Gage and I had been heading back up to Eloise’s hospital room with arms full of Thai takeout when Gage stopped in his tracks.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, turning to the alpha who had his head tilted as if he was listening for something.
After a moment he just shook his head and started walking again, “Sorry, got a weird feeling from Eloise for a second. She seems fine now.”
I wanted to push him for more information but that would be like kicking a wall and expecting it to bend. A few minutes later we stepped off of the elevator to find Ric on a call outside of the room and Leon speaking with one of the nearby nurses. Owen was downstairs with Dominic and his grandmother until they discharged him in a few days. The door to Eloise’s room was completely shut when it was normally left open a crack.
Putting our boxes on the half counter at the nurse’s station I turned to Leon, who had finished speaking with the nurse and was staring at Eloise’s room door. “Why is Ellie’s door closed?”
“Cecelia Worthington is visiting right now.” Was all he replied, his eyes staying fixed on the door and his fingers tapping out an anxious beat.
“Why is Cecelia Worthington here?” Gage rumbled. I had never personally met Cecelia Worthington—she wasn’t the type of woman you just ran into on the street. The Worthington’s even owned their own law office that was a part of their mass of corporate business ventures so there was no way for Whitlock & Simmons to have ever really dealt with her. I knew that the Russo’s had a business relationship with the Worthingtons and apparently Cecelia Worthington had taken a shine to Eloise (and honestly who didn’t take a shine to her), but did that really extend to a private meeting in a sick woman’s hospital room? Scratch that, Eloise was getting better by the hour so ‘sick’ probably wasn’t the best word for it. But still.
Leon shrugged, his blue eyes narrowing as if he could somehow use x-ray vision to see what was going on inside of the room, “Apparently she had something ‘very important’ that she needed to tell Eloise. The woman is scary as hell when she’s got a purpose.”
I opened my mouth to input some kind of snarky remark but never got the chance. The sound of a phone clattering to the floor and the edge of the counter cracking filled the hallway.
“What the hell Gage?” I asked, looking down at the splintered counter in shock. But he didn’t respond to my question and instead swung his whole massive body around and began stomping towards the closed hospital door with Ric on his heels.
I shared a confused look with Leon before we followed, just making it behind them as they swung the door open so hard that it slammed into the wall. Gage stomped into the room and gathered Eloise into his arms, glaring at the elegant older woman sitting in the chair next to the bed.
“I don’t know what the hell you just did, but I’m going to need you to stop.” Ric growled, sounding the most aggressive that I’d ever heard him be. He pointed at Cecelia Worthington before joining Gage in hovering over Eloise. Leon and I joined them and one look at Eloise’s pale face was enough to tell me that whatever Gage and Ric felt through their bond with Eloise had been bad.
“What happened?” Leon asked, brushing a hand down Eloise’s cheek as she stared at Cecelia Worthington as if she’d never seen her before.
“Apparently,” Eloise’s voice cracked a bit as she tried to hold back tears, “Cecelia is my grandmother.”
Oh shit.
I was the only one in the pack who really knew what Eloise’s parents were like as I’d grown up with very similar ones. Her mother Georgia had been disinterested in Eloise at best and violent with her at worst. Her father was gone for long stints at a time as a long haul truck driver and whenever he was home he could be heard getting into screaming matches with his wife. There were many nights that Eloise had climbed into my room through the window I always left cracked in order to escape from the fighting.
“Ma’am, do you mean to tell me that you're Bobby or Georgia’s mother?” I asked, a little bit incredulously because Bobby and Georgia Taylor were some of the ugliest people I’d ever met inside and out and the woman in front of me looked nothing like either of them.
Cecelia Worthington snorted at my use of the word ma’am but answered me nonetheless, “Heavens no. I have no blood relation to either of those deadbeats. My son, Jason, was the boyfriend of Georgia Taylor’s half-sister Rosemary. Eloise is the product of that relationship.”
“Is my mother still alive? Rosemary?” Eloise asked from the protection of Gage’s arms. She looked a little bit better now that she seemed to have digested the absolute bomb of information that she’d just been given.
Cecelia shook her head, “No, when we were looking for you we found out that she died a few years after you were born. She’d gotten clean and was in the middle of a custody battle to get you back but unfortunately she was in a car accident and didn’t survive.”
“She wanted me back?” Tears filled Eloise’s brown eyes and I couldn’t help but reach for her free hand and entwine my fingers with hers. I couldn’t purr like an alpha but I could comfort her in my own way. She gave me a grateful squeeze as Leon thumbed the tears off of her cheeks.
“According to the court documents we could find that was always her goal. I only wish she’d contacted us and we could have helped her.”
“You set up backing out of our business deal to force us to attend the charity gala, didn’t you?” Leon’s blue eyes narrowed on the woman sitting in front of us. He’d had a thoughtful look on his face ever since Eloise had revealed her relationship with Cecelia.
Cecelia smiled a smile that was, quite frankly, the scariest thing I’d ever seen, “Very astute Leon. Once we figured out that we had a granddaughter somewhere we had to work backwards and much to our delight she lived in the same city as us! You would think it would be easy to meet with her.”
“Something tells me that it wasn’t very easy at all.” Ric’s tone was dry.
“No, it was not,” Cecelia continued, “The omega academy is many things but flexible they are not. They refused to grant visitation access to non-family members of their omegas—especially wards of the state as Eloise was—and would need a DNA analysis of both parties to begin visitations. I was told that it could take up to twenty-four months to get a court order for the test and another six for the academy to actually administer it. Thirty months so that I could meet someone who I was pretty sure was my grandchild.”
My opinion of the academy continued to drop as she spoke, having had my own experience with the level of control that they held over some of the more vulnerable members of our society was ridiculous.
“But luckily for me my granddaughter is a very stubborn young woman and it took the academy going far out of their ‘control comfort zone’ and forcing her in with a pack in order for me to finally meet her. But the issue was that Pack Russo hardly ever attended social events except for a few at the end of each quarter. So I may have manufactured a way to force you out of hiding.”
“It worked.” Leon’s voice was gruff and he crossed his arms over his chest, glaring at the older woman. I’d only known Leon for a few weeks at this point but the first thing that I learned was that he hated being toyed around with.
“You used the champagne we drank while we were alone for the DNA test, didn’t you? But I don’t understand, why didn’t you just, I don’t know,askme? Also why didn’t you tell me as soon as it was confirmed? You’ve known me for almost four months now.” Eloise was angry, I could hear it in her voice and see it in the frown that she wore. As long as I’d known Eloise she’d always hated people making decisions for her without her knowledge. From me choosing to let her go to her (now adoptive) parents sending her to the academy it had been a trend in her life. A veritable landmine that Cecelia Worthington had unknowingly stumbled upon.
