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.
8
Remy
I pulled the SUV to a stop in front of the house and killed the engine, staring at the house I had grown up in while contemplating what would happen in the next few minutes.
“You’ve got this, Rem,” Katy told me from the seat beside me.
I nodded at her and glanced back in the rearview mirror. Rhodes and Larkin were in the middle bench seat, and he had somehow managed to get her out of her seatbelt and onto his lap on the drive from the airstrip to my house. She lifted her head from his shoulder and gave me a warm, supportive smile.
Dante and Ryder were on the back bench. Dante’s eyes opened from where he was sleeping against Ryder. It was probably the first time he had rested since we had left Wyoming.
He started to straighten, pausing to kiss the underside of Ryder’s jaw before meeting my gaze steadily in the mirror. Ryder didn’t bother removing the tattooed arm he had draped across Dante’s shoulders. Once they had climbed into the backseat, Ryder had pulled Dante against him and the former alpha heir had fallen asleep, finally finding a moment of peace with his boyfriend since the explosion.
Dante and Ryder had shared Tate between them for almost two years since they started dating her sophomore year. It wasn’t uncommon with the dwindling number of females for multiple guys to share a mate, especially when those guys grew up as best friends and brothers, but it was a little more uncommon for the guys to start crossing swords. Dante had only confided in me last year that he and his beta were more than friends behind closed doors.
It made sense. I had seen the private looks they exchanged, but it wasn’t my place to ask. Besides, if the three of them were happy and all on board, who was I, or anyone, to judge?
They had kept it quiet since Dante was in line to be an Alpha. An Alpha sharing his mate was unheard of; Alphas were too territorial to share, and women usually only had one child, and more than one mate meant more than one possible dad. Plus openly gay or bisexual Alphas simply weren’t a thing our world embraced.
An Alpha should be the epitome of an alpha male, which meant anything less than deeply heterosexual was frowned upon by most of the packs and the Council.
I was happy for my friends. Dante needed Ryder as much as he needed Tate, and they needed each other as much as they needed Dante. Splitting up that dynamic and relationship for optics or because it wasn’t what a group of old men on the Council expected was ridiculous. Because in their small minds, being anything less than straight somehow made you less of a man or less of a shifter.
Like how Katy being gay made her a failure to our race since she likely wouldn’t have a kid herself. Her entire identity as a female was based around her ‘job’ to procreate in the majority of our world.
It was bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit, and I wasn’t