39. CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“What do you mean you still won’t tell us where she is. Aurelia, our packmates have all but vanished and you know where.” I was trying very hard not to yell at Ciara’s sister as she sat behind her desk.
They all seemed to know exactly what was going on with her and Wiz and yet they wouldn’t tell any of us.
It had been three weeks since the accident and we still weren’t any closer to finding her than we had been when we came home to the empty apartment and a note from Ciara telling us she’d be back soon and that she was taking Wiz with her.
“I can’t tell you, Enzo,” Aurelia insisted, her blue eyes looking conflicted even as her words were firm.
“That’s bullshit!” Slamming my hand on the flat surface, I growled with frustration.
“Hey! Don’t you raise your voice at her,” Colt barked as he stepped through the open doorway of his office. “I get that you’re upset about Ciara and Wiz, but that doesn’t mean you can yell at a pregnant woman, much less my mate, Santoro.”
“I’m sorry,” I immediately apologized, guilt fisting in my chest as I stepped away from the desk.
Aurelia softened a bit. “What I was going to say before you interrupted me was that I can’t tell you where she is because I don’t even know exactly. She’s just as upset with me as she is with you.”
“Why though? None of you will tell us specifically what happened before the invitational and she’s our packmate.”
Exhaustion filled my body, weighing heavily on my shoulders right alongside the memory of the hurt on Ciara’s face when I’d said the words I wished more than anything I could take back.
I hadn’t meant them, but Ciara didn’t know that.
Maybe you really are a bad luck charm, the words echoed over and over in my mind and so did the way her brown eyes widened and her mouth opened with shock.
I thought I would have a chance to apologize, to grovel at her feet until she forgave me. But she’d run before I could get the chance and I’d spent the past three weeks trying to console my two heartbroken packmates.
Artie’s surgery had gone off without a hitch, but the omega rarely ever left his nest and rarely ever spoke. Misery oozed off of him in almost physical waves and it was hard to even get him to eat let alone leave the apartment.
On the other hand, Leith had thrown himself into his training and when he wasn’t at training he was curled up with Artie. Both of them were closed off from me and I found myself more alone than ever.
I’d done that. All of my fears about losing my pack were coming true before my very eyes and I didn’t know how to fucking fix it.
Running a hand through my hair and tugging on the ends, I realized that I must have looked completely insane to the people in the head office of the Complex.
Aurelia was looking at me with worry while Hideo and Colt looked at me with varying levels of pity.
“Enzo,” a familiar voice came from behind me and I turned to find Alexei Peterson standing in the doorway of the office. “Come with me, son, we need to talk.”
“Uncle Alexei…” Aurelia began reproachfully but the man just waved her off.
“He has a right to know what we do. Legally and emotionally,” Alexei said, jerking his head and motioning for me to follow him.
We walked in relative silence as we crossed the complex to where all of the coach’s offices were.
Once we were settled, him behind his desk and me in the chair in front of it, I was nearly exploding with the need to know where Ciara was.
“What is going on Alexei? Why are you all acting like this and where are Ciara and Wiz.”
Alexei scrubbed a tired hand over his face and leaned back in his desk chair. “Has Ciara ever told you about Brynn’s accident four years ago?”
I shrugged. “Just that it made her forget about who got her pregnant and that Nash surprised the hell out of her when he showed up claiming to be the father.”
Alexei’s lips tiled up into a wry smile and he nodded. “That’s the gist of it, yeah, but not what I want to talk about. The night before it happened, Ciara and Brynn went out to celebrate their medals and I made Ciara promise to look out for Brynn. The next morning when we got a call from the hospital that Brynn had been hit by a car I was so panicked and scared that I ended up lashing out at Ciara.”
All of this was starting to sound uncomfortably familiar and I shifted in my seat, afraid to meet the man’s eyes.
“I’ll never forget her face when I yelled at her. Ciara’s always had trouble hiding her hurt—I think it’s one of the reasons why she runs. If you can’t see her then you can’t know how much your words hurt. She came back and eventually forgave me, but I don’t know that she ever forgave herself for it all.”
He sighed gravely before continuing. “Three weeks ago Ciara received a phone call from a hospice center in Dublin. Her father is suffering from end stage liver failure and is dying—I thought she and Wiz would go and she could get some closure. But Wiz just emailed me a leave of absence request which tells me they aren’t planning on coming back anytime soon.”
With his words, everything seemed to click into place. The cagey way she was acting and the sheer mixture of emotions that had raged down the bond that day before she cut us off.
“Fuck.” The word left me in a growl as I put my face in my hands.
“Look, Enzo, I’m going to level with you,” Alexei said, sitting forward and our eyes met. He looked as exhausted as I felt as he spoke again. “I’m ridiculously pissed at you for telling my daughter that she’s bad luck. Anyone would be fucking lucky to have her in their lives and my family has been blessed by her presence for fifteen years. But she’s chosen you. All three of you. I really hate the idea of her being all the way over there without her pack around her to support her.”
“I don’t want that either.”
Alexei nodded as if my words helped him come to some kind of a decision before he slid a piece of paper across his desk to me. “Good. I wrote down where she and Wiz are staying in Dublin. I can’t leave because we’re in the middle of preseason, but you guys can.”
I stared down at the address in shock. “You’ve known exactly where she is the entire time? Who told you?”
Alexei snorted. “Wiz of course. You didn’t think I’d let my daughter go somewhere I couldn’t find her, did you? Even when she was in Scotland I knew exactly where she was the entire time.”
“Then why didn’t you go and get her? Then or now?”
The man just shrugged. “Sometimes Ciara needs to work through her emotions—she’s been through a lot. If I were to drag her back here, I don’t know when she’d just run again. But that doesn’t mean she has to do it alone, especially now that she has a pack that loves her. And you do love her, right?”
I nodded, my head bobbing up and down violently. Even if my telling her I loved her was tinged with sadness, I still wanted the chance to say it again.
“Good. Now go and get your pack and get our girl back.”
“All incoming tourists from the United States please proceed to the passport line with your passports out and ready please,” an airport attendant called, winding her arm in the direction of a line full of other tourists.
“Are we sure this is a good idea? Ciara obviously doesn’t want to see us or she’d call…” Artie was a nervous wreck as Charm led him to the line, and upon seeing the service dog, the attendant switched us over into the shorter line.
When I’d come home and told them what I’d learned from Alexei, Artie and Leith seemed to come to life again.
The next two days had been a flurry of getting everything packed, dropping Lucky off at Aurelia’s, and getting our tickets purchased.
We’d been confident about traveling to Ireland to plead our case with our two other pack members, ready to grovel as much as needed, but now that we were here it seemed like the omega was getting cold feet.
“I don’t know about you,” Leith said as he showed his passport to the attendant and stepped onto the other side of the booth to wait for us. “But I’m not willing to wait another four years for her to return. So we find her and we work all of this out.”
I couldn’t agree with him more and had tried several times to call Wiz to let him know we were coming, but his phone was still shut off.
So we were just going to show up to the hotel and hope for the best. We’d even gotten rooms in the same place—even if this all had a high chance of ending horribly.
“And what are you going to say to her?” Artie asked as we walked together to the exit to get a taxi.
“I haven’t worked all of that out yet,” I told him honestly. “Obviously I’m going to apologize, but that doesn’t seem like enough—you know?”
“Oh, I know. It’s not easy to come back from calling someone bad luck.”
Artie’s words made me wince. The omega still hadn’t forgiven me either, but I was just glad he was speaking to me again.
The taxi bay at the Dublin airport was clogged with people getting dropped off and picked up and it took another fifteen minutes for us to snag one. Our driver was a plump man with a cheerful face and he grinned at us in the rearview mirror as we pulled out and began the ten-minute drive to the airport.
“Where are you three coming from?” he asked conversationally as he expertly navigated the ridiculous airport traffic.
“Seattle,” Leith answered, lifting an arm so Artie could cuddle in and shut his eyes for a quick rest.
“Really? You’re a Scotsman aren’t you? What were you doing in the states?”
“We worked there,” Leith explained. He’d always been the best conversationalist of the three of us and I leaned back and let my own eyes drift shut, leaving it to the other alpha to keep up the talking.
It felt like I hadn’t slept in weeks, which I hadn’t really.
Turns out, getting kicked out of your omega’s nest almost permanently was a detriment to one’s sleep habits and my bed just didn’t feel the same without any of them in it.
I wasn’t sure when I fell asleep, but I woke up with a jerk when Leith gave me a nudge.
“Thanks very much,” Leith said to the driver as we unloaded our suitcases and paid him.
The hotel was a clean-looking glass building—the same as your average run of the mill franchise—and a friendly looking woman was manning the front desk.
“Hello, checking in?” she asked as we gave her our reservation information. “You have two adjoining rooms with a private omega’s nest and a patio for the service animal. Looks like we’re still giving it a clean from the previous guests, would you like to leave your luggage here?”
“Thank you,” I told her. “We’re going to head up and visit some friends who are already staying here, is that okay?”
Once we’d stepped together onto the elevator, my nerves really kicked in.
“What if she slams the door in our face?” I asked as the elevator ascended.
“Then we knock again,” Leith said, somehow the most unfazed out of the three of us.
“And what if she breaks up with us? For real? I read about bond dissolution and it sucks.” Artie’s voice was high with panic as he gripped Charm’s harness even harder, making the golden retriever eyeball him with worry.
“I doubt she would put you through that Artie,” Leith soothed, pulling the omega in for a quick kiss.
I shot him a look. “How are you so calm? Aren’t you scared she’s going to reject us?”
“I’m fucking terrified,” the man said and I felt his end of the bond ease open for the first time in weeks, showing me just exactly how he was feeling. “But if we’re all panicking nothing will get fixed. I just want to see her again, to clap eyes on her and make sure she’s okay.”
The elevator dinged, letting us know we were on the right floor. I pulled the scrap of paper Alexei had given me and began searching for the right room number.
Too soon we were all standing in front of it.
“Maybe we should come back later once we don’t look like we’ve just spent twenty-five hours traveling to get here,” Artie whispered, tugging on the ends of his messy-from-the-plane hair.
But Leith was already lifting a fist to knock on the door.
The sound of someone approaching the door came from the other side and the door was yanked open by Wiz who was looking down at his phone. “Did you forget your keycard agai—”
His words were cut off when he looked up to find us standing in front of him.
Wiz’s mouth opened before it closed and the man just sighed as if he wasn’t overly surprised to see us. “I see Alexei finally spilled the beans then?”
I held up the piece of paper. “Where is she?”
Wiz stepped to the side and let us into the room. It looked lived in, probably because it had been. Some of their clothing was draped over the radiator, drying from the wash one of them had given it.
There was a movie on the television and a half-eaten sandwich on the bed telling me what Wiz had been doing before we knocked.
“She’s not here right now. She left for the hospice to visit her father an hour ago,” Wiz explained as we took the space in.
Charm seemed the happiest to see the man and was busily pushing her snout into his hand, plying him for scratches as the four of us stood in awkward silence.
“So, it’s been a minute,” Wiz finally said before sinking down onto the edge of the bed. “I suppose you are all looking for an explanation?”
“I’ll fucking say,” Leith huffed an angry laugh. “What were you thinking? You’re supposed to be a part of our pack and you just run off without saying anything?”
“What was I supposed to say?” Wiz’s brows drew together with frustration as he and the Scotsman exchanged a heated look. “‘Oh, by the way, Ciara is about to flee the country because she feels like she’s bad luck and her dad is dying, okay byeee?’ No. That’s fucking crazy.”
“It’s crazier to cut us off,” Artie cut in, patting around until he found the edge of the little chair next to the bed and settled into it. “We’re a pack and other than that you’re my best friend. If Ciara was going to run you should have told us so we could have come too.”
But Wiz wasn’t hearing any of it. “Even if you were exactly what she was running from? Artie, you didn’t see her. She wasn’t going to wait to have a conversation. Besides, we may be pack, but for me Ciara always comes first. You knew that from the start.”
“Well, we’re here now, so what would you have us do?” I asked, finally speaking for the first time since he’d answered the door.
Wiz’s dark eyes met mine. I could tell he was still pissed at me and I didn’t blame him.
“Now you listen to her and support her. She’s got a lot on her plate and doesn’t need you guys adding any more to it. Some groveling and apologizing wouldn’t hurt either, though.”
“That’s the least I can do,” I said and it made the others laugh, a bright spot in what had been an otherwise dark month.
“Is it bad, then? Her dad’s health?” Artie asked the question we’d all been thinking ever since Alexei told me about it.
Wiz’s half-smile disappeared and he nodded gravely. “The whole situation is fucked. We’ve been here three weeks and it’s only gotten worse. I think the more he talks to her, the more he lets go, his nurses don’t think he’s got more than a couple of weeks left at this point and that’s being generous.”
“And they’re…okay?” Leith asked, frowning.
Wiz snorted. “I can never tell. She’s still pissed at him, but I also think she likes getting to know him and hearing stories about her mom. In any case, she goes every day to see him for a couple of hours.”
As if his words had magically conjured her, the lock on the hotel room door beeped and we all whirled around toward it.
“And apparently she’s back early today,” Wiz said, hurrying to stand and pass us to intercept Ciara first.
Ciara stepped through the door, a bag of food in hand and she started to shrug her plaid jacket off without looking up from her feet. “They had to end visiting hours early because Finneas was falling asleep, so I thought I’d bring you some dim sum from that place you like. It’s all I can seem to keep down these days…”
Then she paused, her nostrils flaring as she kept her eyes locked on the ground.
The bag of food dropped out of her hands and hit the floor with a dull thud.
“Mo ròs.” Leith’s use of the endearment was said on an almost relieved gasp as he moved to take a step closer to her.
But Ciara was having none of it and whirled on her foot and ran right out of the hotel room.
“Damn it, you’re not supposed to be running, Ciara!” Wiz shouted as he took off after her.
There was a crash outside followed by a chorus of cursing from both of the alphas in the hallway.
We hurried to the door and peered outside to find Ciara halfway down the hall on her knees, clearly having fallen, as Wiz tried to help her to her feet.
Wiz was oblivious to us as he hovered over her, his hands gently lifting her up as she let out a sob that nearly tore my heart in two. “You can’t run like that, Ciara, you’re pregnant.”
There was a brief pause as the words seemed to register with Artie, Leith, and I before we all sucked in a tandem gasp.
“She’s what?” We all asked at the same time.