by Lana Kole
Chapter Nine
It was early afternoon when Maya coughed, covered in dust and cobwebs, a curse falling from her lips in complaint. After showering, they scarfed down a quick breakfast before squeezing in time to look for the amulet. Theo had been scheduled to work today, but she delayed opening in order to give them time to search the attic and take down the Valentine’s Day decorations. She’d promised to make the extra hours up to him by removing the cat ears from the uniform. It hurt to make the change, but Maya knew she had more entertainment than she could handle as it was.
“I don’t think it’s here,” she announced.
“We should keep looking. I mean, you said it has to be in the building, right?” August clarified.
Maya thought for a moment before nodding solemnly. “Yeah, I’m sure it’s here somewhere. This was all we had.” She gestured to the dark, damp storage area of her attic, but she meant the bar in general.
“That settles it.” August nodded. “We keep looking. We need the amulet beyond anything else, if only for peace of mind.”
Knowing he was right, Maya only grumbled slightly before she moved another box out of the way. At first, she’d assumed they would have to help her, but she felt that strange energy flowing through her again, like a wave of electricity coursing through her veins and lighting her up from the inside out. It was with their borrowed shifter strength that she effortlessly picked up heavy boxes and sorted through things she’d never seen before.
“Maya, come here for a second.” A hesitant tone colored Asher’s voice, and Maya made her way to him, crossing around and over boxes and piles of her parents’ former life.
Mostly they’d found old clothes, stored from when Uncle Malak moved in after her parents died. Some baby furniture was in one corner, broken down and stuffed up there to collect dust. Maybe they had hoped Maya would use the same items for her own children some day.
A pang splintered her heart, and she rubbed her chest as she approached Asher.
“Whatcha got, kitty cat?”
“Seriously? Kitty cat?”
Maya grinned down at him where he sat on the floor. “Dead serious.”
With an eye roll, he patted the spot beside him, and she sat, waiting for him to reveal whatever it was he discovered.
Slowly, he pulled a box closer and motioned for her to look inside. Her breath caught as she spied the stacks of photo albums and loose pictures.
“Oh my god,” Maya breathed, reaching inside and grabbing a handful of the old pictures.
Some of them were old—the written dates on the back tracking all the way to her parents’ birth years. Others were newer, random snapshots of her life, starting from the day she was born until just after her graduation. They stopped after that, and Maya tried to push away the reason why.
Flipping through the photos carefully, she nudged Asher in the side to witness her as a baby in a fluffy white dress.
“You were so cute,” Asher teased.
“Were? She still is cute.” August patted her head as he approached them from behind. Gesturing to the spot beside her, she motioned for him to sit and join.
He obliged and pulled the photo out of her hands to look at her tiny, grumpy face as she cried in her pretty white dress. “Not too happy here, hmm?”
“I guess not.” Maya winced at the thought of pitching a fit for her parents. Sifting through the other photos, her thumb traced the face of a beautiful, slim brunette smiling as the sun beamed down on her, joy etched in the very essence of the photo itself. “I don’t remember much about them.” The sadness in her tone was as palpable as the happiness in the image.
August’s warm hand traced a comforting pattern on her back as she slid the photo to the back of the stack to reveal the next one. “You were so young. I’m sorry, Maya.”
Her emotions swelled to a breaking point as she flipped and saw the vaguely familiar faces of her family. Her only family.
Her blonde strands fell from behind her ears to cover her face, but she didn’t tuck them back, not as the tears welled and threatened to spill over. Biting her bottom lip as it began to quiver, she breathed deeply through her nose as her sinuses burned with the pressure of holding back her tears. She remembered so little of them, only having flashes of memories.
A single chilly afternoon, eating ice cream with her dad, even though her nose turned red and her fingers hurt. Shopping with her mom and hurrying home to put the new clothes away, hiding the receipt from Dad. She even remembered a Valentine’s Day. Her parents and Uncle Malak had sent her a valentine to school—a stuffed animal with a pink balloon attached. A cat, of course, because their love was as old as the Egyptian bloodline they’d hailed from. That’s what the card had said, she recalled.
Maya could have smacked herself in that moment. There had been little hints, key words, but she wondered why they had never just told her directly, or even left her a clue. At least a more solid clue that she could grasp in her hands rather than bat around like an idea in her head.
Flipping through more photos, she found one of Uncle Malak, his handsome, tanned face staring back at her proudly, with his arm draped over her shoulder. Clad in a black and gold graduation gown, she beamed up at him, holding a bouquet of flowers he had given her as a congratulations. She shuffled to the next picture and what she found broke her heart. It was the same picture as before, but slightly shifted. Uncle Malak still had his arm around her, but a fierce expression of disdain shaded his features as they both stared at a figure that had shouldered his way into the photo—Alex. Maya’s innocent face, framed by tacky, layered bangs, gazed at him as if he held the world in his hands.
Bile rose at her so obvious young love for the one person that deserved it least.
Suddenly, she wanted to hold the stuffed cat her parents and Uncle Malak had gotten her. Jerking her head up, she glanced from box to box, all the ones they had gone through and deemed unhelpful.
“When you guys went through the boxes, did you find a stuffed cat, maybe a handwritten card?” Eyes darting around the room, Maya stood and tried to decide which box to start with. She didn’t know what had come over her so suddenly, but she wanted to hold that cat in her arms, she wanted to see their handwriting. It didn’t matter that she had their names tattooed in their own scrawl on her arm, she wanted to see the real thing.
Instead, August pulled her to him, hugging her tight and palming the back of her head. “Maya, just breathe, it’s okay.”
It wasn’t until that moment she realized tears streamed down her face, her sorrow tugging at her chest in gasping breaths. It had been a long time since she had cried for them, for their loss, for her loss. Her mistakes—the last of her family and how she’d betrayed him. A sob ripped from her throat, and she tried to rein in the emotions spinning wildly out of her control, but it was no use.
“Where did you go, Maya?” August asked, hesitancy in his voice, the question pouring from him in a gentle plea, as if it had been weighing on his mind for a while. In that moment, August very well could have been inquiring about her mental state, but with her mind so shocked by that image, Alex was the one that came to mind and how she’d moved out to live with him on a whim. Something she regretted even in that instant.
“I left with him.” She squeezed her arms tighter around August, and Asher came up behind her to tuck his head into her shoulder, their warmth cocooning her. “Uncle Malak dropped everything to take care of me. For all intents and purposes, he became my dad too. And I just left, as if everything he’d done for me didn’t matter. I even left you guys behind. I’m so sorry.”
She might have spoken the words into August’s chest, but she prayed they carried to Uncle Malak, wherever he was. Unintelligible words fell from her lips, but she at least knew what needed to be said.
“He taught me everything. Once my parents died, he picked up the bar, adjusted his life to make the changes to mine as seamless as possible, almost as if nothing had happened. He trained me to fight, to take
care of myself, because at the time it had just been a simple robbery, and he never wanted me to feel helpless again.” She laughed at the irony. If only she had known.
Arms tightening around her, they both let her cry and apologize, offering sweet notions and comforting words as she let her regret manifest into an emotional outburst.
Many tears later, she opened her eyes and sniffed the last of the episode back, finding herself on the floor surrounded by not only two, but all three of her men. At some point, they’d laid out a blanket, and now she lay prone on August’s chest as Amir and Asher caressed her arms and back from each side.
Breathing a heavy sigh, she basked in the silence for a moment, before opening her mouth—
“Don’t you say it.”
Her mouth snapped shut, and she turned her head to Amir with a questioning glance in his direction.
“Don’t apologize for that. You not only needed it, but you need to forgive yourself.”
A simple nod was all she could offer them, her strength fading quickly as if it was sucked from her bones. The silence pressed in on her, becoming too much, and so she shared the vision she’d had the night before, changing the subject and taking her mind off the painful memories. They soaked up the fresh information, tucking it away for future use.
But they didn’t let the distraction last long, as she should have known. Maya had been the one to open that particular can of worms, so she wasn’t all too surprised when they asked her about her past.
“What exactly happened to you during those years you were gone?” Asher questioned cautiously.
Innocent question or not, Maya still flinched when she remembered those years. The Alex years. “I don’t know if we should go into that.” Avoiding their gazes, she looked around the room.
“It’s in the past, I know, but I feel like wherever you went—whatever you did, it made you who you are now, and that’s significant to me. To us.” August spoke the sweet words quietly beneath her, his chest rumbling with the words. Asher and Amir were on either side, stroking her skin and playing with her hair.
A heavy sigh left her. “It’s not pretty.”
Amir’s eyebrows drew low. “It never is.”
Maya gave in, spilling the whole, ugly, terrible truth.
“When I was eighteen, I met this guy.” She grimaced. “That’s how it always goes, right? Anyways... I was obsessed with him. Alex. I thought he was the best thing to ever happen to me. We had so much in common that we clicked right away, and the connection was so... intense, I thought that surely it was love. That he was the one, and I was so lucky to have found him.” Maya waved her hand in the air as if clearing a chalkboard to make room for more history, and she noticed the guys were intent on her story, thankfully, and hints of judgment appeared to be far from their mind. “He was exciting. I feel stupid now, after everything we did together, everything I did to impress him. Hindsight, you know?” Maya laughed at the irony. “Before you ask, no, I never saw him coming, or going. He was a surprise, which is maybe why I thought it was so real. Because I couldn’t see a damned thing about him when I wove.” More hand waving, and she took a deep breath before continuing. “To please him, I did pretty much anything he wanted because I wanted to be with him constantly. Couldn’t get enough. If it was midnight and he wanted to see me? Done. I would sneak out, he’d come get me, and we’d abscond to some lame local haunt. I thought I was so cool, I had the coolest guy on my arm, at least in my eyes. The rose-colored glasses I adopted hid everything else from me. So much so, that after I graduated and turned nineteen, I moved out. Against Malak’s wishes and despite his desperate pleas, I still left him.” Barely able to meet their gazes, Maya eyes trailed elsewhere, bouncing between boxes and shadows in the attic. She only caught glimpses of the pain on their faces, and she remembered that they’d been the ones to see him through the end.
That was the part that killed Maya the most, and barbed wire seemed to constrict her throat as she continued her tale, drawing circles on August’s chest for comfort. “What I didn’t know was that Malak had cancer. He’d been diagnosed and he knew I was making a mistake. But I just moved out and left him there alone. For a guy. A fucking guy. Malak begged me not to leave, but at the time, I thought it was just because he didn’t agree with my choice. Instead, he just didn’t want to—” Maya cleared her throat as a wave of sorrow welled up. “He just didn’t want to die alone.”
A tear escaped, and soon, her entire story flowed out alongside the sobs. How almost immediately, she regretted the decision, but was too stubborn to go crawling back. When Alex went too hard on the drinking, she was there for him to knock around if she mouthed off. Maya skipped over the parts where he’d withheld money until she worked for it, in order to buy them groceries because he hadn’t allowed her to have a job.
His ‘rock star’ career had ended fast, because he wasn’t nearly as suave as she first thought.
When Malak passed, out of the blue, after she turned twenty-one, Alex had even tried to keep her from attending the funeral. That was the day she’d said enough was enough. She’d made use of his newest addiction, sleeping pills, and crushed up a few in his morning beer. He’d been out like a light, and she had packed amid his sloppy snores and disappeared.
Of course, he knew where to find her and had done just that. Weeks later, he’d hunted her down in her newly owned bar and made a scene. Maya had stood up for herself, bringing that bastard’s head down on her knee, ruining his once flawless face. By that point, she’d seen everything she hadn’t before. His nose was huge, his hair was kept long to hide the receding hairline, and his saggy skinny jeans were worn to hide the fact that he had no ass.
Maya had kicked him out of the bar with a parting curse and filed for a restraining order against him. Since she lived above the bar, he was ordered not to come within a thousand feet of her residence or place of work. With all the images of bruises, hospital bills, and paperwork, the courts had easily agreed that she needed some form of protection.
Oh, Maya could protect herself, but now she didn’t have to, because as much as Alex valued his control over her body, her emotions, and even her state of mind, he valued his freedom to piss off more.
“Thank fuck for that. Now, here I am. Still living above the bar.” Still shut off from anything even hinting at intimacy, at least until these guys.
“And kicking ass,” Asher said.
August was solemn, with a hand stroking her arm. “We wondered why you were gone for so long. We attempted to follow you, but we couldn’t quite sneak into your new apartment complex. No pets.” With a teasing smile, he pinched her arm.
Amir tried to comfort her. “Malak wasn’t totally alone. We stayed with him after you left,” Amir stated. “He was understandably upset, but like any man, he bottled it up.”
The confirmed information brought fresh tears to Maya’s eyes, and she gripped their hands in thanks.
The burden of letting Uncle Malak down still weighed heavy on her heart, and she wished with all her might that she could turn back time and not make the same mistakes.
Maya thought of the amulet. Technically, assuming they could find it, she could. But every movie, novel, comic book, and basically any plot that included turning back time never ended well for the main characters. She was definitely the type to accidentally fuck up the future. They’d end up with a game show host for a president or something like that.
Chuckling at herself, she took another deep breath and glanced at the guys surrounding her. In their eyes, she could see the empathy and understanding. Knowing they didn’t pity her went a long way to proving that maybe everything would turn out okay.
“That might have been my only relationship, but I learned enough from it to make me a better person.”
“Maya, you’ve always been a good person. You just got a little twisted up. The wrong people will do that to you,” Amir soothed, his tone truthful.
His words warmed her heart, and she sent him a watery smil
e before chuckling. Wiping the tears away, she motioned to them. “Enough about my sob story. Tell me who you were before you were cats.”
A silence that suddenly rang as awkward filled the room, and Maya paused, waiting for one of them to fill it. Instead, it stretched on, until she turned to the left and focused on Asher. A shameful expression came over the man, the one she truly knew the least about. Their conversation from the library played through her head—and Maya decided she really didn’t need to know. Not now.
“You don’t have to tell me. It’s okay. I know you guys all grew up together. And I know you now. That’s enough for me, if it’s too hard.”
Asher grimaced. “After how you just opened up to us... But I have to warn you, you won’t like who I was. Hell, I don’t like who I was. But like you said…”
“Hindsight,” Maya finished the sentence for him with a soft smile. Leaning in, she kissed him chastely on the cheek, before rolling over and laying her head on his shoulder. “We all make mistakes, Asher.” August curled up to her back, and she sighed happily.
He nodded, before seeming to gather his courage and letting out a slow breath. “After Dad left, Mom went down a... dark road. We downsized, obviously, to a tiny apartment, and to keep making the payments she...” Clearing his throat, he continued hoarsely, “She... sought other avenues of work. I was only fifteen at the time, and I was so angry at everything, everyone…” A glance was sent to his brothers, who both lay behind Maya. She held off any judgment, it wasn’t her place anyway. “It was an impressionable age. I had known all along what was going on, and I don’t know, I guess it just kind of... messed with me. Instead of looking at that as an example of what not to do, I followed it. To deal with everything going on, I slept around. Partied a lot. I almost never came home—” His voice broke, and Maya rubbed a slow pattern into his chest with her fingertip. “Amir stepped up and made sure August was taken care of.” Asher looked down at her, and she peered up to see his ice-blue eyes covered in a sheen of tears as he stared at the ceiling. “It’s why he’s so smart, you know? Amir made sure he went to school, ate, and did his homework. I just beat up his bullies when they gave him hell.”