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‘Are too. What’s wrong?’ she asked.
‘Evie found Xochil,’ I breathed out.
‘Did Evie get hurt?’
‘What? No!’ Man, I was a bad storyteller.
‘Cory, I don’t know the story at all, so why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you instead of giving me mini heart attacks?’ she asked, clearly annoyed with my shit already.
‘She doesn’t trust me. She tells me nothing.’
‘And that hurts your feelings,’ she stated.
‘It hurts my heart,’ I told her, knowing I didn’t have to hide anything from her.
‘Oh, Cory, you have to give her time. It’s been less than two months.’
‘It’s been twenty-five years, Bells. This isn’t a person that just joined the pack. This is Evie. Our Evie. It hurts that she left us in the first place, and it hurts that she keeps us at arm’s length now.’
‘It hurts that you’re in love with her, and she doesn’t seem to feel the same and that she went on dates with Paolo again,’ she clarified.
‘Yes.’
‘You need to tell her.’
‘I can’t. I want to. Fuck I want to, Bells; there are moments when I feel like she might feel the same, and then she does something to show that I’m just her alpha and old friend. If she tells me she’s going to wait for her mate, I don’t know that I’ll survive it.’
‘You won’t know until you tell her. You don’t want to be stuck in a loveless union. You don’t want to be alone forever,’ she said, and I caught something in her voice before she could hide it again, but she quickly continued before I could comment on it. ‘Woo her. You know her better than anyone. Even better than I did.’
‘It’s been a decade. She’s a stranger to me as much as she is to you now.’
‘That’s a lie, and you know it. You’re just being a chickenshit,’ she laughed.
‘Are you coming out or not?’ I asked, suddenly annoyed that she was calling me out on my shit. Yes, I was too fucking scared to tell her and lose her. I didn’t need reminding that I was a fucking coward.
‘I’ll be there after the full moon. Brandon needs me to finish a project we started with the vineyard, and this is my chance to put my new shiny almost there degree to work.’
‘I miss you, Bells.’
‘I miss you more. Trust me. I’ll be there soon enough. Give Mom and Dad a hug for me, yeah?’
‘Always. Are you calling them often?’ I asked.
‘Often enough. There’s only so much I have to chat about without sounding like a broken record. I gotta go. Time for dinner. I love you, Cory. Grow a pair of balls and get Evie to be my sister-in-law already.’ She laughed before she ended the mind-link.
“Like it was that fucking easy,” I grumbled. For the longest time, I thought wolves had it easier than humans. We know for sure when we’ve found the right one. It never occurred to me at that age that if I didn’t find my mate in time, I was looking at an even trickier situation than the humans —convincing a she-wolf to give up on finding her Goddess-given mate just for me.
I walked toward the office the next morning with a bag full of breakfast. James had training to lead, and Jo ran into the main office to deal with some HR issue. I walked in to find Zi and Evie huddled together in Evie’s office. I knocked, not sure if I was interrupting anything.
Evie gave me a brilliant smile that stole the breath from my lungs and beckoned me in.
“I found it. I found the damn missing parenthesis. We just opened and downloaded the first phone’s data,” she said.
“Shit. That’s great news! Find anything that tells us where we can find them?” I asked, coming over to their side of the computer. I leaned down to see a bunch of open folders
“There’s not a lot. A few pictures with targets and a bunch of coordinates. We’re trying to find out what they are,” Zi answered, pointing to a series of numbers on a document. Evie was clicking madly on her computer, and suddenly a map with pins appeared. I leaned in closer, wanting to figure out where they were pointing.
Zi suddenly leaned a little closer to me and sniffed.
