Once he’s calmed down, he asks me to call the garage and leave a message for Gabe. He doesn’t want to go into work, but Candice insists that people are counting on him, and only her demanding that he leave gets him to move. He can come backafter his appointments and pick us up, or we will have one of the guys come by and get us.
After he pulls away Candice shakes herself and starts marching toward the door. I step in front of her, not wanting to grab her when she already looks like she is about to break.
“Little Lion, Candice, you can’t…I mean…I don’t want you to go in there, ok? The cops will be here soon, but they’ll need to look around and do cop stuff before we can do anything. Alright? I know you want to see, but just…trust me ok, I’ll take care of it.
Now, on that note, how much stuff was stored on your computer, how much might be lost if it got damaged?”
She looks up at me, tears in her eyes. “My computer? Mostly just recent stuff, unfinished sketches. I store everything online, so only a couple days worth of work. But my photos, stuff from my grandpa…all of that…I…how bad is it?”
Closing my eyes I pull her into my arms as she starts crying. “It’ll be ok, I’ll take care of it.”
I know I’m repeating myself at this point, but I’m not sure what else to do as I rock her back and forth against me with her tears soaking into my shirt.
Then we wait. I lean against her house, holding her against me while I text Gabe. After that I leave a message with Kelly at the front, Candice doesn’t want them to come rushing over and have even more to deal with at work. I want whatever helps her be happy.
I ask her questions to take her mind off of what’s happening, while my own mind spins and makes plans. We wait, because I can’t do any of those plans until after the police leave. We talk about what color she might want to paint the nest, and about what she might like to do with her room at the house. We don’t really need a spare room anyway, no one visits…and if they do, fuck’em, they can get a hotel.
Finally the police arrive, they go through, take a lot of photos, but there isn't much they can do, take some samples, a few pieces of broken glass from the busted door that have blood on them, photos of the bootprint. But there isn’t a lot of evidence, no fingerprints or anything glaringly obvious. They’ll send over a copy of the report for insurance purposes, and I seeth as Candice cries. Then we go inside and start sorting through her life again. She looks into the office, closes the door and goes to her nest. More loud sobbing comes from there.
Gabe comes over for his lunch break, and helps us collect what isn’t destroyed of her nest and clothes, and her broken computer tower and takes us back to the house. After locking up I pocket her keys, I’ll need those later.
I bundle her into the nest at home, holding her until she falls asleep, then I go start cleaning up, washing all the nesting stuff she brought over to go in her room. Taking the side off of her computer tower, the asshole snapped the motherboard in half when he stomped on it, but the hard drive looks intact, so I’ll salvage what I can. After dinner I’ll take Xanover, we can board up the back door, and then clean up some. Even safe in our home, I won’t leave her by herself.
I told her I would take care of this, and I will. Checking in on Iggy I find that she is just chilling on top of her terrarium, so I pick her up and put her on my shoulder to have some company while I work on laundry and getting dinner ready.
So much to do.
Chapter 26
Work sucks. Trey called in, so we’re already short staffed, and I asked Kelly to help me write up a job posting for a couple of mechanic positions. Even if we hadn’t found Candice, Gabe still needs to take some time off. He runs himself ragged between work and the pack.
We’re mostly done with renovating the house, or we were, I might set up some plans to build an addition. Maybe a large office space downstairs so we can all have one together. I’m not against Candice having her own room and office, I just think she might not want to work out of her bedroom. But that is more of a long term plan.
I work together with Gabe to finish a couple of bigger jobs. If we can just get through those, everything else will be small stuff–oil changes and tires. Those are easy enough that we can do multiples at once, and hopefully get caught up. Kelly comes out and tells us that Jacks called and left a message to call him or Leo. When Gabe finally finishes up and pulls out his phone,there’s a lot of cussing, before he manages to type something back. I don’t know what to expect when he finally puts his phone away and comes to fill me in.
Apparently, someone broke into Candice’s house and trashed it. Jacks is with her, but they have to wait for the police before they can do anything else. Gabe, of course, wants to leave now to go wait with them, but he doesn’t want to leave me to work alone. He has some choice words about Trey calling in, but I don’t blame the guy, we’ve been running him ragged, especially these last few weeks.
Kelly offers to stay late to help Gabe with the backlog of paperwork, which he isn’t real happy about, insisting on paying her overtime, even though she doesn’t work full time to start. She’s practically family, so I go ahead and fill her in on the basics of how we met an omega, but then someone trashed her car. I point out the little beater in the parking lot, as Kelly fumes about it.
We met Kelly, shortly after we moved to the area, her mom brought her in one day to get her car worked on. Fifteen year old Kelly was fascinated with the shop, and she’s hung around in one form or another ever since.
After all that, I tell her about the recent issues with someone stalking Candice, calling and screaming at her and now breaking into her house. Kelly is, understandably, upset on all of our behalves, but she’s also super excited for us, and is practically wiggling as I finish giving her all the details. Except Candice’s name, which, yeah, she could easily look up in our files, butshe won’t since I asked her to respect our omega’s boundaries. Also, if things go the way we hope, she’ll meet her soon enough anyway.
Gabe goes on lunch and goes to pick up Candice and Jacks, along with some of her stuff they manage to gather up to take to the pack house. When he gets back I go by her house to have a look around.
Fucking fuck, this place is trashed.
Picking up the iguana’s terrarium I put it back, but I can’t get much done on my lunch break. I know that Gabe and Jacks already got all the clothes and nesting material they could salvage. So I spend my time gathering up the photos that are broken and torn up on the floor. I see several of them are cut with broken glass, but hopefully we can salvage some of them.
I walk into her office and all her books are torn up, there are a lot of sketched images, not just dicks this time. But everything is torn up and scattered on the floor. Sorting through the papers, I collect a few books that still seem to be intact and add them to my small pile of torn memories. Unfortunately there’s no time to take care of anything else right now, I need to get back to work.
At least I have enough time to stop and grab some deli sandwiches and trash bags on the way back to the garage. Gabe and I managed to each wolf down a sandwich between oil changes. Thankfully, Kelly has finished the job posting and asks me to look over it before she sends it out. After that, it’s just playing catchup with work until five.
Kelly left a couple of hours ago, but we’re mostly caught up, finally. Wecanget the job done with two people, it just requires hauling a lot of ass. I don’t often work full time, but I’ve had to for the last few months. Hopefully this job posting will get me back to part time soon.
We don’t have to stop and get Leo, since he still has the Jeep, so we make it home before he does. Jacks is just finishing up dinner, and Gabe and I each retire to our own rooms to wash off the garage grime. It feels like weeks since I was in here with Jacks, but it was just yesterday. I really need to schedule a date night soon. Maybe we can bring Candice along, see if she is up for dinner and a movie.
I’ll talk to Jacks about it later tonight.
