Chapter Twenty-One

Rafe

T he second that we step into the gym, we find her, and we just stand there and watch her. None of us are pretending that we aren’t, we are being blatantly obvious in the fact that we are watching her and only her. Jensen and Riot have already proven that they are willing to just watch her and don’t give a shit who knows about it.

We have already sent the message, and our guys have been spreading the word that she is off limits. No one should be surprised that we are here, except, we are still getting stared at, probably because we are actually in a gym lesson for the first time this year. None of us are fans of gym, it seems like a pointless class to all of us, so we don’t bother attending.

The teacher gives us a few cursory looks but doesn’t bother to tell us to join in or get out or anything really. Hell, we aren’t even in our gym kit; I don’t think that we own them, actually. At least I am sure that I don’t have one. Well, I might have one from seventh grade, but there is no way that would fit now; it would look comical.

And then I notice her leg.

What the fuck.

The scar on her leg is big, it is huge and must have been really fucking painful when it happened, and I find myself wondering how it happened; it looks too big to have happened in a fall, but I could be wrong.

I am suddenly very thoroughly distracted from her scar as she runs her hand down her silky thigh, and I find my eyes following that instead. She brings her hand all the way up her leg. She has the attention of every male and some of the females too on her, and I want to snap and growl at them all to make them look away.

It's the first time in a very, very long time that I actually want to use my voice. I haven’t used it, not even when I have been by myself. I do use my vocal cords to laugh, grunt, growl, I even hum. So, it’s not like they haven’t been used for all of those years; they have. I just haven’t uttered a word.

I have no idea if I still stutter; hell, I have no idea if my voice will actually still work despite the fact that I still use my vocal cords.

But right now, with everyone watching her and thinking lusty thoughts about her, I want to use it.

I want to threaten them all, and I glance at the guys to see that I’m not the only one who is aware of how everyone else seems to be watching her. Although, she seems to be completely oblivious, her attention only on us.

For some reason, knowing that she is only focused on us settles my growing fury.

They are all looking at her, but she’s only looking at us. I kind of like that. Probably more than I should.

She makes sure that she has all of our attention, which, of course, she has; where else would we be looking right now?

Once she is certain that our eyes are on her and her hand, she sticks her middle finger up at us and gives us a deadly looking glare.

It is such an Ever thing to do.

I smile, her smile, it’s the one that I always saved for her, because she made me feel like there wasn’t anything wrong with me, when I couldn’t get through a sentence without stuttering and I kept getting frustrated. She was patient, and always calm. She didn’t rush me or push me; she just waited and told me it was okay; she made me feel like I was okay, and I loved her for that, I still do.

She was always so proud of me when I managed to get the sentence out, and she used to ask me to read to her. I loved reading, and it is something that I still love. My speech therapist said that reading out loud was something that could help me and my stutter.

I hated it.

It was turning something that I loved into something that I hated and Ever could see that, so she made it into a game. She turned it into something that was special for us, something that me and her shared, and when she left, I didn’t want to try anymore it hurt.

It really hurt. So I stopped trying, and I refused to read out loud any more and then I stopped talking out loud too.

I fucking missed Ever.

I was devastated; we all were when she left, and that was the way that I chose to deal with it. It wasn’t healthy, and I know that I was told that by multiple therapists, but it was easy for me to stop talking. The guys had already learned a lot from Ever, and because we were all hurting, they just accepted that this was the new me and then threw themselves into learning American sign language so that they could communicate with me.

I fucking love them for that.

I don’t know why but my smile seems to trigger something in her expression, I really fucking hope that something is recognition.

“That was really fucking hot.” Jensen comments.

“She recognizes us,” Riot says, as his gaze switches between Ever and me.

Pride fills me.

She thought she was proving a point when she ran her hand up her leg, and I am willing to bet that she thought we were staring because we were judging her. She hadn’t recognized us at that point, or she would have known that we would never judge her on her appearance.

In reality it was quite the opposite, we were in shock, and that was the least of the emotions that I felt.

She has a scar on her leg that is huge. All of us are more than acquainted with scars; all of us have one somewhere from our various exploits. It is because of those exploits that we are also all aware of what knife scars look like, and there is no doubt in my mind that the scar on her leg was inflicted by a knife. I really hope I am wrong.

It is highly unlikely that she inflicted a wound as jagged and obvious as that, and that means that someone did that to her.

Rage, unfiltered and almost uncontrollable, fills me as that thought and what it means floods my mind.

Someone deliberately took a knife to Ever.

My Ever.

Our Ever.

Someone hurt her, and they did it with intent. There is no question about that.

I am going to kill them. I’m going to get her to tell me the name of the person who did this to her, and then I am going to use the contacts that we have gathered over the years to find them, and then I’m going to kill them, making sure that I give them the exact same wound that she has.

I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of pain that she was in when that was made, and since my eyes are now back on it, I realize something else, and I really hope I’m wrong.

I nudge Cash next to me to get his attention so that I can ask him the question that I really hope he knows the answer to. “Does her scar look like it was stitched?”

Cash’s eyes narrow as he realizes why I am asking and then he looks back at Ever and the scar on her leg. He squints like he is trying to see it better.

While he studies her leg in order to answer my question, I look at her and she is frozen to the spot, staring at all of us, her eyes playing over each one of us, and I can practically see the memories playing behind her eyes.

I really hope that she is remembering us right now.

“No,” Cash says, the anger making his voice harsher than it usually is. I glance over at him, and his face is blank, “That wound was not stitched.”

I growl, I didn’t think it had been, but I was really hoping that I was wrong. Ever has been through even more than we had thought she had, and I fucking hate it. I want to protect her; I don’t want any harm to come to her. But I can’t protect her from her past, and I find myself hating her father for taking her away from where she was safe and exposing her to something so dangerous.

If he hadn’t taken her away, then she would have stayed here and stayed safe. We would have made sure of it.