Page 75 of Glass Omega

I’d spent the day busying myself with other work in anticipation of it while trying not to think about my wife who I’d much rather be with on a Saturday afternoon. The same wife that had now seemingly gone missing.

Just thinking about it made hot, acidic bile rise in my throat like I was about to throw up.

“We are going to have to reschedule,” I insisted, nodding at Collum who in turn said something into his earpiece.

“Edison—” Shuuhei began, so flabbergasted that he forgot that in official meetings he was supposed to use my last name. “You really need to know this.”

“It will have to wait.” I needed to get the fuck out of here and to wherever the hell Rhodes was.

I swept out of the abandoned office building where we’d set up our meeting, my guys falling into clip behind me as I strode towards the car.

“Boss, what do you need from me?” Collum asked as he opened the car door.

“Get into contact with Rhodes’ team. I need a minute-by-minute playback of how the fuck this could happen.”

She was just supposed to be going to a friend’s for girls’ night. That was about as innocuous as it could get, so I was struggling to understand the situation and how Rhodes of all people could have lost her.

It was an hour and a half back to the estate and the longer I sat in the back of the car stewing, the more I kept thinking about my own mother.

The story of how she’d been kidnapped by the Serbians was famous—almost legendary—in our circles.

It was two weeks after she married my father and she was out with a full security detail at a flea market.

All eight of her security members had been killed and she was taken.

War broke out with people falling in line and by the end of it the Serbians were gone and my mother was irrevocably broken.

She should have spent the rest of her life in convalescence somewhere out of the city. Somewhere nice.

But my father had paid far too much for her and her father was the loudest voice of the branch families for her to be able to do that. So my mother had spent the rest of her life ricocheting between lucidity and screaming like she was being murdered.

My next breath caught in a wheeze as I thought about Perrie meeting the same fate. The constant need to be sedated, the puttering aimlessly, the inability to even make her own decisions.

The inner alpha, which normally sat happily in the back of my mind, was now doing its damndest to take over and find the omega we’d all but claimed.

Find, find, find, find, find,it repeated over and over like the beat of a drum and I felt a pounding headache coming on.

Then, about halfway through the ride, my phone pinged. Fearing the worst, I pulled it out and read the message:

RHODES: Got her. Heading back to the house.

“Boss,” Collum called from the front seat, probably also getting a text from the other guys on the team.

“I know, Rhodes texted me. Let’s get there as fast as possible.”

The car accelerated and I slumped back in my seat, still trying to regain control over my composure.

But my inner alpha was still protesting, not believing the rational side of me that knew Perrie was safe and she was with Rhodes.

If anything, the panic continued to grow.

Perrie was supposed to be my wife by contract only—partners who were friendly but in it for a greater purpose of creating a generation of Keanes free from the bullshit traditions and the influence of the branch families.

That had started to change the moment she came into my study and I had her underneath me… and the subsequent weeks following where I spent every spare moment I had with the omega.

The tower which had previously been a dark place for me where I’d almost punish myself daily taking care of my mother’s plants had become completely Perrie’s now.

From the printed copies of the pictures she’d taken on campus and around the estate lining the walls to just the general shift in the air whenever she would come downstairs and sit in one of the wicker chairs to watch me care for the plants.

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