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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.
