35. Seraphina
35
SERAPHINA
T he elevator dinged, and the doors opened to reveal a long, carpeted hallway. Bronze sconces dotted the walls, and framed watercolor paintings gave the otherwise sterile space some life. We passed several meeting rooms labeled with names like “Brazos,” “Pecan,” and “Longhorn” until we reached a large conference room at the end of the hall.
“Are you sure I’m dressed okay?” I asked Loki, pausing at the door. It was unlike me to care about such things, but this was a professional meeting, and it was being held by my new in-laws. I’d tied the ends of my T-shirt into a little knot at my waist, and I was still wearing yoga pants and running shoes. The ensemble did not exactly scream “badass assassin.”
“It’s Sunday, doll,” he replied breezily. “Weekend casual permitted.”
My Alphas had traded their sweatpants for worn jeans that hugged their muscular butts and thighs like I wanted to hug their dicks with my vagina, and instead of their usual Sentinel-branded work shirts, they wore faded T-shirts that clung to their broad chests and allowed a full view of the tattoos decorating their arms.
“You guys are distracting,” I griped. “I can see Hawk’s nipples through that white shirt.” Not to mention all the ink on his chest.
“Back at you, Little Flame,” Hawk replied. “Those pants look like they were painted on that juicy ass.”
“And when did you get that shirt, querida, your freshman year of high school?” Blaze asked. “Your tits barely fit in it now, and I can’t look at anything else.”
The conference room door banged open. Blaze’s dad, Marius, stood in the doorway, wearing gray slacks and a linen shirt, a dark brow arched at us. “Would you four care to join us?”
Blaze rolled his eyes and gave his dad a shitty salute, then he grabbed my hand and led me past Marius and into the room. Loki and Hawk followed, sticking as close to my back as they could manage.
Inside, several long tables had been set up in a horseshoe, with computers, files, and cords strewn about the surfaces. The tables faced four large screens mounted on the back wall. Seated around the table were a few of the guys’ fathers, including Thomas Montgomery and Ivan Dallas. A handful of other Sentinel operatives I didn’t know were also present, and seated away from the table, reclining lazily in a lone chair in the corner, was Jere.
I halted my steps and pointed at him, indignant. “Why is my dad here?”
Jere cocked his head, his deep-green gaze zeroing in on my necklace of fresh bite marks on display above the stretched-out neck of my T-shirt.
“We invited Jericho to join us,” Marius told me as he strode by to take a seat at the head of the horseshoe. “Now that we’ve been made aware of Bryce Solutions’ consulting role in this case, we could certainly use his expertise.”
I glared at Jere. “I do not need a chaperone.”
He ignored that, instead nodding at my neck. “Your mother is not going to be happy.”
“Wait a second,” Ivan Dallas said. I could feel the entire room’s focus shift toward me. “Are those?—”
I stomped my foot and threw my arms into the air. “Oh, that is rich , Jere. All Mom has ever wanted from me was to shape up and find a pack to bond with. I finally did that, with Alphas you all handpicked , by the way, and now I’m in trouble because I bonded with them too quickly? Give me a goddamned break.”
“Gabriel,” Thomas Montgomery rumbled. “You knew better than this. Your mother also will not be pleased.”
Loki pointed at me. “Did you hear what my sharp and beautiful omega just said, Dad? You all got what you wanted, and now you have the audacity to complain that we cemented our bond on our own schedule, not the one dictated by bullshit OFS customs.”
Ivan Dallas rubbed his temples. “But you all know how much the bonding ceremony means to your mothers. And the tradition of waiting to bond the omega you’re courting is meant to demonstrate the pack’s superior control over their Alphas, which the three of you have in spades, so there’s no excuse.”
Hawk scoffed. “Bullshit, Dad. The wait is about some purity culture nonsense that the OFS still propagates.”
I gave him my biggest heart eyes. “You complete me, Jasper Dallas.”
Hawk’s adoring smile almost had me climbing him like a tree, the fact that we were in the middle of our business meeting with our fathers be damned.
Marius cleared his throat and cut his son a pointed look. “I’ll bust your ass later, Alexander. None of us should be surprised, really, that all four of you still refuse to color inside the lines. This is, of course, why you are a perfect match, despite the heartburn it gives your parents. But I will also just say….” He aimed the patented blinding-white smile of a Cruz male right at me. “Congratulations. Welcome, once again, to the family, Seraphina.”
“Thank you, sir. I am excited to be here, both as a member of the younger Pack Montgomery and on behalf of Bryce Solutions as a contract consultant. My trigger finger is getting itchy.”
Marius raised a brow at Jere. “You’ve managed this for years, huh?”
Jere shrugged. “You get used to it.”
“Now, to business,” Ivan said, cracking his knuckles before typing furiously on his laptop.
Loki settled me into a chair and took the seat next to me. Blaze slid in on my other side, and Hawk punched him in the shoulder before grabbing the chair next to Blaze. He craned around Blaze to give me one pitiful little pout, and I blew him a kiss to make it better.
Several images appeared on the screens in front of us.
Hart, cocky grin in place as he posed for his hospital staff headshot. Candi Jenkins, dressed like a 1950s housewife, blonde hair perfectly curled as she smiled demurely for a magazine photoshoot. A bland man in his forties with graying brown hair and a mustache. Photos from what must’ve been the original break-in at the Ackers lab, with broken glass strewn about the sterile-looking space. Images of the dead Ussuri guards from Hart’s lake house.
“This is the state of the mess we have to finish cleaning up,” Marius began. “What began as an investigation to catch a thief has now morphed into what will likely be a rescue mission for omega women and girls taken or coerced by the organization and the three main players pictured here.”
Presumably for Jere’s benefit, he summarized everything we’d uncovered thus far—Stone and the MC’s involvement in the initial break-in at the lab, the connection between Stone and Hart, the sham Families for All Institute jointly owned by Hart, Candi Jenkins, and a Russian oligarch named Dmitri Glebov, the effects of both the original Ackers drug and the drug as modified by Hart, and the fact that Stone had been about to traffic two omega girls somewhere before he’d ended up with my bullet in his head.
I raised my hand. “When I confronted Professor Hart at the lake, he spewed some BS about the low-bred girls they’d procured . Since he was an arrogant, delusional prick, that wasn’t good enough for him, so he snatched Paige instead.”
Loki squeezed my thigh. None of us would mention that he’d also tried to snatch me.
“Which is why,” Loki told me, “our working theory after the events at the lake was that the institute plans to use the drug on unwilling omegas to create some kind of forced surrogacy situation. Both for the benefit of the owners themselves and potentially for other betas who are willing to pay for a baby.”
Jere nodded, his focus never straying from the images on the screens. “And the involvement of the Ussuri is concerning. Glebov has provided this project with a stable of violent idiots with questionable training and no morals. It fits with the theory that they’re holding actual humans against their will, not just hiding a cache of stolen drugs.”
“What have you guys figured out since the lake raid?” I asked the room.
“We’ve dug into as much of the institute’s public and private dealings as we could find,” Ivan replied. “The files we recovered from Hart’s briefcase contained a list of potential partners or investors in this conspiracy on a smaller scale. Many are beta couples of status from all over the state. None of them have children.”
His fingers flew across his laptop keys again, and new images appeared in front of us.
Satellite photos of a large white mansion surrounded by pruned hedges, a pink Cadillac parked in the driveway. Screenshots from an understated professional website touting the institute’s work in advocating for beta families in very vague terms. More screenshots from what looked like a secured chatroom.
“As far as we can tell,” Ivan went on, “there is no office or official address for the institute. The entity’s formation documents do not list one, and since they never actually filed with the state, there is no registered address. There is no lease in any public record under their names or the institute’s name. Candi Jenkins owns only her home, shown here. Gerald Hart owned only his home and the lake house. Glebov owns a bevy of properties in Russia, and anything he may own in the US has so far eluded our attempts to trace it.”
Hawk gestured to the screen displaying the chatroom activity. “We knew there had to be some way that the institute was communicating with potential donors or clients,” he said, “so this week we focused on tracking down as many of the people on the list from Hart’s briefcase as we could. We were also fortunate that Hart’s cell phone was in his briefcase and not lost at the bottom of the lake after the Ussuri blew his head off.”
“Quick question,” I interjected, raising my hand again. “Why did the Ussuri kill Hart? The entire reason they were at the lake house initially was to guard him and the drug.”
Marius grimaced. “We suspect the Ussuri answer mainly to Glebov, not Hart, and that Hart’s primary value to this operation was his knowledge of the Ackers drug and his ability to modify it to work much faster. But his going off script and kidnapping an OFS omega for his little project was not only unsanctioned, it also revealed him to be unstable.”
“The guards who were called in as reinforcements were probably given the order to eliminate Hart as long as they could get possession of his briefcase,” Loki told me.
“Ah.” There was something poetic about Hart’s obsession with being owed the same things as the OFS courting Alphas being the thing that led to his downfall.
“As far as Hart’s cell phone goes,” Blaze added, “he was generally careful with his texts, and his call history didn’t give us much. There was, however, one suspicious mention of a ‘private chat’ in an exchange with Candi Jenkins. That helped us know what to look for, and a couple of days ago, one of the people from the donor list slipped up.”
Ivan chuckled. “Some people are still easily duped by a phishing email. Once we were into his computer, the login instructions were easy to find.”
“To summarize the gist of the chatter,” Marius said, flapping a hand at the screen, “the participants seem to be bidding on a product , the first of which is supposed to be available in the spring.”
Cold dread crept through my body. “They did it, then,” I said tonelessly. “They used the drug to induce a mini-heat on whatever poor omegas they’ve forced into this scheme, and at least some of them are pregnant.”
Marius nodded, his face grim. “We believe so. The timing aligns from when the Ackers drug was first stolen late last spring. If they managed to, uh, induce their first pregnancy this summer?—”
“You mean if they managed to violate these omegas by forcing them into their most vulnerable state and taking advantage of their inability to say no,” I ground out.
Loki reached into my lap, where my hands were balled in such tight fists that my fingernails were digging into my palms. He gently unwound my fingers and placed my hands into his lap instead. Blaze threw a protective arm around me, squeezing me tight, and then a low, soothing rumble sounded in his chest.
The anxiety and rage leached from me almost instantly. “Shit,” I whispered. “They really weren’t joking about the power of your Alpha’s purr.”
The dads in the room took a break from business mode to gaze fondly upon the group of us, like they were so proud of their handiwork. Loki cleared his throat and glared at Marius.
“Right,” Marius said, resuming the meeting. “The bottom line is that the institute must have a lab or facility of some kind, both to replicate the stolen fertility drug and to house their omega victims. The chatroom user HappyFamilies89, whom we believe is Candi Jenkins, assures the group that the product is being tended to by licensed professionals. We think this is code for medical care, so they’d need to have some kind of clinic on-site as well.”
“We need the location of that lab,” Ivan said, his tone deadly serious. “We’ve been unable to find it via our usual means, so now we will need to change tactics.”
I looked at Loki. “We need to get to Candi Jenkins.”
He nodded. “Exactly. She’s likely the only person—besides Glebov, who has not left Russia—who knows the location of the lab. The Ussuri armed guard that we’re certain to find there probably stays on-site and rotates shifts 24/7.”
“We think our best shot for access to her is happening a week from now,” Marius announced. “According to the chatroom, this coming Saturday, the institute is holding a private, invitation-only, fundraising gala at Candi Jenkin’s mansion, which is located in one of the most exclusive gated communities in Fort Wayne.”
I quirked a brow. “Do you all not live in the most exclusive gated community in Fort Wayne? Are you Candi’s neighbors?”
Thomas Montgomery scoffed. “She is in one of the most exclusive, not the most exclusive. We live in White Rock Estates, which is smaller, pricier, and closer to the city center.”
I laughed. He sounded like Andrew.
“So how are we getting an invitation to the gala?” I asked. “I’m guessing this is a beta-only affair?”
Ivan waved a dismissive hand. “Generating a passable fake invitation is the easy part. We just need to assemble a capable team of beta operatives.”
It was my turn to wave a hand. “That’s easy. Leave it to me.”
For the next hour, we talked through our plan. When I would raise my hand and offer thoughts or suggestions, I was listened to. No one, not even the Sentinel staff in the room who were not related to my Alphas, appeared dismissive or skeptical that I, a small, young, and newly bonded omega woman, could contribute to this mission in a significant way.
It was entirely possible that Thomas Montgomery had put the fear of God into everyone here before we’d arrived in an attempt to get back into Loki’s (or my) good graces, but I’d take these vibes however I could get them.
Especially because of the overwhelming sense of pride that radiated through my bonds every time I spoke. If I could’ve bottled that feeling and sold it, I’d be a bazillionaire, richer than the Montgomery, Cruz, and Dallas packs combined.
The sun was just beginning to set when we were finally dismissed. The guys and I determined that our first order of business would be taking me to grab more clothes and toiletries to keep in their suite, so we trudged out to the small parking lot behind the hotel, heading for where Loki had screeched their SUV to a halt last night before tearing me out of Blaze’s clutches and running off with me.
I typed out a text to Cam on the walk, and as Loki started the car, my phone pinged with his response.
“Where to, Lamb?” Loki asked. “Your dorm? Or your parents’ house?”
Blaze chuckled. “I can’t decide which place would be more awkward for us to all pile into your bedroom together.”
“My parents’ house, for sure,” I said to Blaze, and then I met Loki’s ethereal gaze in the rearview mirror. “But actually, I want to make another stop first. Head to Merchant Village, please.”
Hawk, who’d won the minor skirmish to sit in the backseat with me, quirked a pierced brow. “Merchant Village?”
“Yep. I need to talk to Cam, and I suspect you guys have an appointment there as well.”
The three of them exchanged questioning looks, then Loki shrugged, shifted into Drive, and away we went.