I was pretty sure that he thought that if he became the heir, then maybe he could protect Cini the same way Alesso did.
And now here we were with a missing beta and no clue what the hell happened to her when we could have taken her and run for the hills ages ago.
We had enough money that we could protect her from her father, and if I were being honest, I was pretty sure that Amante Sr. wouldn’t go searching for her either.
To him, she had no use, so maybe he would just let us go.
Elio hung up his phone, looking frustrated as he turned to speak with us. “None of my contacts have heard any chatter about anyone matching Cini’s description going through their channels. It’s like she disappeared completely off the grid.”
The scrubbing in the other room stopped and so did the sound of running water as Dante joined us in the living room.
“Have you tried—” he began, his voice always surprising me with how deep it was.
“I’ve tried everything!” Elio snapped, cutting the other alpha off, something we never did when Dante was speaking. It was one of our unspoken rules because he did it so rarely, but it seemed our rules were going right out the window today. “I’ve called everyone I know to try and find her, D, she’s nowhere.”
Dante’s lips pressed together in a thin line and he said nothing else.
“At this point,” Elio continued, scrubbing a tired hand over his five o’clock shadow. “We’ll have to move our plans up.”
His words got everyone in the room’s attention.
“Are you crazy?” Ranieri asked, throwing his hands up into the air. “You must be crazy if you think we can move up our plans and still remain earthside. At this point we’re going to end up tossed in the river with a pair of cinderblock shoes!”
“I agree,” Dante intoned, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Well what do you want from me then?” Elio asked, clearly irritated by being shot down twice by our pack. “At this point we’d need a miracle to figure out what happened to her and—”
As if his words were magic, Elio’s phone began to ring.
He cursed under his breath and put the phone up to his ear before barking harshly into it. “What?”
Then his expression shifted from anger to shock—a look I’d seen so rarely on his face.
“Keane,” he said, the name making everyone in the room stiffen with discomfort. Our prides were still bruised from trying to crash Edison Keane’s wedding in retaliation for his crashing ours.
Not that any of us had really cared much about losing out on Peregrine Chandler. I, for one, had been ecstatic when Edisoncarried her out of the church, saving us from having to tie ourselves to her forever.
We hadn’t evenwantedto crash Edison’s wedding in the first place—Amante Sr. had forced us just as he’d nearly forced us into marrying Peregrine—but it still had hurt our egos to be taken down so unceremoniously by his men and chucked into what amounted to a dungeon underneath his mansion.
Edison Keane may look suave and debonair on the outside, but I and the rest of my pack knew that he was amongst the most brutal of our kind and not one to fuck with.
So why was he calling us now?
Elio’s jaw tightened as he listened to whatever Keane was saying on the other end of the line before his dark brows lifted straight up in shock.
“No, I don’t know what happened to your omega, Keane, though it’s funny you should mention it…”
***
The Keane estate was deathly quiet, as if its inhabitants were holding their breath until their mistress returned.
It was insane to me how seamlessly Peregrine Chandler had fit into life as Edison Keane. The few times we were forced to meet her before the wedding had been filled with silence as she seemed to ignore our very presence, but she must have found her new husband more interesting than us because the man looked about two seconds away from burning the world down to get her back.
The normally put together alpha’s dark hair was mussed and disheveled as if he’d been running his fingers through it and tugged on the ends before we arrived.
“We pulled her brother from the airport,” Keane told us in a clipped voice as he and his second-in-command, Rhodes, led the way down the stairs to the holding rooms.
It was a place that, prior to this, I had no desire to ever return to again, but Elio was convinced that Peregrine and Cini being abducted in such close capacity to one another was definitely connected. So, if we helped Edison find his omega, maybe he would help us find our girl.
