Right. But you don’t know everything to make the best choice,” Ty interrupted. “You’re just a kid.”

  He used to call me kiddo, and it used to sound sweet. For a while when we first were getting to know each other, he’d felt like the big-brother friend type, the kind one has a hopeless crush on.

  “You don’t know everything, Madeline Northsea. You’re eighteen.”

  “You don’t know everything either, Tyson Atlas.”

  I could use his full name too.

  “But I’m not operating under the delusion that I do,” he shot back.

  I raked my fingers through my hair, calming myself down, before I met his gaze. “I came out here to check on you because I figured you miss Silas as much as I do. Can we fight tomorrow?”

  His eyebrows arched skeptically. “I don’t need you to check on me. I was fine out here alone.”

  So, that’s a no on postponing the fight until tomorrow.

  I stared into his face, his angry blue eyes and stern expression.

  Meeting his anger with anger wasn’t helping, and even though I could feel heat wash through me and a smartass remark burned on my lips, I tried to release the building fury that his own anger provoked.

  “Maybe I said that wrong,” I said, my voice coming out even, not heated. “Maybe I didn’t need to check on you so much as I…needed you.”

  The words hung in the air. They made me feel too vulnerable. Despite my winter coat, I found myself pulling my scarf a little tighter as I turned toward the water, trying not to watch Tyson’s face from the corner of my eye.

  His voice came out different, gentle, when he said, “We all miss him. You should talk to Chase, or Penn, or Jensen…”

  “Why not you?”

  “Maddie.” He rubbed the
back of his neck.

  “What changed, Tyson?”

  He shook his head. “You didn’t really want to talk about Silas. I know you, you’ve got some plan to fix his situation, if he’s alive out there somewhere. You don’t need me for that.”

  Maybe I didn’t need Ty to do anything. But I needed him. He should know the difference.

  “And you’ve got some plan to fix me,” he added, a bitter twist to his voice.

  Ty thought he knew me so well.

  “If I knew how to fix you, believe me, I would. But I don’t even know what went wrong.”

  I stared out over the river. Moonlight shimmered over the dark water. The silence between us stretched on so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Ty spoke to me so sparingly lately, except for his outburst of annoyance tonight.

  From the way he spoke, it seemed almost as if talking to me hurt, as if meeting my gaze made him ache.

  “Maybe some things aren’t meant to be,” he said.

  “We are.” My voice came out soft. “You and me. We’re mates.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to say fated. It sounded even more final than mates, and even more heartbreaking when he seemed to be rejecting me.

  “No, we’re not.”

  “Why?” I felt my lip tremble as I turned to him, and I wrenched down on it with my teeth before Ty could see. I whispered so my voice wouldn’t break, “What did I do?”

  His features tightened with pain. “You didn’t do anything, Maddie.”

  He was in as much agony as I was. The realization struck me deep, and I reached for him, wanting to hug him, to make it better. “Then why—”

  He pulled away from me, raising his hands to his shoulders to avoid touching me as he took a quick step back.

  I stared at him.

  “You didn’t do anything,” he said, his voice hard. “Sometimes we don’t get what we want. Not me. Not even you.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” I said. My voice came out heated. “Like I’m some kind of brat.”

  “Aren’t you?” he demanded. “Haven’t I made it clear I want to be friends, teammates, but I don’t want to be anything more? And yet here you come, when I’m out here…”

  He trailed off. I wanted to point out he wasn’t exactly being a good friend, but instead I said, “When you’re out here? Doing what exactly?”

  He shook his head instead of answering.

  “When you’re busy feeling sorry for yourself?” I asked. “Because you have magic? Because you’re a witch like me?”

  Even though we were alone in the still and quiet night, he rounded on me with his eyes widening before he looked around. There was no one here. It was just the two of us, and the river rushing below.

  “Just tell me what I did. Something changed. You stopped…” I stumbled. I didn’t want to talk about the way Ty had stopped loving me.

  I had meant it that day in the fortune teller’s basement when I told Ty I loved him. I was pretty sure he’d meant it too. But every day that went by, I was a little less confident he ever had.

  “You didn’t do anything!” he half-shouted.

  “Then why?” I demanded. “Why do you act like you hate me now?”

  “Because you’re my sister!”

  I stared at him, unable to process what he’d just said.

  “Winter said he was going to come back to his children,” he said. He ran his hand through his hair. He was quieter now. “He looked at us, Maddie.”

  “I’m not Winter’s daughter.” I shook my head. “And you’re not his son.”

  “He’s the Stranger,” he said, referring to the card in the tarot reader’s deck. “The Stranger. There was just one. One card for both of us.”

  “You’re wrong.” He hadn’t even believed in the damn cards. Panic flooded my chest. “Tyson, you’re not my brother. We’ve been together…”

  “What we did doesn’t change the facts.”

  “It’s not a fact. You’re just guessing.”

  “You just don’t want to believe. Because it’s not what you want.” Ty’s eyes met mine, blazing with anger, and the wind blew so hard around us that it stung my face.

  “You need to stay away from me,” Ty said, his voice full of finality, not anger now. “And I need to stay away from you.”

  He jammed his hands into his pockets and turned.

  I was reeling so hard that I couldn’t catch my breath. But I managed to say, “Don’t walk away from me, Ty.”

  We could talk through this. We could figure out the truth together.

  But he was already striding away through the night, his shoulders hunched against the cold, leaving me behind.

  Chapter Three

  The underclass mess was full of noise—the band of shifters playing in the corner weren’t exactly creating music—and the party was underway hard. Jackets were hung over the backs of all the chairs, forming a sea of dark blue blazers. Lots of shifters were singing along, as if they could drown out the band.

  As I headed for my table of my favorite handsome fools, Jensen, Penn and Chase looked up at me, smiles brightening their faces. But my heart lurched at who was missing, and they must see it on my face, because their own expressions shifted.

  No point in hiding it. “Ty doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  “I can kick his ass,” Penn offered.

  “Can you?” Jensen quirked his eyebrow before he tilted his beer to his lips. “I thought you two were matched fifty-fifty. It’s a generous offer to make, but it depends on the day.”

  “Speaking of kicking someone’s ass.” I took my seat at the table and caught Jensen’s beer out of his hand before he could set it back on the table. He raised an eyebrow, but didn’t complain. “I have a lot of feelings and a desperate need to burn them off in the dojo.”

  I’d taken solace in the dojo since Silas disappeared. Losing myself in physical activity was an academy-approved outlet for all my emotions. It felt better to hurt someone and to get hurt myself than to be alone with the grief that choked my chest.

  Penn raised his cup. “Pass. I am deeply intoxicated and so is Jensen, as indicated by his absolute lack of judgment regarding who would win in a fight between Ty and me.”

  Jensen snorted. “I’ve seen you fight. I know I can kick both your asses.”

  “Instead of theorizing over your beers, come to the dojo and prove it,” I invited them. I drained the last of Jensen’s beer and plunked it onto the table. It didn’t help, of course, but sometimes I couldn’t resist a dramatic gesture.

  And if anything would drive me to drink, it was Tyson’s conviction that I was his sister. It didn’t make sense. Fate might be a cruel mistress, but it wouldn’t sentence Ty and me to be mates when we were already bonded by blood.

  If he’d just talk to me—if he’d just talked to me three months ago—we could have dug into the books and sorted this out.

  I would talk to the guys about it, tomorrow. We would start finding answers.

  Tonight, they were half drunk, and I needed time to think.

  “Chase looks both spry and sober tonight.” Penn raised his glass in a toast to Chase, although no one clinked cups with him. “I volunteer him as tribute.”

  “You love to fight with me,” I reminded Penn.

  “No,” he corrected, “I love making up with you. I realize one of my duties as your boyfriend is to let you punch me in the face—”

  “And to try to punch me,” I reminded him.

  “When did we start throwing that word around?” Jensen asked. “Boyfriend? Girlfriend?”

  The words didn’t seem to fit in his mouth quite right.

  “Okay, one of our duties as her mates,” Penn said. “Is that any less weird, man?”

  “Not at all,” Jensen said. “But I’ve never known you to make things less weird.”

  “You know you’re mine,” I said, running my hand across Jensen’s shoulder. He caught my hand and lifted it to his lips, pressing a quick kiss to the
back of my knuckles. His eyes said yes, even if he wasn’t great at talking about his feelings.

  Chase rose to his feet and offered me his hand. “Go easy on me.”

  I smiled as I took his hand.

  “You guys coming back here?” Jensen asked, tilting his chair back on its rear legs. When he did that, he looked so relaxed and sexy. And also, I had to resist a powerful temptation to knock the chair out from under him. “Or will we see you in bed?”

  I lifted the bottle of tequila from the center of the table. It was getting pretty low. “I think it’s probably safest if you guys don’t hang around the bar waiting for us. What’re you going to do if Clearborn has us running drills tomorrow?”

  Penn touched his fingers to his face in the mark of Saint Cain, as if he were devout. “Jensen will just be grateful for the good training.”

  Jensen leveled him a look. “That’s a funny way of saying Jensen will have some perspective.”

  “For once.”

  “Says the guy who—”

  “Let’s get out of here before they start that fight you need so much,” Chase said. But the two of them were just playing around. Penn and Jensen spoke the same love language: sarcasm.

  Chase and I headed into the hall. When the door slammed shut behind us, the noise and chaos faded.

  “Do you ever think there might be other ways of dealing with your feelings besides fighting?” Chase asked me casually as we headed down the stairs and across the dark quad toward the bright lights of our dorm.

  “I do,” I said. “And then I reject them as impractical.”

  The basement was dark. Chase walked along flipping lights on. There was something cozy about coming down to the dojo when the lights were off and it belonged just to the two of us.

  For a while, coming down here to do my laundry or to work out at night had reminded me too much of when Faro attacked me. Now the memory had faded. It would never be gone entirely, I knew that, but my heart no longer beat faster when I came down those stairs.

  The big fluorescent overhead lights flickered on slowly, illuminating the blue mats on the hardwood floors, the bo staffs and training swords hanging on the wall.

  Chase tossed his blazer and his shoes to the floor, and I did the same. He hesitated, then began to unbutton his shirt. “If you don’t mind… I keep tearing these damn shirts.”