Chapter 7 - Cillian
It took a couple of days for Cillian to finally tell Camden, Franco, and Jasper what had happened, despite all of them asking pointed questions about why he had married Amber so quickly. Cillian had wanted to get his thoughts straight, but he couldn’t keep them in the dark any longer.
They all listened to the story. When he finished recounting Amber and their sudden marriage, he wasn’t sure what to expect. All of his friends looked back at him with stony faces.
“You managed to keep all of that from us?” Franco said.
When Cillian nodded, Franco rolled his eyes. “I’m not sure if I should be impressed that you didn’t say anything, or pissed off that you kept us in the dark when we could have helped you.”
“I’m a bit of both,” Jasper said. “Are you really that stupid?”
Cillian let the insults roll off him. “I did what I thought was best.”
“No,” Camden growled. “You acted impulsively. I know you’ve had issues with being rash in the past, but this is on another level of stupidity.”
“It’s not as though I had a lot of options,” Cillian said defensively. “I had to act quickly.”
“You could have told us,” Camden said. “You should have told us. Before you went out on a dangerous mission on your own like an idiotic new recruit. You have better sense than that. Maybe then we could have extracted Amber without you having to buy her. Why didn’t you rope us in?”
Cillian shrugged. “It’s not the type of thing I like to talk about,” he grunted. “On top of that, it’s not your battle. You guys didn’t know me back then. It wasn’t your mission that fucked up.”
“We’re still a team, even if we’ve retired,” Franco said, folding his arms. “We would have helped. Honestly, if you had asked us for help, we probably could have neutralized Eric and gotten Amber out of the way, instead of making you have to choose between the two.”
Cillian grunted, but didn’t respond. Partially because he knew that Franco was right. He had made a choice to go at it alone, and it had ended up costing him.
“It’s no use arguing over it anymore,” Jasper said from where he leaned against the wall. “Things are already in motion. What’s done is done. What we need to focus on now is what we’re going to do about it.”
Camden muttered something, but nodded. He glowered at Cillian, but didn’t bring the argument up again. Instead, he said, “We need more information on the Night Pack and the people involved. At the moment, we’re flying blind.”
“I can bring you up to speed,” Cillian said. “Just give me a day or so to gather all my old notes and see what else I can dredge up.”
“We’ll set up a meeting for the end of the day tomorrow,” Camden responded with a curt nod.
The alpha’s shoulders remained stiff, his words clipped. Cillian was nowhere out of the woods yet. Camden was far from happy with him, and Cillian would get an earful about all of this when they had taken care of the threat.
Camden dismissed them. Cillian walked down the hall, his mind wandering. No matter where his thoughts drifted, though, they kept coming back to what Jasper had said, his words spinning around in his mind.
What’s done is done.
That included what he had done to Amber, making her marry him.
His stomach squirmed in unease. He had questioned whether he had been impulsive in insisting on it nearly every day now, whenever she shot him angry glances or hurried out of the room when she saw him.
He smothered the stab of guilt by reminding himself that it was to protect her, even if she didn’t see it right now.
But that tiny inkling of remorse continued to linger.
His own feelings toward Amber had grown more complicated of late.
He had never met someone like her. He admired her fire.
Whenever he had interacted with her during training sessions, they had bantered easily.
She had always been quick to stand up for others.
He had liked her even before stumbling across her in the woods.
In another world, he might have asked her out at some point.
They could have dated and seen where things went, instead of him dragging her into marriage.
That guilt resurged. He might have been doing it for the right reasons, and he didn’t regret doing it.
He only wished that it hadn’t resulted in the hostile or distant stares from Amber or how guarded she was around him.
Because he could tell there was something else bothering her.
Something had been eating at her ever since her encounter with Eric.
But whenever he tried to ask her about it, she deflected. She didn’t want to confide in him.
It frustrated him because he was trying. He was trying to be there for her, and she wouldn’t let him.
Probably because you forced her to marry you, a voice in his head said. She doesn’t trust you now.
Even if that were the case, he wanted to break down those barriers. He wanted her to trust him. The question was how he could do that now, after everything. The answer was that he couldn’t, not immediately.
His mind began to turn, mulling everything over. He should do something nice for her, something to tell her that he did want her to be happy. That he wasn’t trying to dictate her life, and that he valued her as more than just a possession, unlike Eric.
The problem was that he had no experience in that department, and he had no idea what he could do.
As he went to his own office, he ran through options in his head, everything he had learned about Amber since he had met her and since she had moved in.
As he sat in his chair and stared out the window at the bright green leaves just beginning to bud on the trees, he let his mind wander until a memory popped into his head.
She had mentioned that she missed working in the library because she liked being surrounded by so many books.
He smirked. Well, there was something he could do about that.