Chapter 8
A va was out like a light before Bryce left to attend the conference. I didn’t blame her one bit between the lack of sleep and how much energy it took growing a person.
I napped as long as I could before I finally had to leave for my shift. Leaving Ava’s side was a unique misery I’d never experienced before, like I was swimming deeper underwater with every step away from her I took.
“Yeesh, you look rough,” Darius, one of my shift partners, told me when I rocked up to work.
I flipped him the bird and went straight to the coffee machine.
“You’re not sick, are you? You should’ve called in.”
“Not sick,” I replied, adding a liberal helping of milk to my coffee so I could chug it faster. “A lot of change overnight.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
With a sigh, I told him everything that had happened.
He listened, slack-jawed, before whistling low when I got to the end. “That is not what I expected. You definitely should’ve called out if you have a new omega.”
“I didn’t think it would feel this bad to come in.” A low-grade headache, and nausea just light enough that I could mostly ignore but it sat heavy in my body. “I didn’t want to make covering the shift difficult.”
“Family first.” Darius patted my shoulder. “The world is not going to implode because you’re not here for a couple shifts.”
“You don’t know that.”
Darius laughed. “At least let everyone know in case you need to bounce. They’re gonna have to figure things out fast if you’re going on parental leave soon.”
“I need to make a list of all the changes. It was so much so fast I feel like I’m forgetting important things.”
“Couldn’t hurt. I guess you guys will have to move out of that apartment too?”
“If I don’t have to relocate to New York.”
“Fingers crossed your omega hates it when she goes so we get to keep you.”
“I don’t know how to manage,” I confessed. “I’m so used to planning everything.”
“You are exceptionally anal-retentive,” Darius said with a grin. “You can plan all you want, but life is going to do whatever it wants. Much like children. Good luck with that.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“You’ll be fine,” he assured me. “You’ll learn to get flexible really fast. Parenthood is like being a shark: sink or swim.”
Before I had even finished updating the team we were rushed off to our first call—a car accident with relatively minor injuries. While we were waiting at the hospital for our patient to be admitted, my phone rang, the number for Bryce’s personal phone sliding across the screen.
Ava.
Darius gave me a knowing look. “Go. We’ve got this.”
I stepped away to answer it, my hello met with sobbing. “Sweetness, what’s wrong?”
“I can’t get in.”
“In where? Where are you?”
“The hotel.” She sniffled, a hiccup following.
“Did you get locked out of the room? Did you call Bryce?”
“He didn’t answer. I was trying to get my stuff back.”
Shit.
“That’s not safe. I’m on my way. Keep trying to get a hold of Bryce.”
“Okay,” she whimpered.
I ducked in briefly to update my team, but Darius was already waving me off before I could open my mouth.
“I said go. Family first.”
I bolted, hopping into one of the many cabs hovering outside the hospital. I was only ten minutes away, but I probably dialed Bryce at least that many times on the way. He didn’t answer a single one.
I called Ava on his phone as I was getting out of the cab, letting her direct me to where she was. I found her standing in the hallway around the corner from the room she had been sharing with Andrew, and pulled her straight into my arms, my bonding sickness symptoms disappearing instantly.
“Sweetness, you were supposed to stay in the hotel room. Why didn’t you wait for Bryce?”
Ava buried her face against my chest. “I know Andrew’s schedule. I thought I could sneak in and get everything while he was busy, but my card didn’t work.”
“All right. Let’s go down to the front desk and see if we can get that sorted.”
Bryce nearly bowled us both over when he burst off the elevator. “Shit, sorry.” He careened to the side, catching himself on the wall. “What happened? What’s going on? What’s wrong?”
Ava winced at the fresh burst of anxiety. I got only a whisper of it through the bond from Bryce, but that was bad enough. I explained quickly, and he looked instantly relieved.
“Okay, for the future, please text too and tell me what’s going on. I have way too much anxiety and thought I was gonna have a heart attack when I saw those missed calls.”
Ava’s bottom lip wobbled and she extracted herself from my arms, sinking against him. “I’m sorry. I panicked.”
“That makes two of us,” I said with a relieved laugh. “It’ll probably take us a little while to figure out communication.”
“I didn’t realize how bad my headache was being away from you.” Bryce visibly relaxed the longer he held her. “Let’s go get your stuff.”
Luckily, the staff member who had checked Ava and Andrew in remembered her because her name was not on the room. Any resistance they’d had to getting her a fresh card melted away when she burst into tears and told them why she needed to get her stuff out.
“Hey, Bryce, do you think you could find Andrew and stall him?” I asked. “Or at least keep an eye on him to make sure he’s not going to surprise us?”
“I can do that.”
“Good. I’ll message you once we’re done.”
We parted ways, Bryce back to the convention, Ava and I up to Andrew’s room.
“Sweetness, this can’t happen again.”
Her eyes filled with fresh tears.
“I’m not mad, I promise. I will drop anything at any point in time whenever you need me. I just don’t want you to put yourself in an unsafe situation. Andrew has already proven that he doesn’t care about your well-being, and we don’t know what he might do if he sees you again right now.”
“Oh,” she said quietly. “I didn’t think about that.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to. I’ve just seen far too many domestic violence calls. I know that leaving is the most dangerous time, and anyone who would do what he did shouldn’t be trusted with your safety.”
Ava swiped the card, the light flicking to green, her hand frozen on the handle. “Do you really think he would hurt me?”
“Hasn’t he already?”
“I…yeah, I guess he has.” She sighed and pushed open the door.
I went in first to make sure he hadn’t somehow slipped away and wasn’t already in there. Once I gave the all clear, Ava stepped inside. It looked like he hadn’t touched her things, at least. We popped open her suitcase and I grabbed all of her clothing that was hanging in the closet while she scooped up her toiletries and dumped them in the suitcase along with them. She changed out her heels for sneakers and tossed the heels in with everything else.
“Is that everything?”
She stood stock still, staring at the bedside table where a small velvet box sat. Ava moved toward it as if on autopilot, her fingers trembling when she picked it up. I was at her side as she lifted the lid, revealing a glitzy platinum band and rock of a diamond.
“He knows I wear gold,” she said quietly, lifting the ring from its resting place.
Engraved on the inside was the phrase Hope you’re happy now.
“What does that mean?” She turned to me.
I didn’t want to tell her that it looked like a shut-up ring to me. Instead, I asked, “Have you been asking to get engaged for a while?”
“I’ve been hinting. I thought he was going to propose when I graduated university, but he didn’t, and I thought again when I told him about the baby…If he was going to propose this weekend, why did he get so weird about it?”
“Some men give their partner a ring to make them stop asking when they’ll get married. He was probably intending to string you along for a while longer after giving that to you.”
Ava’s face pinched with fury and she threw the ring down on the bed. “I hate him.”
“Let’s go hate him back in Bryce’s room.”
“Wait.” She tugged a thin gold band with a floral pattern off her finger and set it down next to where the engagement ring had landed.
“Did he give you that?”
Ava nodded. “A promise ring. He gave it to me the first time he flew me out for a conference weekend. I don’t understand how he could hate me that much, or hate his wife and kids. Why not just leave?”
“I’m assuming it was that he wanted to have his cake and eat it too. Loving wife and kids at home, pretty girlfriend for when he traveled. You all deserve so much better than him.”
I hoisted up her suitcase and hustled her back down the hallway where she would be safe and secure, texting Bryce as soon as I locked the door.
“I’m going to see if I can get some time off work,” I told her. “A couple of weeks shouldn’t be an issue.”
“You don’t have to do that for me.”
“I’m doing it for me too. I wasn’t expecting a new bond to hit quite that hard.” I gathered her in close, breathing in her pecan praline scent. “This is exactly where I want to be. We have a lot of stuff to figure out and not a ton of time to do that before our baby makes its way into the world.”
Ava looked up at me, her hazel eyes impossibly wide. “Why are you being so sweet?”
“You’re my mate. I don’t take that lightly. I’m going to do whatever needs to be done to make sure that you’re safe and comfortable, and that we’re all ready to be partners and parents.”
My omega melted against me. “Thank you. Maybe fate knows what it’s talking about.”
“I would hope so. Want to cuddle?”
“Yes, please.”
I stripped down to my underwear, and Ava switched her dress for a nightgown, climbing in next to me and burrowing under the blankets.
“Hotels are not good at providing enough blankets.”
“We can pick you up some nesting supplies before we go back to the apartment,” I offered.
“How mad do you think Luke is going to be that we left?”
“I’m hoping that Micah will chill him out.”
“He’s good at that?”
“The best,” I promised. “Don’t worry about them, though. I’ll play mediator and everything will work out; it just might take some time.”
I curled around Ava, her purr rumbling. I might not know what to do with the blessing fate had dropped in my lap, but I knew for damn sure I wasn’t going to squander it.