26. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“…Completely irresponsible of you to go into a public place while you are knowingly in heat.”
Enzo was going on an hour of scolding while the rest of us sat on the couch like a bunch of naughty schoolchildren.
The haze of the heat lifted after two days, though after the first one I spent most of my time across the hall in my own apartment with Wiz.
He reassured me up and down that he was all right with the events that had taken place, but everything still felt tender, as if we needed to wait on pins and needles to talk about it as a group.
And that time was now.
I sat between Wiz and Artie on the couch, trying not to squirm as Wiz played with my fingers and Artie’s hand slid along the line of my spine.
How was anyone supposed to get a scolding like this?
Enzo must have picked up on my distraction through the bond that I was still having trouble blocking and he frowned at us.
“Artem,” he said sharply, using Artie’s full name. “Stop feeling her up and focus.”
Artie’s hand jerked away from my back as if it had burned him. “Enzo, love, you know I didn’t mean to go into heat at the Complex.”
“And using shoddy, expired suppressants was supposed to accomplish that?” Enzo shot back, arms crossed over his chest.
There was a pause before Artie answered with less energy than before. ‘Well… yes.”
“I think—” Leith finally cut in and I watched from my peripheral as he sat forward on the couch. “That we should move on from what happened and to what our plan is going to be.”
I couldn’t look at him. Not full on at least. Embarrassment over losing complete control in front of him still filled me.
My first real memories coming out of the rut had been in the tiled shower of Artie’s bathroom while he gently washed my body under the warm water.
It wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before, and yet it felt more vulnerable than anything I’d ever shown him when we were together four years ago.
“Isn’t that obvious? She’ll move in here with us,” Enzo said as if it was a done deal.
I wasn’t necessarily opposed to it, but because he wasn’t even asking my opinion I felt my spine straighten obstinately. “I like my apartment. Besides, there isn’t much extra room for Wiz too.”
Even though I couldn’t feel Wiz’s emotions the same way I felt the rest, I knew he was happy with my words by the way he squeezed my fingers.
Enzo turned to Wiz. “And you want to be a part of this pack?”
“I already told you I do.”
“Do you like Artie? In a romantic way?”
There was a pause as Wiz glanced over at Artie, and Artie, feeling his gaze, turned to face him fully.
They may not have been bonded, but they both shook their heads at the same time. “No,” they said in unison.
“But I’m fine with him being around,” Artie reached across me. “Bros?”
Hearing that word come out in his proper British accent nearly made me laugh as the two shook hands.
“Bros,” Wiz agreed gravely and they grinned at each other.
Enzo, however, didn’t seem amused and I was about to make his mood turn even more sour. “I’m going to stay in my apartment until things settle… all of this happened so quickly that my head is still spinning with it.”
“Pack members should live in the same house. It’s traditional,” he pointed out, the tendon in his jaw tensing with irritation.
I didn’t give a fig about what was traditional and what wasn’t and I probably would have shot some snarky comment right back had it been any other day. But I knew Enzo was struggling even more than me with all of this.
“I’m just across the hall. If things go well, we’ll all move in together in say… six months?”
All of the men in the room groaned at that.
“Six months? Ciara that’s forever,” Artie whined, his displeasure at my words flowing down the fresh bond.
I really needed to get a handle on that. It was loud enough in my own head and now I could feel the emotions of three other people, all of them slamming into me at full force as I tried to maintain a neutral impression.
“Two months,” Enzo negotiated.
“Five,” I shot back.
“Three and you move in after the invitational.”
The Seattle Sports Complex was hosting an invitational for the Western half of the United States toward the middle of September before hockey pre-season began. Athletes from all of the ice sports disciplines would be flocking in to show off their skills in a faux competition.
It would also be where Artie and I skated together for the first time in front of a crowd, that is if we ever got our routine together.
Down the bond I could feel Artie’s hope and guilt over the bond that we’d made between us. Then, just behind that I felt Enzo’s irritation, and was that a hint of desperation?
It was hard to pick what emotions were mine from the tangled mess in my mind and a wash of pure panic came over me that I immediately shoved down.
The room suddenly felt too hot, like someone was holding my body to a bonfire. Shaking Wiz’s away I stood and cleared my throat, worried my voice would come out as a croak if I didn’t. “Three months is fine, now if you’ll excuse me.”
Whirling on my barefooted heel, I hurried for the front door. I needed to get out of there, to get away from all of the emotions I couldn’t be sure were my own or if I was being influenced by the feelings of the three men inside of the apartment.
“Ciara,” I heard Wiz call my name, but I was running headlong for my apartment and into my own bedroom that smelled comforting because it just had my scent and just the ghost of Wiz’s.
But being in another room didn’t help the waves of confusion and concern that were covering me like a suffocating blanket. I’d never been one to feel claustrophobic—but it turned out that having three consciousnesses besides your own crammed into your brain was all I needed to feel like tearing my own skin off.
Huffing, I buried my face in my pillow before curling up into a ball.
The door to my bedroom opened and someone came inside.
“Wiz, not right now,” I told him, my words muffled. There was a soft chuckle. “It’s not Wiz, mo ròs.”
Lifting my head, I found Leith leaning against the doorframe and one glance behind him told me that he’d come alone.
I hadn’t been alone with him since that day in the hallway when he’d been so close to kissing me… and then had apologized because he couldn’t.
We hadn’t been anything anymore then, but now we were. We were pack.
The word both sent a thrill of excitement and a sense of impending doom through me as I sat up and faced him fully.
On one hand, being in a pack was a good thing. I always had a permanent place with them now, thanks to the bond which I only vaguely remembered putting on Artie’s neck.
But on the other hand? I felt like I was setting myself up for a supreme level of heartbreak. There was no going back from a bonding mark—at least not in any way that was pleasant.
All of that stewed inside of me, mixing into a nauseating tornado of shit as I felt the emotions of my packmates slamming into me and I realized as I stared up at Leith that it was hard to breathe.
“I can’t—” I wheezed, the panic making everything turn bright and intensely detailed as I tried to suck in a lungful of air and failed.
I thought I was doing so well with everything, but the discussion about moving in had tipped me over the edge and all of the questions that I’d been putting off since I came out of my rut were now at the forefront of my mind.
Cool hands cupped my face, tilting it until I was looking right up into Leith’s green eyes as he knelt down on the bed in front of me. “You’re overwhelmed by the bond, Ciara.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I managed to rasp, finding just a hint of snark within myself amongst the storm.
Leith’s red gold beard twitched as he smiled down at me. “It was bad for me at first too and I only had two other people to deal with, so I’m going to tell you how to separate and block them.
“I want you to close your eyes and imagine each of us as colored threads,” he continued, his voice soft and melodious, almost hypnotizing. “Once you can see it in your mind, I want you to very slowly separate them into their own streams until there’s no mixing.”
With a sigh, I let my eyes drift shut, starting with the alpha in front of me.
Somehow he was the easiest to place. Leith was green, like a forest that has been standing untouched for a thousand years.
As if by magic, the tangled mass of emotions in my body changed, green bleeding through the threads until I was able to identify what was coming from him.
Worry, affection, anxiety, and hope. I mentally pulled each green string free from the center and set them off to the side until I’d picked them all out.
Then I moved on to Artie. With a small smile I realized that he was pink—the color of a fresh blush like the one he’d had during his heat. From him I could feel a lot of guilt, but also a satisfaction that mirrored my own.
At the end of the day I’d wanted to be his and he’d wanted to be mine. We’d both known the risks when I stepped into that shower.
I was glad not to find any sort of regret as I organized his end of the bond.
Finally, I reached the third person in my head, the one I knew the least about. Enzo wasn’t angry at me, I could understand that much, but he was angry in general.
Protective, loyal, and a bit disappointed in himself, Enzo’s threads turned a deep shade of blue, and I realized, accounted for the majority of the emotions that were pummeling into my psyche.
They were all knotted up, like he was refusing to let go of them.
Stubborn, my mind provided and I could feel my lips pull up into a wry smile.
Never did I think I would end up in a pack with Enzo Santoro. Kiss in the closet aside, we’d butted heads any chance we got and I had a feeling that wouldn’t change just because we were a part of the same pack now.
He liked to argue, and so did I which didn’t bode well for us.
“Enzo’s aren’t easy to pick apart,” I whispered as I tried in vain to untangle the ball at his end of the bond.
Leith laughed, his thumbs sliding up and down my cheeks. “That’s never going to change. Sometimes Enzo doesn’t even know what he’s feeling. You can leave that, are you done with the rest of us?”
I nodded. “What now?”
“Now, I want you to imagine building a mental wall, brick-by-brick, until those threads are blocked off for you.”
“What if I want to feel what you feel?”
“Then all it takes is removing a couple of bricks to let whatever you want in. You don’t have to be available to us all of the time, mo ròs, you are still your own person, bond or not.”
Once I was done building my mental wall, I flopped back with a sigh of relief. I was alone in my head again and all of the emotions in it were just mine.
“Can it be that easy?” I asked, finally opening my eyes to find his face directly in front of mine, our lips only an inch apart.
Leith’s green eyes darted down to my lips. “It’s all instinct. It shouldn’t be hard to control.”
“My instincts are always hard to control,” I confessed, thinking of the inner alpha that was constantly pushing me toward the pack and the handsome alpha that was far too patient with me. She was completely content and silent now, the bitch.
“Mine are too,” Leith said, and then his lips were on mine, devouring them with a hunger that took my breath away. It was the same electric feeling I’d gotten the first time we kissed so long ago, and a sigh slipped out of me as I wrapped my arms around his neck.
It was what I’d been waiting for ever since I ran into him outside of the club in Scotland earlier this year. The memory of our time together—time that I’d ruined by running away—had come back full force.
Each of the men kissed in different ways. Enzo’s kiss had been forceful, full of a burn of desire that had nearly fried me as he stole it in that closet.
Artie’s was soft, sweet, and a little bit unsure like he wasn’t sure what I would like, but wanted to kiss me anyway. The memory of it was still tinged with the haze of my rut.
Wiz’s kisses were full of the promise of forever. Like he was renewing a vow to me each time he dropped his face to mine. Each kiss was punctuated by the curl of a smile as he pulled me in for more.
But Leith? Leith kissed like he could see straight through me. Through every wall meant to keep others out, every anxiety, and every worry.
He’d been the first person to really chip all of that away—long before either of us had met the others.
It had terrified me at the time and caused me to use going back to Seattle to warn Brynn about Nash as an excuse. But when I’d woken up in his arms that morning, the deliriously happy feeling oozed out of me had made me think I was walking right into the same future my mam had with a smile on my face.
Leith was the complete opposite of my father in quite literally every way, but the fear had still been the same.
I didn’t know what good karma I put into the universe that put him back in my path, but I was sure glad for it as his tongue pried my lips apart in order to taste me.
Finally coming up for air, Leith rested his forehead against mine, his eyes intent on my face. “Was that okay?”
“It was more than okay,” I told him, my fingers tracing the lines of his jaw. “Thank you for letting me join your pack.”
“Thank you for not running away from me this time.” Leith leaned against the headboard of my bed, dragging me with him until I was cradled in his lap. “Can you promise me that you’ll stay and talk with us if things get hard?”
I thought about it, looking down at my hands. I wanted to say yes and leave it at that, but that wouldn’t be totally honest.
Whenever anyone in my family asked me why running was my knee-jerk reaction, I couldn’t quite explain it to them.
It felt as if I’d been running my entire life from my problems and breaking that habit wouldn’t be easy.
“I’ll try,” I finally said, resting my head over the place where his heartbeat was the loudest. “I can’t make the promise though.”
Leith’s sigh was tinged with disappointment, but he pressed a kiss to my temple anyway. “That’s all I can ask, I suppose.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes until I felt myself start to doze off.
“Will you go on a date with me?” he whispered, causing me to stir.
“Aren’t we already past dates at this point, Leith?” I asked with a yawn.
Leith shook his head. “No, I never got a date with you. One that’s out in public for the world to see.”
Guilt over that filled my chest as I sat up to look at him. Leith Dougall deserved to be shown off in public, not hidden the way I’d done in Scotland. “I think we can arrange that. Can I plan it though?”
He frowned. “Are you sure?”
I nodded with a slow grin. “Yep, it’s my turn to woo you, good sir, so prepare yourself to be courted by Ciara Callaghan, dating extraordinaire.”
Okay, that was a lie. My dating experience equated to the week and a half that Wiz and I had been dating, and while it may have felt like ages since then… I still didn’t have much to go off of.
“But you all have to meet my family first.”
Leith grimaced. “I’m sure they’ll be really pleased that you’re showing up with an entire pack in tow.”
“I’ll be sure to hide anything heavy that can be thrown,” I said cheerfully, snuggling back into his chest.
There was a pause. “You aren’t serious, are you? Ciara?”
I just smiled and pretended to fall asleep until I actually dropped off, comforted by the closeness of his scent and his warm body.
I was sure it would all work out, the dads couldn’t be that mad… right?