With Hearts to Hear| ✔

|22|

Two Years Later

Killian took a deep breath, air rushing through his nose and into his lungs with a painful pleasure. It was coming back around to the annual pack audit; it was mundane, but the mediocrity of the season was marked with the painful reminder of Rachel leaving.

In the two years that had passed, many things had improved for his pack. The damage caused in the last few years by Damien's threatening hold on their business practices had been replaced by brand new opportunities with the other packs in the country.

Seth and Renee would trade his wood materials for supplies like fabric and flour. Since he had no need for fabric, he traded with Vincent's pack who had quite a few tailors by trade for other useful materials that his pack could use. Even Sebastian and Adam would barter what they had to offer for things that worked in their convenience; most leftovers were sold in Willsden Brooke for extra income to funnel back into the people and places in the pack that needed extra support.

It was an old system, but it was useful, and it meant that all the packs were almost like one large pack split into smaller groups.

Killian sighed, deciding that it was pointless to try and avoid the task— it had to be done, and his people would be better off the faster he could get it done. He didn't want to have to ask Leandra or Aiden for help because he would undoubtedly snap at them if they looked at him with too much sympathy or tried to pretend that nothing was the matter.

The truth was, the day Rachel had left, something had died inside of him.

It wasn't the fact that she was gone that had left him empty, it was the fact that she left. He had been so certain that he would have a chance to make things better, to fight for her, to at least apologise for hurting her; only she hadn't even given him the chance to. He knew he wasn't entitled to her hearing his apology, but after knowing what he had felt for her, it stung.

In the two years that he had spent alone, he thought of her often. He wondered where she had gone, what she spent her time doing; he wondered if she was still writing music— he missed hearing her sing, and that battered guitar of hers. He wondered if she had moved to the other side of the world and started over completely, or if she was just under his nose the way she had always been.

More often than not, he wondered if she thought about him.

He wondered if she was still hurt, if they saw each other again if he would be able to stomach asking for another chance. He wondered what he could have done differently.

He would go back to the beginning in his mind; he could picture it as if he were there, breathing in the cool autumn air. He could see her there arguing with that human police officer, and the moment she offered to buy him a drink— he was certain he wouldn't change any of that. He had two years to decide that part of them was perfect.

Then it got a little trickier. He would think about asking her to come back to his 'town' and wondered if he should have told her the truth then, or when she first met his mother, or every single moment after that.

He thought about the night she practically begged him for the truth, about the way she recoiled from him with every hidden truth brought to light. He thought about the way he had spoken to her, his last words to her.

That was the part that cut him the deepest. She had left thinking that he didn't care, thinking that he didn't want to be around her. That the last words she heard him say were out of anger, and there was no guarantee that he would ever see her again.

At the beginning he was hopeful that she would return, that she truly just needed a few weeks to figure things out and that perhaps she would decide that the way she felt with him was enough of a reason to try again. But as weeks turned to a month, a month turned to many months, he started to think that whatever she had felt for him wasn't strong enough. Or perhaps it was completely overshadowed by a complete resentment and lack of trust.