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All of it was a bit like living in the Twilight Zone.
On one hand, I still hated him for what he did to me and Mam, but on the other? I couldn’t help but like the sober, older version of him. It made me see what my mam saw in him when they were younger and it was almost healing to be in the presence of him as he was now.
It also made sense why Orla went to bat so hard for him almost a month ago when she’d called.
The Finneas Callaghan of today was almost a completely different human being from the da of my memories and it was a complete mindfuck that I couldn’t even try to wrap my head around.
It also made me doubly grateful for Alexei and Maxim.
When I asked Finneas about it, he told me they’d insisted on the one-thousand euro payments even when he’d refused and soon after the accident he was forced into early retirement by the Garda and needed the money.
I was trying not to hold it against any of them, but I was still angry that they hadn’t told me about it.
We weren’t going to head back to the states until after Finneas passed. It was a decision I’d come to pretty quickly once I realized how actually finite my time with him was.
I’d told Wiz to go back and leave me on my own, but the other alpha had outright refused, telling me he’d already put in for a leave of absence from the team. Which of course filled me with even more guilt than I’d already been feeling.
It was supposed to be his triumphant first season and at this rate he was going to miss it all.
But every time I tried to get him to go, he would hold me close at night and whisper how much he loved me and how there was no other place he’d rather be than right next to me.
I wasn’t sure what I’d done to deserve such a man, but I was ridiculously glad to have him with me through all of this.
Even if it made me miss the rest of our pack even more. Their absence was like an ache I refused to acknowledge and yet it always seemed to hover at the back of my mind.
We were planning to contact them—Wiz kept pushing for it—but I kept putting it off.
What would I even say after three weeks of no contact?
Hi there, it’s me, Ciara. The woman who ran out on you after causing an accident that brained our omega. Oh, and by the way I’m three, almost four months pregnant with said omega’s baby who has been making me vomit more than I ever have in my entire life?
I snorted at my inner monologue as the elevator ascended to our floor.
None of that would work, so until I figured out what exactly to say, I was just going to give all of my attention to Finneas.
They weren’t sure how much longer he had and I wanted to know everything about him and my mam before he disappeared forever.
The elevator dinged and I stepped off, ready to eat one of the few foods that didn’t make me feel like I was going to spew exorcist style.
“You better let mama eat,” I whispered to the little bump that had formed over the past three weeks. “Or else we’ll both be mad.”
It was as if, as soon as we acknowledged it and went to the doctor for a scan, the baby decided it was time to show itself.
I was now noticeably pregnant, though I had taken to wearing Wiz’s clothing instead of my own to hide it as I hadn’t told Finneas or anyone else about it yet.
Putting my keycard in the door, I waited for it to blink green before I pushed the door handle down.
I started talking before the door was even fully open, shrugging my jacket off while trying to keep a hold of the bag of food. “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…”
I trailed off as I smelled the familiar scents of cranberries, apples, and oranges filling the air.
For a moment, I thought I was imagining their scents. It wouldn’t have been the first time since we left Seattle that I caught a phantom whiff of one of them. Though, whenever I usually looked around, they were never there.
But this wasn’t a hallucination and it certainly wasn’t my imagination.
“Mo ròs,” Leith’s familiar rumble reached my ears, sending a shiver of need down my spine. My inner alpha, who I’d shoved deep, deep down the day of the invitational, perked up with recognition.
I wanted to look up, to see their faces. But fear filled me so deeply that I let go of the bag of food and ran.
