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7

SKYE

“ I don’t know where to start,” I confessed, twisting my fingers together in my lap.

I had spent hours imagining meeting my father one day, cataloging all the questions I would ask him. Questions Mom always evaded or outright shot down. But now that he was sitting a foot away from me, my mind was blank.

“I suppose that makes two of us,” he replied with a hint of a smile that made his eyes sparkle. “I’m sure we both have a lot of questions.”

I nodded in agreement. “How long have you known about me?”

“Less than two days,” he answered. “Dimitri told me when he found proof.”

I frowned. “Proof?”

A grimace twisted his lips, giving him a feral look. “He found the file the doctor kept on you. He ran a DNA test that showed I was your father.”

“How the hell did he get my DNA?” I racked my brain to figure out when Elias could have gotten a sample from me. “The accident.”

When I had gone off the cliff and been in a coma for three weeks, the doctors had run tests. It would have been easy for him to keep a sample for himself, which meant he had an idea of who my father was months ago.

“Accident?” Nikolai’s gray eyes narrowed and swept my body, checking for injuries.

“A few months ago there was an... incident,” I said cautiously. “I was in a coma for three weeks.”

His brows rose suddenly, dramatically. “I would think being in a coma for more than three weeks was more than an incident .”

“I tackled a guy trying to kidnap me off a cliff,” I said plainly, my tone flat. “He died, I was in a coma.”

He watched me like I was a new, curious thing he had discovered. “That was reckless.”

I glared at him. “I was running low on options.”

A smirk lifted the corner of his mouth. “I said it was reckless; not that I didn’t approve. I would have done the same.”

Surprise flashed through me. “You would’ve?”

He leaned forward. “I would die before I would let anyone capture me. If I could take my enemy with me, all the better. I understand the impulse.” His face smoothed into an impassive mask. “Although where you get that particular trait from could be from me or your mother. She was impulsive and reckless, as I recall.”

My stomach flipped uneasily. “She was?”

He gave me a brief, tight-lipped smile. “Well, I only knew her for a few hours, really.”

“A few... hours?” I echoed. My brows lifted, intrigued and confused.

His gaze darkened with shrewd intensity. “She never told you about us.”

“She never told me anything about my father,” I admitted, feeling a little like I was betraying her by divulging that. “I only recently figured out that you two were bonded.”

His gaze flicked away from me, his jaw tight. “We were for a few, fleeting moments.”

“What happened?” I needed answers. I craved them.

“A question I have often wondered myself,” he said grimly. “Perhaps one day we can both ask her.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means that when I last saw your mother, she was on her way home to pack her bags and come back here with me, her mate.” He leaned forward slightly. “Next thing I knew, she severed our bond. Why she changed her mind, I don’t know. I had resigned myself to never knowing.”

“You didn’t ask?” I pressed. I couldn’t imagine Remy ever giving up on me so easily.

“I knew her for barely a night. I knew she was engaged. I assumed she decided to uphold the engagement her parents arranged instead of following a relative stranger into the night.”

That made zero sense.

I knew my mom. Maybe I didn’t know what she was like before she was an omega, but sitting here, I can’t imagine her choosing a life as the pack plaything over anything else. Especially not with my life in the mix, too.

“There’s got to be more to it,” I muttered. “Did Mom tell you anything about her pack?”

“Not much,” he answered. “I got the impression she wasn’t overly fond of them or her parents.”

“Did Dimitri tell you anything about what happened to her? To me?” I swallowed. “He was there for the hearing when I testified against them at the Summit.”

“Dimitri was only able to give me a brief report of what happened.” His eyes went hard and flinty. “He wasn’t able to provide me with the details, but it was enough for me to request your uncle be brought here. I have a few questions about the treatment my daughter received while in his care.”

I gulped down a lungful of air as the room tilted slightly. “Treatment?”

He stared at me. “I assumed, by the fact that you were being called to give an account of your time spent there as you had escaped to your new pack.”

“Just me?” I asked, raising a brow. Relieved that he didn’t know all the dirty details Dimitri could have revealed. “Not Mom? I promise, she endured a hell of a lot more than I did, which makes me think there’s a lot more going on here than either of us know.”

“That may be, but she stopped being my concern when she renounced and decimated our bond. I made peace with your mother’s decision years ago,” he replied stiffly, twisting the silver ring on his thumb thoughtfully. “But I’m having a harder time forgiving that she kept my heir from me for eighteen years, especially if your life was in danger during that time.”

My head snapped up. “I’m not your heir.”

“You most certainly are,” he rebuffed easily.

“Dimitri is your heir; he’ll be Alpha after you.” My spine stiffened. I had no desire to be an Alpha or an heir or anywhere that wasn’t Blackwater.

“I suppose in your world it is that cut and dry,” he mused softly, rubbing his jaw. “Here we do things differently.”

“I don’t care how you do things here ,” I snapped, my fight returning with a vengeance. “My home is in Washington with my mate and my family.”

“This isn’t a discussion that needs to be had tonight.” He waved a dismissive hand.

“This isn’t a conversation that needs to be had at all ,” I countered. “I’m not staying here. I’m going home to Remy.”

He regarded me coolly. “And if he’s dead?”

I shot to my feet, rounding on him. “Don’t say that!”

“You care for him.” Nikolai frowned, his brows pulling together.

“He’s my mate ,” I said again emphatically.

“And your mother was my mate, but she still didn’t seem to care about what happened to our bond or me,” he retorted.

“Remy and I aren’t you or my mom,” I said through clenched teeth. “I love him, and he loves me. The only reason I’m here and not with him is because your son dragged me across the world while I was unconscious and slapped a freaking magical bracelet on my arm.”

Something dangerously close to pride glittered in his eyes as he watched me. “You’ve got fire in your spirit. That’s good. You’ll need that to be part of this pack.”

“I’m not part of this pack,” I corrected, chest heaving as I struggled to maintain control. “And I promise if I don’t get to call home soon, I’ll use that fire in my damn spirit to burn this place to the ground.”

He smiled at me. Freaking smiled like this was a normal father-daughter conversation.

“You’re magnificent,” he said softly. “Everything I could have hoped for in a daughter.”

“Are you insane?” I demanded, glaring down at him.

“Did you realize that you haven’t stopped holding my gaze the entire time you’ve been in this room,” he continued like I hadn’t spoken.

I held up my arm, the silver bangle flashing under the harsh fluorescent lights. “My wolf is currently in limbo thanks to your witches or whatever.”

“They prefer to be called Romani or Roma.” He shrugged indifferently, tugging the end of his sleeves.

“I don’t really care if they want to be called Santa Claus.”

“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 as 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 for 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.