Pushing up from the table, I looked at each of them. “Are you with me?”
I’d asked the same question years ago after we’d gotten out of prison and seen the state that Cini had been left in without her older brother there to protect her.
It had started as a way to repay Alesso back for everything he had done for us, and on a more guilt-ridden level, a way for me to atone for my sins from the night he had died.
But now Cini was the center of our universe and our center had gotten hurt. The slow and steady path we’d been painstakingly taking before was closed to us and now it was time for action.
“You know I’m with you,” Nico said readily, as if he’d been just waiting for me to ask.
I turned to Dante, and while he didn’t verbally respond, he nodded once with a resolute expression on his face.
Then, I looked at Ranieri who still sat frowning at his clasped hands on the table.
“Rani?”
He was the one who always seemed to float on the outskirts of what was left of our pack after Alesso died. He was always closer to the dead alpha than he ever was with us and we all pretended like he hadn’t already had one foot out of the door that night before everything had gone to shit.
Even still. I knew that the one thing that he had cared about was Alesso when he was alive and now he cared about the alpha’s memory that was fading by the day.
He wouldn’t let Cini get hurt.
With a heavy sigh, Ranieri scrubbed hand over his face which was fuzzy with a stubble that I was sure the rest of us were also sporting after who knows how long without a shower.
“Yeah,” he finally said, surrendering. “I’m with you.”
I had their approval. Now it was my job to make shit happen.
Whipping out my phone, I dialled the number that had no business being in my phone and even less business being a recent call, and waited for it to ring.
“What the fuck do you want, Ricci? I was in the middle of soothing myverydistraught,verymuch in heat, omega, so this had better be good,” the familiar growl of Edison Keane filled my ear.
Taking a deep breath, I opened my mouth and began to sell my soul to the devil.
Eight
Three weeks.
It had been three weeks since my kidnapping and three weeks since I had seen them.
Their absence shouldn’t have felt any different than it usually did. There were sometimes entire months in between a sighting of Elio, Nicolo, Dante, or Ranieri at the Amante Estate.
It wasn’t like I was allowed to leave either, so Ishouldhave been used to not seeing them at all.
And yet, as the days went on, I found my patience growing thin and the aching desire to see them seemed to hollow me out more by the day.
I had spent my entire morning trying to distract myself from it—but there was only so much activity the solarium could offerme and I refused to go into the main house at all for fear of running into my father.
He’d left me mostly alone since bringing me back from the hospital last week—instructing the household staff to monitor me more closely than they usually did before disappearing into his study.
Baskets of nesting materials had been left in the bedroom upstairs that I rarely ever slept in and I had spent the first day dragging it down to my solarium and arranging it on the twin bed that I used most days even before I had been kidnapped.
I was trying to make myself more secure, but for some reason the nest that should have made me feel safe just made me feel inadequate, like I was some kind of imposter.
Then there were the all-glass walls of the solarium which posed their own issues upon further inspection.
Before, just drawing the curtains at night had been enough to make me feel secure in my favorite place in the world, but now?
Now my skin itched at night if I even tried to lie on the bed like I had a thousand times before.
