“They do give gifts to good boys and girls,” he replied with a knowing grin.
I threw my hands up. “Is this all a fucking joke to you? My life is currently a wreck. I have no idea if my mate is alive, my mom probably thinks I’m dead, and I just found out someone I thought I could trust has actually been keeping a secret file on me. Forgive me if I don’t see the humor in all of this.”
He stood up so quickly I scrambled back a step. He was huge, massive and imposing and sucking up most of the air in the room.
“No, Skye, I don’t think this is a joke,” he said, all hints of amusement gone. “I don’t think it’s a joke that my daughter has been stolen and hidden from me for years. I don’t think it’s amusing that a man I let into my pack has been manipulating and lying to me. I can assure you, little wolf, that we have both been wronged by people we trusted. We are both scrambling to make sense of a senseless situation.”
There was no denying the raw emotion in his voice as he spoke. All his sarcasm and jokes aside, he was hurting, too.
I closed my eyes, feeling the prick of tears starting to burn. Once I knew I wouldn’t start sobbing, I looked at him, begging him to understand. “I just need to talk to Remy. If you want a father-daughter reunion after that, fine. But I need to talk to someone to let them know I’m at least alive.”
He loosely clasped his hands in front of him. “Skye, I won’t keep you from your mate. Until I know he’s alive, and in a state where he can protect you from whatever threats his pack—”
“—my pack,” I interrupted.
“Fine, your pack is facing, keeping your location hidden is safest.”
I steepled my hands in front of my face. “I can appreciate you wanting to protect me, but my place is in Blackwater. Even if something happened to Remy, I won’t abandon my pack and my family.”
“I’m your family.”
“You’re a stranger that donated his sperm to my DNA,” I answered with as much gentleness as I could. I was almost sorry when he winced, but he needed to know where my heart was. “You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. Maybe one day that will change, but not today. Today I need to get home.”
He shook his head. “You can’t.”
My fingers curled into fists at my sides. “If I have to walk out of here and traipse across the Russian countryside until I find an airport, I will.”
“Did you not see the storm coming?” He frowned at me.
“Fine,” I sighed with a shrug. “I’ll leave in the morning.”
He scoffed and chuckled a bit at the absurdity of my situation. “This is Russia.”
“I’m well aware of what country this is,” I said dryly.
“Storms like this don’t come and go. The amount of snow and ice that will fall here? It will be at least five days before a plane could safely take off. Maybe a week.”
My heart sank. “I can’t be here a week.”
Someone knocked at the door and then pushed it open. Dimitri stepped inside, closing the door once he was in the room.
“Forgive me,” he said to Nikolai, glancing at me before deferring to his father “I just received word from Viktor.”
“Who’s that?” I demanded.
“Viktor is the man we left behind in Wyoming,” Dimitri told me. “He’s been monitoring the situation in the States.”
“What did he find?” Nikolai asked patiently, crossing his arms over his broad chest.
“Another plane took off a few hours after we did. They lied on their flight plan, so it took him some time to figure out where they landed and who might’ve been on the plane.”
My breath caught as Dimitri’s green eyes locked on mine. I knew before he said it.
“They landed in Blackwater. There was no passenger manifest, and he found out from the people at the airport that two of the people were listed as medically unstable, but there were six occupants on board.” He gave me a small smile. “Odds are your boy was one of them.”
The air rushed out of me so fast I got dizzy and had to bend over. I braced my hands on my knees so I wouldn’t collapse.
Remy’s alive.
I knew it. Wolf rattling around inside of me or not, I knew he was alive.
I looked up, my eyes lasering in on Nikolai. “I want a phone. Now.”
Wordlessly, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a sleek black phone. He unlocked it and handed it to me.
My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped the phone. I immediately punched in Remy’s number and put the phone to my ear as it rang.
And rang.
And rang.
But Remy never answered.
8
Remy
I pulled the SUV to a stop in front of the house and killed the engine, staring at the house I had grown up in while contemplating what would happen in the next few minutes.
“You’ve got this, Rem,” Katy told me from the seat beside me.
I nodded at her and glanced back in the rearview mirror. Rhodes and Larkin were in the middle bench seat, and he had somehow managed to get her out of her seatbelt and onto his lap on the drive from the airstrip to my house. She lifted her head from his shoulder and gave me a warm, supportive smile.
Dante and Ryder were on the back bench. Dante’s eyes opened from where he was sleeping against Ryder. It was probably the first time he had rested since we had left Wyoming.
He started to straighten, pausing to kiss the underside of Ryder’s jaw before meeting my gaze steadily in the mirror. Ryder didn’t bother removing the tattooed arm he had draped across Dante’s shoulders. Once they had climbed into the backseat, Ryder had pulled Dante against him and the former alpha heir had fallen asleep, finally finding a moment of peace with his boyfriend since the explosion.
Dante and Ryder had shared Tate between them for almost two years since they started dating her sophomore year. It wasn’t uncommon with the dwindling number of females for multiple guys to share a mate, especially when those guys grew up as best friends and brothers, but it was a little more uncommon for the guys to start crossing swords. Dante had only confided in me last year that he and his beta were more than friends behind closed doors.
It made sense. I had seen the private looks they exchanged, but it wasn’t my place to ask. Besides, if the three of them were happy and all on board, who was I, or anyone, to judge?
They had kept it quiet since Dante was in line to be an Alpha. An Alpha sharing his mate was unheard of; Alphas were too territorial to share, and women usually only had one child, and more than one mate meant more than one possible dad. Plus openly gay or bisexual Alphas simply weren’t a thing our world embraced.
An Alpha should be the epitome of an alpha male, which meant anything less than deeply heterosexual was frowned upon by most of the packs and the Council.
I was happy for my friends. Dante needed Ryder as much as he needed Tate, and they needed each other as much as they needed Dante. Splitting up that dynamic and relationship for optics or because it wasn’t what a group of old men on the Council expected was ridiculous. Because in their small minds, being anything less than straight somehow made you less of a man or less of a shifter.