You Are My Sunshine

Chapter Fourteen

Sam's POV

A week after Kinley was kidnapped and then found, I decided to use some free time to go through the rest of Kinley's file. I'd felt the driving need to do so since the day we brought her home from the Cullens', but only a week later did I get the time. The seven days in between had been hectic.

After an imprint goes through an ordeal such as Kinley's, the entire pack gets protective. Possessive. Everyone wanted Kinley time, and dividing that up in a way so as to not upset the little girl was an easy task. Making sure everyone abided by their given allowances, however, had been an exhausting feat.

Embry had been the worst. Which was expected, but it was also annoying. He threatened to drop out of school. He wanted to move in. He practically begged to homeschool Kinley.

While that last was tempting and Emily actually considered it, I couldn't let any of that happen. We needed to get back to as normal of a life as we could, just with a little extra caution added along the way. Otherwise Kinley would never be able to heal.

So I made patrols tighter. And we made sure we were always early to pick Kinley up from school. We told her that if anyone ever tried to take her like that again, that she should scream. She should kick and fight and make such a ruckus that someone would notice and come help.

Kinley had nodded when we told her, but she still hadn't spoken a word.

Now that we knew Kinley talked to Edward through her mind, I'd been hoping she'd speak up aloud to us. But other than a happy giggle when Emily had procured a huge tray of cookies in front of her when we brought her back last week—apparently my imprint had spent her time stress-baking, something that was much appreciated by us all—Kinley hadn't released a peep.

It worried me. I knew only a week had passed, but she seemed fine. It was the oddest thing. She didn't get nervous about going back to school. She didn't shy away from any of us. She even slept through the night. So if she was showing no signs of distress, why did she continue to hold her silence?

I'd asked Emily about it the night before and she hadn't had an answer. Not for why Kinley seemed even better now, after being taken, than she'd been before, and not for why Kinley didn't speak. "We just have to be patient," Em had said. "Patience and love are what she needs now."

I agreed, but I also didn't like sitting back and doing nothing. So there I was, in front of the computer screen going through the rest of Kinley's file. I knew this probably wouldn't help, but I wanted to read it anyway. I needed to read it, for some reason.

Page by page, document by document, I learned about my little sister and her situation. A lot of it I either knew or had figured out myself. Some of it was more relevant to her mother, which meant I didn't care.

But then I got to an add-on to Kinley's mother's will and froze.

Dear Samuel Uley, the page read.

It was a letter. To me.

Holy shit.

I started to rise from my seat—why, I wasn't sure. Maybe to tell Emily. Or to pace. Instead of either of those things, though, I sat back down. Stared at those words.

Dear Samuel Uley.

Kinley's mother, who had killed herself right in front of her own daughter, had written a letter to me and added it to her will. Why hadn't anyone let me know about this before? If I hadn't gotten a wild hair to go through the rest of this stuff the caseworker sent over, I may never have seen this.

Shit, shit, shit.

Yeah, I was such an almighty alpha right now.

A deep breath in. A deep breath out.