Odin (Billionaire Titans Book 2) by Alison Ryan Page A

with his usual enthusiasm, but softly.
    Nicole pounded on my front door until I let her in, and we drove together to the Desert Springs Medical Complex. A few blocks away, we parked in a Wendy’s parking lot and walked the rest of the way until somebody in a uniform stopped us. I explained who I was, that my husband’s practice was on the third floor of the tower, and the officer looked at me grimly.
    “Follow me,” he instructed, and we were taken to a makeshift command center in the gas station parking lot behind my husband’s building.
    A sergeant met with me, a gruff older man with blue eyes and skin long ago cracked and made leather by the desert sun.
    “We have an active shooter situation, Ma’am. I have men inside the building, but that’s all I can say right now. I have a list here of people who made it out, and you’re welcome to look at it, but I have an even longer list of people unaccounted for. Several people have been taken to MULV.”
    I looked at Nicole, but I knew that if Callum had arrived there, that she’d know about it. She shook her head solemnly.
    “There’s nothing else I can say right now, Ma’am,” the sergeant offered.
    “But you’re looking for him, for my husband, right? Can’t you just go in and find him? He might be hurt! Please!” I was frantic.
    “We’re doing all we can. I want to send all of my people back home to their families at the end of all this, and we’re working as safely as we can to ensure a good outcome for everyone.”
    “Good outcome?” I was incredulous. “My husband could be in there bleeding to death or with a gun to his head? Some maniac is in there with bombs and guns and you want a ‘good outcome’? Fuck you! You aren’t helping! I need my husband!” I pounded on the sergeant’s barrel chest, and he let me. Nicole embraced me, and together we collapsed to the gravel underfoot. I wept bitterly. The sergeant returned his focus to his radios and his paperwork.
    All I wanted to was to run inside the building. If I could save my husband, great. If I couldn’t, then hopefully the man with the guns would shoot me, too.
    Without Callum, I had nothing.

    * * *
    I ’d sat in the kitchen of a stone farmhouse in the province of Munster, County Cork, southwest Ireland when I received the call. After Callum’s funeral, I was invited by the O’Grady’s to stay and heal.
    His aunt and uncle, Maggie and Seamus, had a big house and bigger hearts, and told me I could remain indefinitely.
    It took the better part of two days for me to receive final confirmation that Callum had been killed, but details were scant. Bombs in the building made the going slow for the police, even with help from the FBI.
    The outpouring of grief from his family, his classmates, people he’d met through soccer, work colleagues, friends from Ireland and the States and beyond, was overwhelming. Nicole watched my house for me after she returned to Las Vegas from Ireland, and she told me that the cards and letters continued, unabated, for weeks. My social media accounts were flooded.
    I was lost.
    My phone rang one day, Sergeant Hutton, the man I’d encountered at the scene and screamed at in my desperation. He told me he had news from the medical examiner and from his own investigation that I’d want to hear.
    I apologized profusely for my actions the day of the tragedy, but Sergeant Hutton instead offered an apology of his own, telling me he was sorry that I’d had to wait like I did and that he wished he could have done something to prevent the entire tragedy.
    Marvin Fenske, a retired electrician, had lost his son Nathan, a veteran with PTSD, to suicide. Unsatisfied with what the VA was doing to help, Marvin had paid out of his own pocket for Nathan to see a doctor in Callum’s building, on the fifth floor of the tower. After three visits, Nathan’s demons won out, and he hanged himself from a tree in the backyard of his childhood home.
    When Marvin went to see the doctor who