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“I don’t hate you…”
I snorted. “Bullshit.”
“Will you let me finish?” Enzo chastised, some of the irritation from earlier returning to his voice.
With a sigh, I mimed locking my lips and throwing away the key before gesturing for him to go for it.
“I don’t hate you Ciara. The opposite in fact, I’m scared of you.” Enzo ran a hand through his dark hair, making it stand on end. “You’re going to change everything and I’m so damned tired from all the change.”
“That’s life,” I pointed out, forgetting my earlier vow of silence.
Enzo shot me a withering look and I looked down at my knees sheepishly. “Sorry, go on.”
“I’m going to share something with you that makes me feel… naked. I never told anyone this but Leith and Artie, so it’s…” he seemed to struggle with the word he was looking for.
“Sensitive,” I finished for him.
Enzo nodded. “Sensitive is a good word for it, I suppose.”
I watched him suck in a deep breath before he began.
Chapter nineteen
Inever thought I would be telling my life story to Ciara Callaghan while locked in a dark closet, and yet here we were.
Even I could admit that I’d come into the closet to confront her, already hot with anger. I’d been going over my show notes with the PA who was just itching to get out of the studio so she could go to lunch when Ciara had peeked out of the closet, typed something on her phone, and then ducked back inside.
And after a morning of watching Artie mope around the apartment and not being able to get him to actually tell me why, I somehow just knew that it had something to do with the long-legged lady alpha who was currently looking at me with big, distractingly pretty brown eyes as I started to tell her about my childhood.
“Did you ever wonder how an American like me somehow ended up in Scotland?”
Ciara shrugged her shoulders with a shake of her head. “Not really, did you ever wonder how an Irish woman like me ended up in Minnesota?”
“Touché,” I said, offering her a smile that no doubt showed how nervous I was. “Well, I was born in California in a big Italian family, lots of cousins, but my parents just had me and my sister. I was always a rowdy kid, but shit kind of hit the fan when my alpha designation developed when I was twelve.”
“Twelve?” Ciara’s brows drew together with surprise. “Isn’t that quite early? I was fourteen and the doctors told me even that was rare.”
“What can I say? I’m a medical marvel,” I joked with a laugh that was too sharp even for my own ears. “But it also put me into what my parents like to call ‘super puberty.’ I got taller and bigger than the rest of my peers… and then there was the rage.”
Closing my eyes, I could still remember the uncontrollable anger that seemed to ignite in my hormone addled body at the slightest provocation.
“I fought. A lot. Anytime someone looked at me funny I threw my fists first and asked questions later. It was definitely not sustainable for my parents who were hearing it on all sides until I was eventually expelled from school. To have the words ‘violent’ and ‘alpha’ on your school records doesn’t bode well for getting into literally any other school.”
Ciara seemed to understand me because she leaned in, her cinnamon scent filling my nose as she spoke. “When I was fifteen, Chelsea Warner told Brynn she was a motherless slut because the boy she liked had a crush on Brynn. I saw red and the next thing I knew I was winging an algebra textbook at her head. It took the dads and Aurelia all day to do damage control for that because the Warners were one of the richest families in our little town.”
“So you get it. The rage is mind numbing to the point where sometimes I’d blink and there’d be a kid with a fat lip. My parents really had no other choice but to send me away to someone who could handle me. My nonna lived in a tiny little village in Tuscany and even at nearly eighty years old she was the most intimidating woman I’ve ever met.”
She’d taken one look at me, bruised and battered from my latest fight, and had promptly put me to work on the tiny farm that my uncles ran.
“My nonna was an old school omega and had very strict ideas about what an alpha should be like. Strong, protective, the shield of all pack members even at the expense of their own sanity. She raised me up from an angry preteen into who I am today and I returned back to California to finish up my last year of high school a very different man… but the only problem was that I didn’t feel at home there anymore and I felt…”
A rattling, anxious breath left me as I gripped the top of my knees. My suit was definitely going to be dusty by the time anyone found us, but I couldn’t find it in me to care as I bared my soul to her.
“You felt abandoned,” Ciara provided, nibbling nervously on her lower lip. “You felt like they’d left you behind in Italy even though you understood why.”
“Exactly.” I was surprised to hear her put it into words so succinctly. “I made it through the year and then applied for university in the UK and moved out. My dad understood it on some level, but my mom didn’t. Almost every phone call would end with her in tears so… I kind of just stopped calling.”
It took meeting Artie and his pushing for me to reconnect to actually bite the bullet and do it. My mom died six months after that and the guilt still ate at the edges of me like a slow flesh-eating disease.
