Chapter 16
We Go After Someone Else
Haven is noticing we have taken no steps against her father. Or at least she suspects we haven’t. It might be because every time she asks what we have planned, if there’s anything she can do to help, we gently tell her not to worry about it.
Not that we wouldn’t want her help if there was something for her to do, but there isn’t. The only way Haven factored into our plans was as a tool, a way to embarrass her father, and we sure as hell aren’t doing that anymore, not when it would also ruin our girl’s reputation.
Everything else we can do on our own, and well, we aren’t really planning on doing any of it… Not yet anyway, not until we’ve proven to Haven to stay with us, not necessarily to forgive us, but to at least give us a second chance at being hers.
I want nothing more than to be hers.
I just need her to want it, too.
It grates on my alpha that we haven’t gotten retribution on the man who ruined both of our omegas, hurt them worse than anyone should ever endure. But Hale was right. If Haven will only stay with us until we take care of her father, until he’s behind bars or dead, then we have to hold off on our plans.
The only thing that helps keep my alpha in check is having our omega in the house again, her sweet and spicy scent lingering over everything. Even if she’s not in the room, her scent is there. It soothes him like nothing else, makes it easier to focus on what we need to do.
The low murmur of her husky voice drifts through the halls as she snuggles up with Florence, a daily visitor to our house. It’s the routine now. When Ren is done with rehearsal she comes here, wedges herself between Haven and whoever is sitting next to her on the couch—there’s always at least one of us. They snuggle and watch the truly terrible Alpha Love Getaway . Ren stays for dinner and then leaves an hour or so after that.
It would bother me, having another omega in the house, except that the only time Haven is truly herself, truly happy is when Ren is here.
I fucking love that she has such a loyal and caring friend. One who I know will do anything for our girl.
I just wish she wasn’t here for hours every day. She’s cutting into our time with Haven, with our ability to make things up to her. And she’s been right there with Haven pushing to know when we’re going to take down Bell, what the plans are, what the fallout will be.
Not one of us has said that our plan ends with his death. I suspect that they’re assuming he’s going to wind up destitute and in jail or something benign like that. But no, we fully intend to put him in the ground.
That has always been the intention.
Ruin him. Make him hurt. Put a bullet in his head.
“We have to do something,” Tic says, softly, amber eyes flicking toward the living room where Haven and Ren are curled on the couch together under a mountain of blankets. The four of us are in the kitchen, prepping dinner, though really it’s just Tic doing most of the work.
Ren had all but chased us out of the living room and told us not to come back unless it was to bring snacks or to tell them dinner was ready. So the three of us just linger here, watching the omegas on the couch from a distance.
“What do you mean?” Jude asks, not looking away from the back of Haven’s head. He does this a lot these days, just stares at her, like he’s worried if he looks away she’ll disappear. I understand the fear. We’ve lost her too many times as it is.
“I mean, she’s going to start wondering why we’re not taking steps against her father when we’ve been planning his downfall for fucking years.”
I nod and run a hand down my face. “If we don’t do something, she might change her mind about staying.”
Jude shakes his head, looking at the three of us, before whipping his gaze back to the messy bun just visible over the back of the couch. “But we agreed she’d only stay until he was gone, until she would be safe from him. If we take him down, she might decide-” He cuts off, his voice choked like the words are too hard to say.
But we know what he means. She might leave, might run as far from us as she can if the threat of her father isn’t hanging over her head. I hope like hell that won’t be the case, but I know we aren’t anywhere close to where we need to be in order to ensure it won’t be.
“What if, instead of going after Bell, we go after someone else?”
I turn my attention to Hale, sitting at the island with his laptop in front of him. “Who did you have in mind?”
He pins me with a look like he thinks I should already know the answer.
“Coogan?” Tic asks, forearm flexing as he dices an onion.
Jude grunts out a noise that’s half growl, half delighted laugh. “Oh, fuck yes. Let’s go after the asshole who thought he’d marry our girl.”
My head wobbles back and forth, considering. “It would still hurt Bell if Coogan was gone.”
Hale nods. “We always intended for him to be a part of the plan for just being an insufferable ass, but now that we know he added his own commands on top of Freddy’s, that he was going to force Haven to marry him, that he would have raped her once that happened? I want to make him fucking hurt. Badly.”
I have to blink away the red haze over my eyes at the realization that he’s absolutely right. Brian Coogan would have raped Haven. She wouldn’t have fought him on it, wouldn’t have said no, because he would have barked her into laying there and spreading her legs, into not fighting him, into being quiet while he took and took and took from her. Her body would have allowed him to do all of those things, but her mind would have been screaming.
“Fuck.” Tic growls, knuckles white on the handle of the shaking knife in his hands. “Fuck.”
“Everything okay in there?” Haven’s sweet smoky voice filters through the haze, followed by her scent, which is slightly more acidic than normal, bitter. Fear. She’s afraid right now.
And it only takes a moment to figure out why.
All four of us are pumping out rage pheromones, just imagining what Brian would have done to her. I glance over to the couch to see Haven peeking over the back of it, brows arched over gray eyes. Florence is hunkered down next to her, shaking like a goddamn leaf. My girl’s stroking a hand up and down her back, trying to soothe her fear. Shit.
I take a deep breath through my nostril and let it out, forcing the haze away. The feral urge to find Brian Coogan and beat him until he’s no longer breathing retreats. I make my mouth curl into a reassuring smile. “Everything’s fine, baby girl.”
Her brows draw together, making a wrinkle form between them. “You sure? Because you’re all… very pheromony right now.”
“That’s not a word, angel.”
Haven shrugs. “It’s close enough to a word, and you know what I mean. You’re all bristling like porcupines right now. Did something happen? Did my father do something?”
At that question, Ren’s head pops up to eye us warily as she waits for the answer.
“Nope,” Hale says, shaking his head and shifting so his entire body is facing Haven. “No, he didn’t do anything. We were just discussing Brian Coogan and what we should do with him.”
Heaven’s head tilts as Ren looks at all of us. “Do with him?”
Jude nods and grins at her. “Yep. The asshole barked at you too, made you do things you didn’t want to do. He deserves to hurt, too.”
Ren grins. “Now that is something I can get behind. Anything I can do to help?”
“Or me?” Haven asks like she already knows that we’re going to turn her down. Why wouldn’t she assume that’s what’s going to happen, when it’s all we’ve been doing for the last week?
Hale shakes his head. “Not yet. We don’t have much of a plan ready. We never really intended to go after Coogan, not directly.”
“So then, why are you doing it now? Shouldn’t you focus on my father?”
Tic’s quick to answer. “Taking down Coogan first will hurt the senator. Knock out his biggest support and he’ll be floundering.”
Haven considers for a long moment before she nods slowly. “Yeah, I can see that. Brian basically runs his life for him. I’m pretty sure my father doesn’t have a clue what his schedule actually looks like.”
I have to grit my teeth at her using that douchenozzle’s first name and at her still referring to Frederick Bell as her father, after everything he’s done. He doesn’t deserve the honor of that title. But it’s not like I can tell her that.
She likely already knows.
But old habits and all that.
“Not to mention if we do it publicly, really make a big deal about how fucked up and shady he is, it’s bound to reflect poorly on Freddy boy,” Jude says.
Haven nods slowly, before it changes to a shake. “He’ll just claim he had no knowledge of anything Brian was doing.”
I shrug. “Even if that’s true, the public, his constituents might not believe it.”
“The seeds of doubt will be sown,” Ren murmurs almost to herself before a sneaky little smile curls her lips and she pops up to brace her elbows on the back of the couch. “I like it. It’ll bring the senator’s reputation into question. Start making everyone watch him a little more closely, monitor his actions, question him.”
“He’ll hate that,” Haven adds.
Hale nods. “Exactly. It’ll put him on edge. And people on edge are more likely to make mistakes.”
“So it’s a start,” Haven says slowly. “What else do you have planned?”
We all know what she’s asking. What else do we have planned for her father? What else are we going to do to him, and more importantly, when are we going to do it? These are near constant question these days, and while we’ve tried to distract her with showering her with time and attention and gifts to prove to her how sorry we are for everything we put her through, she is like a dog with a bone. She will not be distracted from this.
I can’t even blame her.
“We’ve had to make some adjustments,” Hale cuts in smoothly. “Since a portion of our plan fell through.”
Haven gives an unimpressed hum. “Right. You’ve been saying that. But you haven’t actually told me anything. What needs to be adjusted? When will those adjustments happen? You can’t just keep me in the dark on this.”
“We’re not,” Tic reassures her. “Once there’s something to know, we’ll tell you.”
Another displeased hum, this time mimicked by Ren as well.
Without another word, Haven stands up from the couch and, with a glare over her shoulder, heads upstairs, clearly pouting.
I can’t even bring myself to feel all that bad about it.
If we only have her until her father is taken care of, either behind bars or in the ground, then I’ll stretch this out for as long as I possibly can.
Ren sighs and shakes her head like she thinks we’re idiots. “Fix this,” is all she says before trailing her best friend up the stairs.
Jude stares hard after both of the retreating omegas. “Maybe we should just do it,” he murmurs. “She’s already been through so goddamn much and we’re keeping her here when she clearly doesn’t want to be.”
I don’t have to have a bond with him to know he’s feeling guilty. After all, the reason Haven found out about the stupid game, about her being a tool for our revenge, is because he was careless and stubbornly didn’t delete the videos and score sheets like we asked him to.
“What’s that saying?” he asks, pulling his eyes off of our girl for the first time in probably an hour. “If you love something, set it free? Maybe we should set her free.”
“What the fuck are you saying?” Hale growls at him, low and dangerous. “That’s our fucking girl you’re talking about.”
Jude gives him this hopeless look that damn near tears my heart out of my chest. Jude never looks hopeless. Ever. He’s always the glass half full kind of guy. The only time I’ve seen him like this is when we lost Janie.
He thinks we’ve lost Haven, too.
She’s here with us, but she’s not ours. Not in the way we want her to be.
“Is she?” He whispers. “Is she our girl? She’s not here because she wants to be, Hale. She’s here because we told her we’d keep her safe.”
“And we are.”
“How long before she gets tired of waiting? Before she resents us even more? How long before she decides we aren’t moving fast enough, and she takes matters into her own hands?”
The thought of that makes my skin go cold. “She wouldn’t.” I have to believe that she wouldn’t willingly put herself in harm’s way just to take down her father, to get away from us. But she’s been living under his rule for longer than we’ve been seeking revenge. We’ve been operating under the assumption that as an omega, she’d rather stay within the safety of our pack.
But what if she’s ready to be done with all of this? With us? With him?
“Shit.” Tic growls.
“She wouldn’t do that,” Hale tries to reassure us, but he doesn’t sound convinced.
“Really? This is the omega that went against her father’s alpha commands to sneak out to see her best friend, to see us. Do you really think she wouldn’t sneak around to be free of all the assholes in her life?”
Jude shakes his head and runs a hand down his face. “If we take care of him for her, show her we are in fact trying to give her what she wants, maybe… maybe she won’t leave.”
“But right now you think she’s so frustrated with us, she won’t actually give us a chance,” Tic finishes.
Jude nods. “Yeah. I think maybe the best thing we can do is finish this and let her go.”
God, even the thought of that is enough to make my stomach clench and my alpha roar, batter at my ribs, demand that I go upstairs right now and claim our mate. But she doesn’t want that, and I will not force it on her.
“She loved us once,” I say, folding my arms over my chest like that will keep my alpha contained. “She can love us again. I think she still does.” Jude opens his mouth like he’s worried I won’t back him on this and is prepared to argue. I don’t give him the chance. “If we let her go, she’ll come back.”
Jude’s mouth curls into a small smile. “Besides, it’s not like we’re actually going to let her go. We’d keep an eye on her. ‘Run’ into her randomly on the street. We’d make sure we stay fresh in her mind.”
I nod slowly. “Yeah. Give her the illusion of being free while still courting her, however we can.”
“Wouldn’t the best courting gift be to get rid of her goddamn asshole of a father?”
I nod. Tic nods. Hale shakes his head. “Not yet. We can’t do it yet.” I think there’s a bit of desperation in his tone, like he’s not ready to not have Haven right here with us all day, every day.
None of us are, but at some point we have to think about what she wants, what she needs, and not what we want. Right? That’s what good alphas do.
The problem is that all our alphas and most of ourselves think the best thing for Haven is to stay here with us, safe and sound, where we can protect and provide for her.
It’s a constant drum in my head.
Protect the omega. Provide for the omega.
Protect the omega. Provide for the omega.
Protect the omega. Provide for the omega.
I can’t escape it.
My former packmates can’t either.
Hale shakes his head again, with more force. “No, we can’t take her father down. Not until she’s at least closer to forgiving us. There’s a reason forced proximity is a romance novel trope. It works.”
Tic’s mouth quirks into a half smile. “So you want to wear her down with our presence?”
Hale’s jaw tightens and releases. “Yeah. I do. She fell for us once. She can do it again. She will do it again.” He says it with such certainty, like it will happen because there couldn’t possibly be any other outcome. He won’t allow there to be.
I want to believe him. Jude and Tic do too.
But Haven’s scent is still hanging bitter in the air, and she hasn’t softened toward us.
“How long?” I ask.
Hale arches a brow at me. “How long what?”
“How long until we call it and give her what she wants?”
I think he’s going to deny that we’ll ever do that. But I stare at him steadily until he sighs. “A month. We’ll hold off on her father for a month, and if she hasn’t gotten any closer to forgiving us…” He trails off, unable to voice the words that Jude was brave enough to utter.
I realize Hale is fucking scared. Scared of a tiny five foot two omega who has spent her life under the thumb of a monster and who’s put us firmly in the same category of monstrous. He’s terrified that she’ll walk away and we’ll lose her, like we lost Janie. Only this time, we won’t have anyone to blame but ourselves.
That little omega has the power to ruin us more than we’ve ruined ourselves.
She doesn’t even realize it.