Finally, she called a friend who was a constable with the Gardai. He would only tell her that there had been a bomb and they had someone in custody talking to him about it.
“I had a friend staying there. His name is Ronan McNally. Do you know if he’s among the injured or the . . . dead,” she asked, her voice faltering slightly as she spoke.
“Ronan McNally? You know him?”
“Yes. Do you have any news on him?”
“I can’t tell you anything else, Maeve. I’m sorry. I have to go.”
Maeve looked down at her phone as she realized he had ended the call without waiting for a response from her. He knew the name. Why? What did he know about Ronan? More importantly, why did it matter to her?
The night that followed felt like an endless assault on her emotions. Fear that Ronan had been hurt in the blast, perhaps killed. The grief that came with that thought. The guilt at knowing she’d developed feelings for the man who had killed her fiancé. Everything swirled around her head and her heart, tangling into a mass of frustration and confusion that kept her awake until the wee hours of the morning.
She awoke with a start just after dawn, hours before her alarm sounded. Snatching her phone up off the bedside table, she checked for messages and found none. Instead, she switched to the news feeds, looking for any information but finding none. She tossed it onto the bed in frustration and went to take a shower. She had a lot to get done today if she could force herself to focus.
A few hours later, she stood in front of the compound, waiting for the crew she’d hired to begin the demolition. The castle called to her, beckoning her like some ancient monolith drawing her in from the supernatural. Was it him? Was it all of them? Or was it just her own demons screaming out from the inside?
She walked toward the ruins and looked over the walls one last time. There was nothing there, no force. No spirits. It was just a gaping, metal-laced hole in the ground now. Anything that had once been there was now gone and would remain so. Nothing she did would change that, and perhaps she’d been wrong to think she should.
“I’m sorry,” she said into the open morning air, the sound of tires crunching along the gravel road behind her growing nearer.
She turned to see two work vans pulling in, followed by a lorry with a bulldozer on the trailer it pulled behind. They had barely come to a full stop when a burly ginger man hopped out of one of the vans and came toward her with a large grimace on his face.
“You Maeve?” he asked.
“That’s me.”
“You ready for this to get started?”
“Aye. I am.”
“We’ll start with the building here and get it on the ground. After that, we’ll move over to the castle and get that filled in for you. I have a dump truck on the way with dirt and gravel. Once we get it filled in, we’ll pour a concrete pad atop it. It’ll need to cure for a day or two before we begin laying the stone flooring you want.”
“Sounds right. Thanks.”
“You gonna stay to supervise or should I just call you when the job is done?”
“Just call me when it’s done. I need to go take care of some other things I have going on.”
“You’re a busy lass,” he teased.
“That I am,” she said with a smile, turning to make her way down the road to where she’d parked her car.
She thought about slipping off into the woods again to check the tunnel once more just in case she’d missed some sign the first time, but she knew there was no use. There was little chance that anyone had survived both the twisted melted metal in the dungeon and the cave-in of the tunnel.
Instead, she climbed into the old Skoda she’d borrowed from Rebekah and headed home. Everything felt upside down now. All this time, she’d been angry and eager to deal vengeance to the McNallys, and now, she realized she was falling for one of them.
The biggest question she had to ask herself was how she could be so willing to avenge her lost fiancé since the moment she’d discovered the horror of his death and so quickly give it all up. For the first time in a while, she saw a future for herself, not just the possibility of love—but also the chance at making her own way through life was on the table.
Every Omega grows up knowing she has little control over her life. She is expected to marry as soon as she is of age and be subservient to her mate. Her job is to keep her home clean, her husband happy, and pop out litters of cubs to strengthen the numbers of the pack.