12. Rafe
Chapter twelve
I slam my head down on my desk, groaning into the wood.
"Mr. Stargazer," my Beta assistant says. She's cute, with waist-length braids and a slim figure, but since seeing Jordan a month ago, she may as well just be a voice in the wind. I don't notice anyone anymore now that I know what is out there for me.
If I could just fucking find her.
"Mr. Stargazer!" she says more impatiently. Right, I didn't answer her.
"Yes, Glinda?" I pull my face up to look her in the eye when I talk to her. Unlike some of my colleagues, I want to treat my admin like a person. She raises a pierced brow at me and crosses her arms over her chest, a folder dangling in her hand. With a heavy sigh, I heave myself off the desk and sit back in my chair.
"Cyrus is here to see you. Said he won't take no for an answer this time."
"I don't want to talk to him," I grumble, scrubbing my hand on my face. "Tell him I have a meeting."
"Nope, not doing your dirty work, bossman. Whatever you two are going through, you gotta fix it. I feel like I'm babysitting my divorced parents." She tosses the folder on the desk. "Here are the reports for the meeting you have in an hour."
Glinda may have an attitude problem but is seriously excellent at her job.
Almost as soon as she's gone, Cyrus comes barreling through the door, full of piss and vinegar. "Where are we at in finding her?"
"Same place we were at yesterday. There is no record of Jordan Cross living anywhere in Lunarcrest City." I've scoured all the public records I could find and even tried to find a library card in her name. It's been nothing but goose eggs.
My packmate throws himself into the chair across from my desk, his massive figure barely fitting in the chair. Ever since his injury a few years ago, he's been unable to get on the ice. It's made him more of an asshole than he ever was. Not finding Jordan has ramped it up to eleven.
"How is it we can't find our Omega?" he grumbles.
I rub my hands down my face with a sigh. "I think it may be time for us to admit that she doesn't want to be found."
Saying the words suck all of the oxygen out of the room, but I don't take them back. It's been swimming in my head for two weeks now. If she wanted to be found, I have to believe we would be with her by now.
"She doesn't have a choice," he growls. "She's ours. She can run all she wants, but we'll find her eventually."
"Fuck, dude, do you not hear how insane you sound? We rejected her. You can't go into this all Alphahole with the you're mine bullshit, or we will for real lose her." This is a fight Slime and Cyrus have had often since we all moved in together, but it's the first time I've called him out directly. "Look, I get it. Knowing our match is out there drives me crazy, too, but we can't charge in guns blazing, dude. We're going to have to earn her trust again."
"She'll scent us and immediately be in our arms and on our knots, dude."
"Oh, what the actual fuck?" I slam my chair back and jump to my feet. "You for real didn't just say that, did you? Like you actually said that shit out loud?"
He sneers at me. "What? It's what all Omegas do."
"Fuck you, dude. Get out." I point at the door and snarl my words at him. "I'm not going to even entertain finding her until you fix the fucked up way you're looking at this situation. This is a chance for us to right our wrongs, not make it worse." Scrubbing my hands on my face, I groan. "We broke her heart. There's no way we didn't destroy her. We don't know what kind of life she's built for herself. This situation is precarious, and you need to recognize that we've got serious groveling to do."
He digs his heels in, arrogantly rolling his eyes. "Why do we have to grovel? She's going to be thrilled. She's getting what she always wanted."
"Did you ever care about her?" I whisper.
He rears back as if I slapped him. "Of course, I cared! What kind of question is that?"
"You seem content to believe her to be some vapid stereotype of an Omega, forgetting that she was one the whole time we knew her, even if she hadn't presented. If all you care about is getting your knot squeezed, then I can't let you be around her." I walk around my desk, putting my hand between his broad shoulder blades and pushing him out the door.
"Jordan is supposed to be the rest of our lives, C. Continue to view her as something to be owned, and you won't get the chance to find out who she became after we tore her to pieces."
Dinner that night is tense. Simon barely speaks to either of us. I'm not sure how us living here together is supposed to fix our strained pack bond if we're not, you know, fixing our pack bond.
Not to mention the awkwardness that still lingers between Simon and me from how we left things.
After a tense meal featuring our glares as the main course, I call a pack meeting—a proper one.
You see, we can talk all the shit we want when we're together, but when someone calls a pack meeting, we have rules. It's been this way since we were sixteen. It was really young to find our pack, but I guess we got lucky.
The rules of a pack meeting are simple.
No interrupting.
We go round-robin style to bring up our grievances.
Personal attacks can be returned with a nut check.
Look, it's stupid, but we were sixteen. And you know what? It mostly worked over the years.
"Pack meeting? Why can't we just talk?" Cyrus says, flopping down on the stiff white couch with a tumbler of whiskey.
"Because I think this is going to be heated, and I want the rules instated," I tell him, leaning against the fireplace. "So from now on, we'll operate on our pack meeting rules. And Simon is going to start."
Simon rolls his shoulders from his position sprawled on the floor. The man never really sits still. He's constantly in motion, changing his position, standing up, changing seats. It's exhausting watching him. Without his leather jacket and his contacts out, he looks more like the boy we grew up with. Who he used to be before the incident.
Except for the tattoos. He's got a shit ton of those. His tank top hides only his torso, but his arms and shoulders are completely covered.
"I want to see Jordan as much as the both of you," he says, tilting his head back to stare at the ceiling. "I haven't stopped thinking about her. Not once. I never wanted to cut her out of our lives. Never once agreed with it." Cyrus makes a noise of protestation, but I glare at him until he closes his mouth and sits back.
"Anyways," Simon says, his voice turning vulnerable. "Despite what we want, despite how I or either of you two feels, not that I presume to know, we cannot just fly in demanding that she forgive us and be with us just because of our scents."
"Cyrus?" I gesture to the brute. "Your turn."
"I honestly don't understand why we need to tiptoe around her. All Jordan ever wanted was to be our Omega, and now she gets her wish. Why do we have to tiptoe around her feelings? Shouldn't she be happy?" He takes down his hair, letting the curls brush his shoulders. His entire vibe is arrogant today, and it's pissing me off.
When it's clear he won't talk anymore, I speak up. "We do not know what kind of life Jordan has made for herself. All we know is that I scent matched her, and she's an Omega. That's it. She could have a partner, a husband. She could have found a pack and didn't care if she was scent matched or not. There is a less than zero percent chance she waited for us because we lied to her and told her we had a match. By the way, we're going to have to come clean and tell her why we lied."
Simon raises his hand, and I cede the floor to him. "I think we need to tell her we lied before seeing her in person."
"Why?" Cyrus asks. "What's the point in that?"
The tattooed Alpha stretches his legs out, arching his back and accentuating the long, slender lines of his torso. "Well, for one, I don't doubt the hospital told her who was waiting for her and what we said. And you were very clear she was our Omega. So she's already thinking something screwy is going on. We don't need to add our scents into it."
I suck on my teeth, sinking to sit on the hearth. Cyrus looks to me for a response, and I shrug. "It's not a bad idea. If we tell her we lied all those years ago before she knows we're scent matched, it'll look more genuine. We can get her forgiveness and then meet in person."
"We'd have to be able to find her, though. Not like we have her number." Cyrus's voice is a defeated grumble. I want to say I think getting Jordan back will perk him up, but it's pretty unlikely at this point. I think this is the software, not a bug.
Simon flops down onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. He folds his arms behind his head as a makeshift pillow. "I'll do some more digging, see what I can come up with. I want to do this right, though. So if anyone finds her, we need to agree that we won't go off half-cocked and call her on our own."
Both of us swing our gazes to Cyrus, who rolls his eyes. I glare at him until he groans. "Fine, agree. We'll call her as a group. A video call, like old times."
I go to bed feeling a glimmer of hope. I hope apologizing in advance is the right call. Maybe I can even pretend I hadn't scented her yet. That's bound to go over better than knowing we only sought her out because I scented her.