Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Eli
“Quinton tried to kiss me.”
I set the tablet down and take the extra second I need to get my face under control before I look up. Reese is in my doorway with her arms wrapped around herself, and the last thing she needs is another Alpha making this about him.
“Close the door,” I say.
She does, then stays near it like she’s already reconsidering coming here. I nod at the worn leather chair across from mine, the one Jackson takes when we’re both in this room, and I wait until she’s in it.
“Start at the beginning.”
It comes out in pieces. The library, the project, the dinner she knew better than to agree to and agreed to anyway because she is starving for one hour of ordinary.
The way Quinton talked about the pack like a condition she could be treated for.
The careful work of positioning himself as the alternative, the exit, the decent man who only wants to help.
Then she tells me about the slip.
“He called me an Omega,” she says, and her voice goes on the word. “He tried to cover it. Said he meant Beta. We both knew. He knows what I am, Eli. How does he know?”
I’ve been running it since she started talking. Kinsley had the restaurant footage. Kinsley hates her. Quinton has history with Gray and has been circling Reese for weeks, and the line between those three points is short and straight.
I don’t say any of it yet.
“What happened after he said it?”
“I tried to leave. He grabbed my arm.” She looks down at her own wrist. “Then he tried to kiss me. I shoved him and got out.”
“Good.”
“Good?” Her laugh comes out brittle. “I made a scene in a restaurant. People were staring. He’s going to tell everyone I’m crazy, or paranoid, or—”
“You defended yourself against an Alpha who put hands on you without asking. He’s the one who should be humiliated.”
She goes quiet. I’ve watched Reese apologize for taking up space in a boat she commands, for needing things from men who would give her anything, for reacting badly when somebody gives her a reason to.
Somewhere along the way, she started treating every reasonable response like another thing she has to justify.
“I need Tyler on this,” I tell her. “If Quinton knows your designation, somebody told him. If somebody told him, there’s a trail, and Tyler will find it.”
“You think it’s Kinsley.”
“I think she’s the connection that makes the most sense.” I put my elbows on my knees. “Go back over the last few weeks. Has he turned up anywhere he shouldn’t have been? Asked anything too specific? Known something before you told him?”
She works at it, and I can nearly watch the memories reorganize.
“He texted me during practice once. Said the lacrosse team was running the lake trail and he saw us.” She stops. “He’s their captain. He sets the routes.”
“What else?”
“He knew about Kowalski. He brought up the articles before I did, and they’d been up a few hours.” She shakes her head. “He had a whole position ready about how the team was handling it wrong. How we were making it worse by closing ranks.”
“He was isolating you.” It’s textbook, which is somehow worse. Find somebody who’s already tired, separate them from the people holding them up, install yourself as the only safe place left. “Making you doubt us so you’d come to him.”
“And I let him.” Her voice goes flat with self-disgust. “God, I’m so stupid.”
“You’re exhausted and you’re frightened and you wanted one thing in your week that wasn’t a negotiation.” I get up and crouch in front of her chair so we’re level. “He used that. That’s a fact about him.”
Her eyes are wet and she doesn’t let any of it fall, which is the part I’ve never known what to do with. I’ve watched this woman take hits that would put most people on the floor, set her jaw, and call the next twenty.
“What do we do?” she asks.
“Tyler and I go into Quinton’s connections. Who he talks to, what he’s building, how far back it runs.” I hold her eyes. “The others have to know. Let me work out how to tell them without Jackson putting him in a hospital before we understand what we’re looking at.”
“You think you can stop him?”
“No. I think I can make him wait.” I take her hand. Her fingers are cold. “I’ll handle Jackson. You get through the next few days without being alone with Quinton. Can you do that?”
She nods and squeezes back. “Yeah.”
“Good.” I stand, and I don’t let go straight away. “Reese. I’m glad you came to me.”
She looks up at me. “You’re the only one who doesn’t make me feel like a problem to be solved,” she says. “Everybody else wants to fix it, or guard it, or claim it. You listen.”
I have no answer for that.
I’ve spent my entire life three steps back from everything, observing, analyzing, keeping the variables I can’t control from touching my decisions. It has always been the safer position. Standing here with her hand in mine, I’m not certain safe was worth what it cost.
“Go and rest,” I tell her. “I’ll come find you when we have something.”
She heads upstairs, and I’m left with the hum of the heating and everything she just handed me.
I give myself thirty seconds. I’m angry enough at Quinton that I don’t trust myself to make decisions with him in the room, but the fear underneath it is colder. I was so occupied with reporters and Harrison and filing deadlines that I missed the threat standing directly in front of us.
Then I put it away and go find Tyler.
He’s got three monitors running and a cold coffee going forgotten at his elbow. When I knock on the frame, he holds up one finger without looking, finishes his line, and turns around.
“Quinton made a move on Reese,” I say. “Grabbed her arm, tried to kiss her. She got out. He slipped and called her an Omega.”
Tyler’s face doesn’t move, but his shoulders do. “He knows her designation.”
“He knows. I want how, and I want who else.”
“Kinsley.” He’s already turning back. “She had the footage, she has the motive, and she’s been quiet since the articles went up, which isn’t her.”
“Can you find the connection?”
“If it exists.” His hands are moving faster than I can follow. “Socials, follows, tagged photos, public location history. Everybody thinks they’re careful online. Nobody is.”
“How long?”
“Give me a few hours.” He glances over. “Are we telling the others?”
I think about Jackson downstairs and what his face is going to do.
“Not yet.”
Tyler nods and goes back in, and I leave him to it.
Jackson is in the kitchen with a sandwich he isn’t eating. His eyes come up and lock on when I walk in, that unblinking attention that makes most people find somewhere else to look.
“Reese okay?” he asks. “Saw her come in looking rough.”
“She’s tired.”
I hate it as it leaves my mouth. Jackson and I don’t lie to each other. That was in the terms.
He puts the sandwich down. “Eli.”
One word, and I’m not fooling anybody.
I could keep him out of it until Tyler surfaces something. It would be the correct play. It would also mean he learns I did it, and that will cost me more than Quinton ever could.
“Not here,” I say, with Zane and Beckett arguing at the television twenty feet away. “Your room.”
He comes up without a word. The room is the same as it always is. Bed, desk, weights in the corner, nothing at all on the walls. Jackson doesn’t keep things.
He shuts the door and leans on it with his arms crossed.
“Quinton tried to kiss Reese.”
His breathing doesn’t change. His face doesn’t move. Everything behind it goes flat, the way a door closes. I’ve seen him row through injuries that should have put him on the bank, and I have never seen him look like this.
“She’s fine,” I add. “She pushed him off and came to me. But he slipped and called her an Omega. He knows.”
“How?”
“We think Kinsley. Tyler’s in it now.”
His jaw works, and I can guess how many versions of this are ending with Quinton bleeding.
“I’ll kill him.”
“No, you won’t.” I step into his space. He has four inches and thirty pounds on me and both of us know he could go through me if he decided to. “You’re going to let Tyler and me find the connection. We work out what he’s actually building. Then we deal with him.”
“He put his hands on her.”
“I know.”
“He tried to—”
“I know.” I put my hand flat on his chest. “I’m angry too. But if you go now, before we understand it, he plays the victim. He says you came at him unprovoked. Maybe he presses charges. Then you’re gone, and she loses one of the three people she actually trusts.”
The muscle in his jaw jumps. He’s fighting every instinct he has.
“I need you here,” I tell him. “She needs you here. Give me twenty-four hours before you do something neither of us can undo.”
He doesn’t answer straight away.
“You’re asking me to do nothing while he’s out there.”
“I’m asking you to trust me.”
“I do trust you.” His voice drops. “That’s the problem. I trust you more than I’ve trusted anybody in years and it scares the hell out of me.”
That gets through every defense I’ve still got.
His hand comes up over mine, holding it there, and his heart is beating too fast beneath my palm for somebody whose face gives away nothing.
My brain starts doing what it always does—sorting, measuring, looking for the safest interpretation—and I stop it.
I don’t know which of us moves first. Both, probably. Then we’re kissing with his fist in the back of my shirt, and it isn’t like the other times, rushed and quiet and half-deniable. This one is slow, and neither of us is pretending it’s something else.
When we come apart, neither of us lets go.
“I want this,” I tell him. “You. I also want what the three of us could have. And I want her to have time with each of us on her own. I know it’s complicated. I know we haven’t worked out a single part of it. I need you to know where I am.”
Jackson is quiet a while. His thumb goes in circles on the back of my hand.
“I’ve been trying to work out how to say that for months,” he says. “Kept deciding I’d get it wrong. Push you off, or push her off, or both.”
“We’re both appalling at this.”
“Yeah.” His mouth moves toward something like a smile. “We are.”
“So we work it out. After Quinton.”
“I won’t do anything tonight.” His grip tightens in my shirt. “But if he touches her again, I’m not asking permission.”
“If he touches her again,” I say, “you won’t be going on your own.”