Into the Light (University of Isles #2)

31. Chapter 31

Chapter thirty-one

We pulled up to the Alpha house and parked in front. Rain hesitated while I practically stormed off the bike, so I had to gesture to him to follow me.

“I guess it’s been so ingrained in my head that this house is bad and dangerous it just feels weird to pull up here.” He sighed before shaking his head and then opening the compartment where our letters were stored.

Our letters. It was hard to even say it to myself, let alone talk about it with Walsh, but I wanted to see the proof Walsh held and why he of all people had it.

I bounded toward the house, pounding onto the door until one of the members answered it.

“Where is he?” I growled at the guy. Poor guy didn’t realize he was in the crosshairs of an angry sister.

“Up-upstairs,” he mumbled before looking over my shoulder, then quickly straightened. “Oh no, absolutely not. He is not coming in here.”

“Yes, he is. We need to see Walsh.” The guy stood in front of the door, blocking us.

“No. He’s not coming in unless there is an official meeting.” The guy’s eyes softened at me. “Come on, little sister, you know I cannot let you guys in together.”

“Call him down. Make the meeting official. I don’t care what happens, but we need to see him immediately.”

“I don’t know—”

“Let them in,” my brother’s familiar voice echoed from behind the guy at the door.

“Thank fuck,” I muttered before reaching behind me for Rain’s hand. Rain didn’t hesitate. My brother would figure this out, anyway, and I needed Rain’s support as much as he needed mine.

Walsh guided us to the office or converted meeting room in the back of the house where most of his business dealings took place. He closed the door behind us before sitting atop the desk and gesturing to two chairs in front.

I shook my head before I held out the letters in their Ziploc bags and shoved them at Walsh.

“Open it if you need to, but I think you already know what these are.” My tone was bitter.

Rain came next to me, wrapping his arm across my lower back and giving my hip a comforting squeeze.

Walsh coughed. “Ah, I see you guys finally found them. I was hoping you—”

“Did you know where they were?” I barked.

“No, Ember. I swear he didn’t tell me their location.”

“Fuck,” I cried. I would not let the tears come, but the anger was coursing through my veins deeply.

“Show us what you have,” Rain added, and I snapped my attention toward him. His eyes met mine with some softness and comfort in them, but I didn’t want to give my brother any mercy.

“Why?” I bit back while Walsh rubbed his hands together in his lap over and over again.

“Because he begged me to,” Walsh said after waiting a beat to reply.

“No.” I threw my hands in the air. “Absolutely fucking not.”

“Ember,” Rain warned as I slipped out of his grip and stormed toward my brother.

“You do not fucking get to give us these evasive answers like you’ve been doing over the last year, Walsh,” I screamed in his face. “You need to tell us what happened immediately, without leaving out a single shred of information in order to redeem yourself.”

He sighed and then looked down at me. For a brief second, all the torment and the months of pain and waiting surfaced on his face. He looked tired from holding onto this weight of secrecy for so long.

“He came to me a few weeks before you guys broke up. He set up a private, formal meeting and wanted to give me this envelope. We looked at it together. You can imagine how it must’ve felt to get this information about my enemy and mostly my dad’s archnemesis.” Walsh looked up at Rain.

“Yeah, why did he do that?” Rain chimed.

“I had the same question, but then Ash told me that he was originally supposed to use Ember to get closer to our family. I was livid, but he convinced me that he was in love with her. He wanted to protect her and was worried something was going to happen to him.” Walsh swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“I assumed it was from the Cartel initially, which I guess was fucking stupid, but he was acting so calm, so he handed me the envelope of this shit that would put away his dad forever and honestly, get the fucker killed.” He paused. “Then he told me he was going to be possibly leaving for a while and needed to make sure that neither of you guys had this information until you got your letters.”

“Did you ask him about the letters?” I asked.

Walsh shrugged. “I did and he said he was going to deliver them to you while he was gone. I didn’t press him any further.”

Walsh’s hands were stark white from grabbing the sides of the table. “Over the time when you broke up with him Ember, he started to get more frantic and concerned that I was going to show you this. I promised I’d wait like I told him I would until the right time, until he got back.”

I wanted to melt into the floor. My heart was shattering all over again thinking of the trauma and pain that Ash must’ve felt in that moment. “The night before the bonfire, I was worried about him. I heard from him earlier that morning. He told me he was going to leave that afternoon. He made me promise that until you guys gave me these letters that gave him permission I wouldn’t share this with you. He made me.” He took in a deep breath. “I was worried, so I followed him that day.”

“He was running,” Rain said, and I looked over to him standing in the back of the room closer to the door. I didn’t hear him walk backward, too lost in my own pain, but I crossed the room and grabbed his fingers, interlacing mine with his. Our sign that we were in this together.

“He was escaping,” my brother corrected. “I followed him to the woods. At first, I wanted to scare him a little bit because he was technically off-campus.” Walsh winced. He added softly, “I am sorry.”

I shook my head. “What happened next?”

I thought I was just scaring him, but then I realized he wasn’t leaving the woods. He was hiding, so I sat quietly waiting to see what he was going to do. I wanted to be sure he got back to campus safely. My heart was beating out of my chest and I can’t explain it but I just had a bad feeling about it all.”

Walsh closed his eyes. “After a few moments I watched him walk to the edge of that damn clearing. When I realized . . .” This was hurting him. I closed my eyes, willing myself out of this nightmare, but I was in the room with the one person who saw Ash before he died.

“You were there,” I repeated.

“I was. I was worried about him, but when I saw him standing on the edge, I called his name. I screamed no. I told him to stop. He stopped to look back at me.” A tear ran down Walsh’s face. Rain coughed, and I saw he was crying too.

“I begged him to step away from the clearing. I took a few steps closer toward the rock when he yelled at me, telling me that everyone would be looking in the area. That I would trek the mud onto the rock and they would think I pushed him because of how close we were to the bonfire.”

“W-Walsh.” Rain held me in his arms, my back pressed against his chest as he sobbed. I couldn’t look up because if I did, the dam would explode within me, too.

“He looked so peaceful, Ember. He looked so at peace with this choice, which only made it harder. After he yelled at me to stand where I was, back in the mud of the path, he begged me to show you this, but not until you found your letters.” He paused. “I begged him to tell me why we needed to wait, and he just said the answers were in the letters. You guys needed time to find your way to each other before you were ready.”

Walsh swallowed back his own pain. “I screamed no again but then just watched as he…tumbled.” A lone tear ran down my brother’s cheek.

“That asshole” Rain said through tears, his chest heaving. “We may have never found them, then what?”

Walsh shrugged. “I wouldn’t have shown you this. I guess life would have looked like it had.” My brother glanced back toward me. “Ember, don’t you think it was hard for me to keep all of this from you? You are my only sister, but over the time that I got to know Ash, I realized his intentions for you were built from the love he had for you. He was protecting you, and in some wild way, I thought that by complying with his asinine instructions, this would bring us closure.”

His voice quieted. “Dad told me you were grieving hard.”

“I was. I still am.” My voice matched his soft tone.

“Ash loved you. He spoke of you so deeply and fondly. He knew that you were going to be the one to help push this all together. I just wanted to protect my sister. You’re my only sister, and I spent my entire life protecting you, so I wanted to give this to you.”

I was trying to be strong. I was really fucking trying, but my entire being was cracking in half as if the world was cleaving open.

“I told you I don’t need protection,” I whispered.

“I’ve seen a lot of fucking death in life, Ember. But I have never seen anyone . . . do that before. It was fucking traumatizing,” Walsh whispered. “I just wanted to protect you from feeling the pain that I felt.”

I wanted to curl up in a ball and melt into the floor and disappear. I wanted, no, needed an escape.

Rain coughed a few times before he looked down at me. “I have to—Give me a minute,” he murmured.

He shook his head at me before he walked out of the door behind us. The weight of the room intensified as Walsh got off the desk and closed the distance between us.

“I was just trying to protect him and protect you, and maybe I fucked up, but I made him a promise, Em.” His voice was quiet.

I knew that was what he was trying to do, and at this point, what’s done was done, but it hurt that Walsh kept this secret for this long. We could have resolved this long ago if he’d have just given us the envelope.

“After what I saw, I couldn’t help but keep that for him. I felt like I owed him that promise, so as crazy as it sounds I kept this from you. I know I should’ve told you but if you saw what I did–”

I stopped him, holding up my hand. “I probably would’ve done the same thing.” Walsh let out a sigh of relief.

“Can we go back to talking to each other?” he asked, and I shook my head.

“I don’t know how to move forward between us. We have a lot of learning and growing to do, but right now my focus is trying to figure this out. We’re going to need your help with facilitating meetings between Dad and Mr. Ortiz.”

“Of course, Em.”

I paused, taking a deep breath. In that moment, I realized the trauma that my brother must have endured in this. Vowing to keep a secret to a dead man’s last wish was something heavy, and truthfully, I was not sure I’d be able to share it either.

“I understand why you did what you had to, to respect Ash.”

“Thank you,” Walsh said softly, the red beneath his eyes growing as the tears flowed freely. “I’ve never seen anyone talk about you with so much love in his heart. I thought, stupidly, that Dad and I were all you were ever going to need, but when he spoke of you, Ember, it was with such a light. You brought him probably the best year of his life—even with the battle he was fighting inside his head.”

I nodded because I was choked up. My brother closed the distance between us, and I let him hold me. Both of us were two broken, tattered souls, and I’d lost the last year with him.

“This isn’t how you expected my college experience to be, did you?” I sob-laughed into his chest, and he held me tightly. After a moment, I pulled away and looked at his tortured face.

“I need you to know from here on out, I need to care for myself. I don’t need anyone to protect me. I can protect myself.”

“I understand.” Walsh looked past the door where Rain had walked out a few minutes ago. “Is he . . . are you?”

“I don’t know, but yes?” It was a question, not because I wasn’t sure of Rain but mostly because I didn’t know what we were. “I fell in love with him.”

I swallowed because it was an uncomfortable thing to talk about with my brother for many reasons, but mostly because I felt guilty for having these thoughts of Rain while we were talking so intimately about Ash.

“He wanted you two to be together. He told me that Rain’s letter was in there for you to find. He wanted it to be him.”

I nodded because, again, if the words came out, they’d be replaced by a bucket of tears.

A slight knock at the door shook me out of my thoughts, and Rain came back into the room.

“Sorry,” he muttered before coming next to me and pressing a kiss to the side of my head.

“It’s okay,” I replied, my hand lingering on his bicep so he knew I was there for him if he needed it.

“Okay. Let’s talk about this meeting. Ember already knows about Pico and my wishes there.”

“Right, yes. Let me go get the envelope. It’s in a safe in my room. I’ll be right back.” Walsh excused himself from the room, and I turned toward Rain.

“Are you okay?” I whispered, getting up on my tiptoes so we could face each other.

“No. Are you?” I huffed an exasperated breath.

“No.”

“Good. Now, let’s take this pain and turn it into something else.”

“I agree.” His fingers caressed my cheeks as he brought my face to his, our noses touching.

“Together,” I whispered, hovering over his mouth.

“Together.” He kissed me in a way that was consuming. In the way he always kissed me.

Moments later, Walsh came in, and Rain and I sat in the two chairs we’d pulled up next to the desk. Walsh dropped the manila envelope onto the large wooden desk in front of us before retreating to the back of the room, giving us the space we needed.

“You do it,” I encouraged Rain. “You’ll know more about what’s inside of this than I’ll understand.”

“Are you sure?” Rain asked.

“Yes.”

His fingers hovered over the clasp of the envelope before he opened it. As he pulled out the papers, there was a loud gasp.