Sapphire Bones

Loyalty

"By all means, Tyler, go. Go save your sister who doesn't want to be saved. Go find her and free her from the mind controlling council she's being held at!" I grunted, refusing to break eye contact with him. Tyler's refusal to leave began to threaten the safety of the people in the house and I wasn't about to stand for it. "She's gone, Tyler. Mia is gone, a lost cause at this point. Her humanity isn't salvageable, now get out of my house!" I practically yelled, my voice reverberating through the walls of the living room until it came and smacked me back across the face with a powerful hand. I drew back slightly away from Tyler and waited for his next move but he stood frozen as if he were contemplating my words. I wanted to point again. Throw my finger at the front door but I couldn't move any of my muscles. They strained to move but my brain froze up, firing in all directions.

"She's not lost," Tyler choked on his words. "I can still save her."

"She's damned, Ty." I used his nickname in hopes that would calm him down but the fire in his eyes didn't waver, only strengthened and illuminated. A burning inferno of reds and yellows atop the normal brown iris'. "She made her choice, and you have to make yours," I said. "If you go there on some ridiculous resume mission you'll end up dead. Your pack will be without a leader and your sister will watch her brother die. Do you want that?"

He thought for a moment, eyes wide and quivering slightly. All the anger and disillusioned thoughts bubbled to the surface and expelled through his nose with one heavy breath of hot air audible throughout the room. At that single breath, his shoulders fell from their stiff places, and he sunk back onto the couch. He stared down at the cup on the table with his lip marks on it, and went to grab it but my voice stopped him.

"I think you should leave," I said. My form towered over his, a shadow cast over his face as he looked up at me from below. He gulped and nodded. Tyler drew his hand back toward him and stood up to leave. Any ill thought he had before vanished from his voice as he held a hand out for me to shake. I took it willingly.

"Thank you for your hospitality," he said.

"Take care, Tyler," I responded with a stiff shake and let go so he could leave. "Be careful out there."

I said my parting goodbyes at the door and watched him as he crossed the terrace toward his parked car in the turnaround. He waved once while he entered the vehicle and drove off without another glance back at the pack house. The smoke from his exhaust puffed up in a dark cloud of soot and dust with stones from the driveway in his wake as he disappeared into the surrounding forest. I waited until the trees engulfed his car before I retreated into the pack house where Damien and the others waited. They hadn't moved from the living room.

"That was," Damien started but couldn't quite find the right words to finish his thought.

"Interesting," Dean said with a nod toward my brother. Damien thanked him with a return gesture and took a seat in the same spot Tyler inhabited only minutes' prior. His hair didn't glisten in the lights anymore, and the water droplets had long since dried off his neck and jaw, but parts of his shirt were still speckled in excess shower water.

"He's going to get himself killed," Jax noted and tossed himself into the arm chair across from Damien. He threw his legs up onto the side of the chair and pulled his phone out just as it let out a loud ding into the air. Just as the phone lit up his eyes did the same. A message from his son, no doubt. He had hoped to bring Ryder back with him but after a long day in court with the grandparents and himself, he settled on partial custody twice a month. It wouldn't be long until he brought his son back for a week, but those seven days were never enough. They would slip by in a blink. Their time together was fleeting, and Jax knew it. At the end of each visit he would watch his son leave in the back of the grandparent's vehicle while it stormed down the driveway away from the house. They didn't agree with the pack way of life, and that alone was enough to keep Ryder away.