Saving Isadore [MxM] (An Alpha's Fight Book 1)

Epilogue Part 1

ISADORE • POV

... five years later...

Being free and able to walk around outside without the confines of a fenced courtyard was a gift I would never take for granted again.

I stared up at the bright blue sky and the fluffy, white clouds drifting lazily above my head. I inhaled deeply and beneath the bitter scent of exhaust drifting with the breeze from the nearby motorway, the comforting, familiar smells of the surrounding greenery and the salty moisture in the air, made my lungs expand with a settling comfort.

The flimsy plastic bag hanging loosely from my fingertips rustled in the wind, grazing against my thigh. The see-through, thin bag held the entirety of my life over five years inside the prison. My notebooks, filled with poems, spontaneous writings and diary style notes. Letters I'd received from Aaron, Maverick and Dad. Pictures they'd sent me from the outside as their lives had progressed while mine lay dormant in what felt like a frozen moment in time.

There were more mundane things like paperwork and clothes, but overall, my plastic bag held everything tangible I had valued dearly for the last five years, which was somehow both pitifully sombre and quite metaphorical according to my literature fan-boy mind. I was amazed to realise that there were so few things in life that held the utmost value and meaning to me and they could all fit inside one worn plastic bag.

My footsteps were light, hesitant, as I walked away from the gate I'd left, the prison guards and formidable building at my back. It felt... foreign to walk out of this place, almost as though I was navigating new lands. Familiar, but changed overtime and therefore becoming a pathway I had to learn all over again. But I focused on putting one foot in front of the other, the sounds of the world, previously blocked out inside the four walls of my cell, echoing pleasantly all around me.

The chirping of birds in trees. Leaves rustling with the wind. The hum and honk of vehicles whizzing up and down on the nearby motorway. They began to blur and so did my vision, filling with tears I hadn't anticipated coming so freely. But they welled and dripped down my face. I didn't know if they were happy tears, sad tears, terrified tears or just tears of relief and joy to be let out after five, tough years of being locked away from the outside world. But I let them fall, enjoying the breeze cooling the wet trails on my face.

Things were changing, they had changed while I was in prison and I knew that I was going to have to adapt to all these uncertain changes and it was going to be challenging. Part of me was deathly afraid of this new period in my life and part of me was more than ready to become acclimated with my family again.

They were conflicting feelings - feelings that had my heart racing and my palms sweating.

Though my thoughts were interrupted when I heard the jarring squeal of tires belonging to a fast moving vehicle and I was quickly sucked back into the present where I was standing on the pavement in front of the prison's designated car park. There weren't many cars parked on the vast concrete slab, which was probably a good thing, because the car drifting into the car park like it was being controlled by a video game player, probably would've crashed into at least one of them.

The passenger side door swung open while the car was still moving and a body jumped out while the driver slammed on the breaks, swearing and cursing loudly. The person behind the wheel yelled out an exasperated "FUCKING HELL AARON!" just as the body that tucked and rolled across the ground came sprinting directly at me.

I didn't have time to blink, didn't have time to breathe, didn't even have time to brace myself before I was body slammed so hard, I saw stars as I fell back a few feet, hitting the thankfully soft patch of grass behind me with a dull thud. But the pain was neither here nor there, especially when my brain finally caught up and realised that I was currently holding my omega in my arms for the first time in five long, touch-starved years of missing him.