Page 8 of The Omega Switch: Part 2

Worst of all, I was starting to dislike my pack mates. They failed to see the truth about Ivy and Arabella. I would hold anger, sometimes fury, buried deep down when I looked at them. It was only months into it that I realized that the majority of my anger wasn’t at them - it was at myself. I saw in them the same qualities that I possessed - arrogance and ego. I had refused to follow my intuition. So, I withdrew, talking to them less and less while I tried to find a way to fix things.

My pack was the same way. We were all trapped in the same cycle, endlessly searching the past for answers that no longer existed, knowing full well that every replay ended the same way. I tried to find her anyway.

The morning that we confirmed she'd disappeared, I walked into the police station intending to file a missing person report. The officer listened patiently, then disappeared into a back office for several minutes, returning with an expression that immediately told me the conversation wasn't going to go the way I'd hoped.

He explained, as gently as he could, that Ivy had already been located and verified safe through channels he wasn't authorized to discuss. He couldn't tell me where she was, who had spoken with her, or even whether she remained in the state. The only information he was permitted to share was that legally, she had every right to leave her job, and her family, if that was what she wanted. I sat in my SUV for nearly an hour afterward, tryingt o digest it. But she was safe.

That should have been enough to quiet the panic inside my chest. I didn’t want to drag her back or force her to see us. I understood exactly why she'd run. After everything we'd allowed to happen, after believing Arabella over her and reinforcing every lie her family had spent years teaching her, why would she ever trust us enough to come back?

Knowing she was alive brought relief. But safe didn’t mean happy, or that she was healed. No matter what, I couldn't sleep right without knowing that she was okay.

I found Hunter in the kitchen one morning, his eye bags making his usual dashing face look more like a worn-down man. His scent was even different - all of our scents were. They smelled of regret and loss. We no longer smelled like a balanced Alpha pack. Hunter stared out the window like a zombie.

"You should go back to bed. Use medicine if you need to," I told him. He didn’t even look my way. After a long time, he finally spoke.

"Do you think she's happier?" He asked, his voice distant. The question made my stomach hurt. I looked out the window beside him, imagining a little house or an apartment somewhere where Ivy could finally breathe without fear.

"I hope so," I said, breathing out my despair.

Hunter nodded slowly.

"So do I."

His shoulders sagged, and I knew that no matter what, we would never recover until we knew she was happy. We desperately needed to know that somewhere out there, after everything we’d failed to protect her from, that she found peace. And I prayed that she had. The hardest part was accepting that we might never be allowed to know.

And I also knew that because of everything, we didn’t deserve to know.

Chapter 6

Hunter

I stepped out of the attorney's office, feeling conflicted. The only thing that brought me some relief from my anguish was relishing in the long, drawn-out legal battle against the Carrington family. I was going to take every last cent from them, tarnish their name, and force them to feel the pain I was feeling now. They’d regret ever treating Ivy like anything less than the special person that she was.

But today was different. After we’d filed so many suits against the Carrington family, I expected to spend the morning discussing more about their breach of contract and fraud. But there was more. Now, we were listening to a forensic accountant explain years of financial deception that somehow managed to be even uglier than the fraud we'd already uncovered.

The conference room was in awe as one of our attorneys projected another spreadsheet onto the wall, the columns of numbers looking ordinary until she began explaining what we were actually seeing. Elias sat next to me with his hands folded, nodding along, while Ronan leaned back in his chair, arms crossed tightly. They seemed normal, but our bonds were a fragile mess, fraying and winding painfully with our suppressed grief. We might as well have been strangers.

"Our discovery requests have uncovered more than we anticipated," Amanda, our lead attorney, explained as she clicked to the next slide. "At this point, the Bond Match fraud is only one component of a much larger pattern."

She highlighted several transactions for us to look at.

"The Carrington company frequently reported research and development expenditures that don't appear to exist. The funds that were supposed to be allocated toward laboratory upgrades were actually transferred into executive accounts, and sometimes luxury expenses unrelated to the business."

I leaned in, my mind spinning. Nestwell Aesthetics' money was being diverted to her family members, not put back into the company.

"The deeper we've dug," Amanda continued, "the clearer it's become that the family was using the company as a personal piggy bank, so to speak. Now, they are allowed to use their salaries as they see fit; however," she said as she pulled up more spreadsheets, “They also claimed government grants for projects that we have no proof ever existed.”

Elias’s jaw dropped open. Even I was shocked at their greed - especially since they shared none of their money with Ivy.

“When did this start?” I asked, reviewing the numbers they handed me.

“It seems that the fraud started small, roughly a year after the founder passed. But then it grew over time. Usually, people try something illegal, and when they aren’t caught, they keep pushing their luck.” She explained.

“They started after her mother passed,” Ronan said, his anger palpable. For good reason - this was something Ivy wasn’t privy to, nor did she benefit from. We could see exactly which accounts the money was going into.

“What about Ivy’s share in the company?” Elias asked, and our lawyers glanced at each other.

“That’s another issue - we still need to go through more discovery to find out more. But with inheritance law, Ivy should have at least some share in the company itself. Though, if she abandons the company, which it seems she has, that might forfeit her claim to any of it.”