“You did what?” I bellowed.

My father gave me a weary look, holding my infant sister in his arms as he tried to keep his e-reader out of her grasp. He was home giving his pregnant mate, Luis, a much-needed chance to take a nap before the rest of the family came over for our weekly dinner. When Anika wasn’t in school, either Luis or my other brothers-in-law took turns watching her with their children while I was at work. The Roman clan was supportive and loving to a fault, but we could be a bit overwhelming when we all got together.

“I don’t know why you’re so upset,” My father said, staring at me like I’d grown a second head. “You told me Ellis wasn’t going to accept any offer we made, so I made a move and moved on to the next shareholder.”

“It’s been a day. You couldn’t have given it a little more time?”

“Strike while the iron is hot, as they say. Besides, I have it on good authority that they just got served with another suit, so they’ll be more inclined to accept now than ever.”

I stared blankly at him. “I don’t even want to know how you know that, for legal reasons,” I muttered. It was no secret to me that my father, while unflinching in his own moral convictions, was more than willing to bend the rules when he thought they didn’t apply to him or shouldn’t. It was one of the things I had once admired about him, but in my attempt to become a better person, I had purged myself of those tendencies a long time ago.

He sighed. “I know you don’t like the way I do things, but I get things done. If you want to take over the project, you’re more than welcome to do things your own way.”

“Alright, I will.”

The way he was staring at me made it clear he hadn’t expected me to take him up on his offer. “You what?”

“I’m taking over the Stover Electronics acquisition,” I said firmly.

“I’m sorry, weren’t you just saying you wanted to start delegating more outside of the family? You really want to take this on, on top of all your other products?”

“I really do.” I didn’t feel like giving any more explanation than that, even though I could see the questions in his gaze.

“What happened at dinner?” he asked warily.

“Nothing more than what I told you.”

“No,” he murmured, his eyes sharpening. That look was the reason I’d never developed a smoking habit in my adolescent rebellion. The man’s intuition was as sharp as his sense of smell, and getting away with anything in the house was damn near impossible. “Something changed.” He hesitated. “Reece, if this is about you feeling bad for your friend —“

“It’s not. I just don’t like the way you do things, and if you want me to lead, you’re going to have to let me lead my way.”

He listened, his eyes gleaming with curiosity. I could tell he didn’t believe that was all there was to it, but he didn’t press the issue, to my relief. “Alright, then. Stover is yours to do with as you see fit, but the offer has already been made and there’s more riding on this acquisition than just the money. We’ve already secured contracts, made promises and started hiring people for the new plant this is going to allow us to build.”

“I know that,” I gritted out. “I’ll make sure the sale goes through, but you need to leave the rest to me. I need your word.”

“Fine,” he said, clearly surprised at my insistence. To be fair, it wasn’t often that I put my foot down on something like this. I never cared enough, one way or another. “You have my word.”

“Good,” I muttered. “Please keep an eye on Anika, and tell Luis I’m sorry I won’t be here for dinner.”

“Where are you going?” he called as I pulled on my coat.

“There’s something I need to take care of,” I said, leaving it at that before pulling the door shut behind me.

I’d left dinner with Ellis still reeling from the realization that the way I’d felt toward him in the past hadn’t been exaggerated in my memory, and wasn’t just some weird, misunderstood crush. Between the discovery that he still hated me as fiercely as he had the last time we’d seen each other and all the implications imprinting on a male omega had for my own identity, I’d hoped to take at least a few days to process things before the board voted. I should have known my father wouldn’t give either of us that chance.

I was already the last person Ellis wanted to see, and I was sure I’d moved even lower in the interim, but I had to find him. He needed to know what was happening, and I’d been around enough acquisitions to know that there was a damn good chance he didn’t. At the very least, I needed him to know that it wasn’t my doing and that I wasn’t going to let anyone push him out of the company he’d worked so hard to preserve.

It occurred to me that I didn’t actually know where he lived only once I was on the road, but I figured I could call his secretary and find out on the way. It wasn’t a huge town, and there were only a few affluent neighborhoods. I knew what kind of car he drove from our meeting at the restaurant, so worst case scenario, I could just drive around until I found him. I was dialing the number to his office when I caught sight of a blue convertible stranded on the side of the road with its emergency lights on.

I pulled to a stop and saw Ellis waving his phone in the air, trying to get signal. He took one look at me and I could tell his day had gone from bad to worse. I rolled down my window. “Need some help?”

“Yeah. Just not from you,” he muttered, going back to trying to find signal.

I sighed. “You’re out of luck, this is a dead zone for three miles. What’s wrong with your car?”

“The tire is stuck in the mud, what does it look like?”

I got out of the car and went around to look. Sure enough, it was sunk in deep and I could tell he’d made it worse by revving the engine trying to get out. “Yeah, this soil’s like quicksand a few days after it rains. You’re gonna need a tow.”

He bit his lip and looked down the road. I could tell he was considering waiting for the next car to come along, but I wasn’t about to leave him out there, no matter how much he hated me.

“There’s something I need to talk to you about. If you let me give you a ride home, I can call a truck to take care of your car.”

“If it’s about your company swooping in and bribing my board members in the middle of the night, don’t bother. I already walked in on the coup.”

I winced. So they had kept it from him. That stung, but given how scary he could be when he was pissed, I could understand why. This was not the timid kid I’d known in school. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know my father was planning on doing that.” I hesitated. “When are they going to vote?”

“They already did. Congratulations, you got what you wanted.”

He’d just hate me even more if he knew what I actually wanted. “Please, just let me take you home,” I said, opening the car door. “It’s not safe out here at night.”

His eyes narrowed. “So now you’re concerned about my safety? That’s rich.”

I frowned. I knew my friends had been a little rough on him in high school, but I’d never let the bullying escalate that far. Just far enough to make me a piece of shit. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” he muttered, stalking past me to get into the car. “I live in the new condominiums they just put up on Sixth. Drop me off and I’ll call a tow truck myself.”

I got in on the driver’s side and tried to come up with anything I could say to make this better, racking my brain for any peace offering I could give. “I know this is probably the last thing you want to hear, but I’ve taken over the acquisition.”

He laughed, folding his arms. “Lovely. This day just keeps getting better.”

“I’m not my father. I don’t approve of the way he handled this, and I’m not going to put up with any more of the secrecy or backstabbing.”

He cast me a look of poorly veiled disgust. “Why do you even care? You got what you wanted. You’re in control of the company and if you wanted, you could fire me tomorrow and never have to deal with me again. Why does it even matter what I think?”

That was a good question. The answer wasn’t one I could give him, even if he deserved it. “Guilt, I guess,” I finally said, deciding I at least owed him the truth. Even if it was only a fraction of it. “I don’t like the way things ended between us. Hell, I don’t like the way any of it went down, and I’m not saying I want us to try and be friends or anything. I know we’re far past that.”

“You’re damn right about that,” he muttered.

“But we are going to be working together,” I continued, pulling onto the street of the new development. The lot was still half-empty since most of the units hadn’t been filled yet, so finding a parking space was easy. I knew I might not have this chance again, so I had to make the words count. “You know the company better than anyone, and I’d like to work together, not against each other. You don’t have to stop hating me after what I put you through, but I think we have the chance to do something good here.”

“Hate you?” he laughed. “I hate your company and everything it stands for, but you? I feel sorry for you now, just like I did back then. Maybe I lost control of my company, but at least I’ve always known who I am, and I never had to make anyone else feel less because of it. As much as I appreciate your attempt at charity, I’d rather be alone in the world than be allies with a man like you.”

His words hit their mark, and knowing I deserved them didn’t mean I was immune to being offended. “I’m not defending what I did in high school, but you of all people should know that you can change. You’re not the person you were then, and neither am I. I’m not asking you to forgive me, but can you at least give me the chance to prove that?”

“Fine,” he said, turning to face me. “All I need to know if you’ve really changed is the answer to a single question.”

“What is it?” I asked doubtfully. There was something in his tone that made me feel like he already knew the answer, even if he hadn’t yet asked the question.

“Are you still friends with Drew Richards?”

I frowned. Drew had been at my wedding, and while I wouldn’t say we were close, the pictures were plastered all over social media, so I knew better than to deny it in case he looked for proof.

“That’s what I thought,” he said before I could respond, getting out of the car to close the door. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Ellis, wait!” I pleaded.

He ignored me and walked up the steps to his building. I watched, trying to decide whether I was going after him as the doorman pulled the door open for him. At length, I decided against it. There was nothing I could say that would change his mind when he’d obviously made it up already.

I could understand why he was still holding a grudge against Drew, since he had taken it upon himself to spearhead the bullying against Ellis more than the others had, but the guy had changed as much as I had. We hadn’t spoken in years, save for the reunion Ellis had been absent from despite still living in town. Last I heard, he’d moved across the country for a job and was engaged to an omega of his own. Gray had more connection to him than I did those days through a company they’d both worked with, so I decided to ask him if there’d been any more bad blood between Drew and Ellis since I’d gone off to college.

If Ellis was going to punish me for not severing the ties of my past completely, maybe they could at least give me some indication of how to move forward.

* * *

“Drew? Wasn’t he the one who cut up all Ellis’ clothes so he had to finish the day in sweats from the lost and found?”

I grimaced as Gray brought another memory I’d forgotten to the surface. “Yeah, he’d be the one. I thought maybe you guys had kept in touch.”

“Not since that college internship. The guy was kind of a dick.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “I can see that now.”

“He also had a major fixation on you,” my brother said with a snort as he went over the contract on his screen. “He was practically your henchman.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Come on, man. Drew was practically in love with you.”

I frowned. “No he wasn’t.”

Gray gave me a weary look. “You can’t be that naive after all these years. Why do you think he started those rumors about you imprinting on Ellis?”

I swallowed hard. I wasn’t ready to tell him they weren’t rumors. Not yet. “Wait…Drew started that?”

“You seriously didn’t know?” he asked, finally looking up from his screen.

“No. I just thought he helped spread them.”

“Why are you asking about this again after all these years? Did Ellis mention him?”

“Yeah. And he blames me for not cutting Drew out of my life, even though we were both shitty people back then.”

“I mean… I can kind of understand,” Gray said, pushing back from his desk. “If someone had done half that shit to me, I’d cut off anyone who had anything to do with them and I’m not even an omega. God, if anyone laid a hand on Dylan…”

“Wait, Drew hurt him? Physically?”

He stared blankly at me. “Were you just that high all throughout junior year?”

To be fair, I probably was. Despite our mother’s best efforts to give us a taste of normalcy by sending us to public school, I didn’t have much of a work ethic back then. I’d always known that the world would be handed to me on a silver platter as soon as I graduated, and it had taken meeting an omega who held me to a higher standard to make me want more in life. “Probably,” I admitted. “I mean, I knew they were kind of rough, but I thought it was just the other omegas who got physical with him.”

I hated that I’d let it happen at all, regardless of who the perpetrator had been. I hated that I’d been too much of a coward to stand up and claim him, even if I wasn’t ready to claim him as my eternal mate. I still wasn’t, and Ellis certainly didn’t need my protection now, but I promised myself right then that I would right as many wrongs as I could.

In light of what Gray had just told me, Ellis’s words outside the car took on a different meaning. So now you’re concerned about my safety?

Shit. He probably thought I knew how far the bullying had gone, and since I’d never stepped in any of the other times, I had only myself to blame for that. Looking back, he was right. I should have ditched Drew and all the others way back in high school, but I couldn’t hold them to a standard I didn’t meet myself.

This was such a mess. Monday morning, I was due to take the tour of the Stover Electronics offices, and I knew that time would tell if there was any chance I could ever put things right with Ellis.

Now more than ever, I was determined to try.