Chapter 25
Fenrir had stuck to the plan.
He’d snuck his way into the building, keeping to the more secluded halls. Having seen the specs when Michelle had first ordered the auction house built, he knew where all of the security cameras and heavily guarded areas were located, making it a simple enough matter to avoid them.
Even still, his first stop was the surveillance room, where he made quick work of the half dozen employees in charge of watching the camera feeds. He didn’t feel bad about it either. Pack wasn’t like product.
Every single one of them had a choice. They knew exactly what they were signing up for when they’d taken this job.
He locked the door behind him and moved for the back stairwell, the one only used by staff. It was tempting to make a detour, to head to the left to the public areas and get visual confirmation that Oberon was there and okay, but it would be a waste of time, so he resisted.
Aside from his alpha, the two main levels weren’t of any interest to him anyway. Disrupting the auction was only part of his task, and Fen was admittedly here for more selfish reasons than to simply aid the White Frost, even if the deal was lucrative for both sides.
It was immature and narrow-minded of him, especially when Levi and Baal had agreed to hand the business over to him if they were successful, but Fenrir couldn’t shake this festering need for revenge.
He wanted the Wardrobe to suffer. To hide. The way he’d had to all this time.
The first few kills had been simple.
Sneaking up on members of the Wardrobe who’d been lazing around on the upper level before the auction began and stabbing them through the jugular with an icicle was surprisingly cathartic. Rationally, he understood he shouldn’t enjoy killing, and yet…
With each life he took, a little more of the tightness around his ribcage loosened.
The Wardrobe’s trained soldiers were pathetic compared to real organizations like the White Frost, only wielding enough brute force to keep the product and ballsy customers in line.
With Michelle holding his leash, Fenrir had never dared to make his true self known, had never tipped his hand and let on what he could do.
How dangerous he truly was.
He’d already swept the entire third level without getting caught before he decided it was probably time to get the show on the road.
Fenrir slipped the blaster free of one of the dead guard’s holsters on his way up to the fourth floor.
His mating with Oberon meant a steadier, more reliable flow of energy, but that didn’t rule out the possibility of burnout.
In the past, using his ability as much as he already had would have been enough to dry up his stores and make him woozy.
Being trapped in that cave for as long as they were had been a blessing in disguise. He’d been given the time to adjust to his alpha and acclimate to this new normal, and his stamina—in both the bedroom and outside of it—had a lot to show for it.
But that didn’t make him invincible, and he recognized he’d gotten a little carried away.
Considering how many bodies he’d left in his wake, it was only a matter of time before he was finally discovered. Maybe it would be wise for him to hide somewhere and give himself a few minutes to recoup some energy, but the rush of adrenaline and endorphins pushed him forward despite the risk.
He’d counted at least three-dozen guards and workers downstairs, including the ones on the level directly below the one he was on now that he’d taken out.
It was a good sign that Oberon’s ploy had worked and Michelle had moved most of her muscle to the auction house in anticipation of him causing trouble.
The plan was simple, yet contingent on being able to suspend her disbelief. Leaked information posed as reality in the hopes of being overheard.
A story about how Fenrir had lost himself to influx and attacked his alpha.
About how Oberon had slain him in self-defense.
At first, Fen had been worried she wouldn’t buy the story. That she’d doubt an alpha could murder his omega in cold blood. But then he’d recalled all the daily horrors she subjected herself and others to, and realized he was being foolish for thinking so highly of her moral compass.
She ran a business wherein family sold family and couples turned on one another all the time.
Hell, half the product on stage right now had been betrayed by someone close to them and handed over to the Wardrobe against their will to pay off someone’s debt.
Add that to the fact she’d witnessed firsthand how bloodthirsty and out of his mind Fen could be, of course she’d believe he attacked Oberon during a fit and lost.
The hope had been to use her spyware to get her to send an invite to Oberon for an auction happening at the end of the month. It’d come as a pleasant surprise to all of them when it arrived this morning instead and they’d realized she’d organized a new one just for him.
These past couple of days apart from his alpha had been brutal, and Fenrir was eager to get this over with so he could return to him.
That’d been the only part of the plan suggested by someone else, and neither of them had been pleased when Baal had proposed it.
He’d pointed out that it was too risky for the two of them to stick together after faking his death.
They didn’t know where Michelle’s spies were planted, or how many there were.
There was also always the chance someone else had gotten bugged, which meant they couldn’t trust being alone anywhere.
Fenrir needed to go to Frost Loans so his “body” could be seen, and sneaking him back out when rumors were clear that the Butcher had a lab in the basement would be stupid, so he’d stuck around.
But not in the lab.
Nothing was ever going to get him back into a lab.
He’d hidden out in Levi’s office instead, in a hidden room that only Baal, Oberon, and Koah knew about. Not even the Leviathan’s secretary had known he was there.
Oberon hadn’t so much as set foot in the parking lot, keeping away from the building to help sell it and avoid suspicion. Since they couldn’t risk communicating through a device either, the two of them had gone just shy over forty-eight hours with no contact.
And it was driving Fenrir half mad.
Maybe that was why he was so eager to tear these assholes apart. To direct that anger and frustration outward instead of keeping it in.
Say what you will about Michelle, but she’d certainly done one thing right with him.
In the end, she’d turned him into the weapon she’d always desired.
Too bad for her it was being used to destroy everything else she’d built.
As Fenrir went on the hunt for Trick, he wondered how Oberon was doing.
His alpha’s job was to catch Michelle’s eye and keep her too preoccupied to notice anything was wrong.
Fenrir’s was to shatter that illusion once it was too late for her to do much about it. Ultimately, they were a red herring, however, meant to help turn attention off the estate so that the White Frost member who was undercover could search for Rebirth.
Was the plan reckless and a tad bit frivolous? Yes.
That might be why Fenrir liked it so much. It was just like the alpha who’d come up with it.
Ready to put his part to work now that he’d blown off some steam, he stormed down the hallway on the upper level where the offices were kept.
That’s where Trick would be, since he always spent his time there, watching the live feed of the stage and the crowd.
He didn’t trust the surveillance team with the task on their own and always insisted on keeping an eye on the events himself.
It was also an opportunity to get a read on their clientele.
He made notes if he saw someone take a particular interest in one of the products, or a certain type.
Information jotted down to be used at a later date to sway someone to their side or curry favor.
There was a reason Michelle trusted him so much.
He was the real Wolf. The one man she’d fallen for.
The one thing she’d truly protect with her life.
And Fenrir was going to put a bullet between his eyes and an icicle through his heart.
Every time he’d been forced to wear a mask and be paraded through those shitty parties, or called by the title Wolf, a part of him had raged. Knowing that he was merely a cover for her true love, another smokescreen meant to protect him for her sake, somehow made it all worse.
His instincts had been twisted by her, made to rely on her for comfort the way a proper omega would rely on their alpha.
She’d successfully enslaved him with her pheromones, yet rubbed her true affection for another in his face.
Trick and her romance was a well-kept secret that she’d never had the decency to also hide from Fenrir.
He’d always known what they were to each other.
What that made him.
To Michelle, Fenrir was nothing more than product. He’d been fooling himself to think otherwise, and now, thanks to Oberon, he’d gotten his reality check.
The two of them had always played good cop bad cop with Fen.
Since Michelle’s need to have his subconscious associate her pheromones with safety and calm, she could never be the one to execute his punishments herself.
Pheromones were fucked like that. It didn’t matter how logically Fenrir understood she was the mastermind behind all of his suffering.
The work she’d put in during those rounds of experimentation, when he’d been half dead and all out of his mind, had been too strong for logic to surpass.
That’d left Trick to do her dirty work for her. Which he’d relished immensely.
Fen’s mind wandered back to that night in the cave, when he’d gotten too close to the flames of the fire and had spiraled a bit.
He thought of all those times he’d been locked in the stone room on level one, nothing but him and the massive fire pit, trapped with minimum ventilation and an oxygen mask to keep him from inhaling too much smoke and dying.
She’d spent a pretty penny on the mask too. High quality tech that didn’t require any other attachments. It filtered out all imperfections in air quality, ensuring that even if it became difficult to breathe, Fenrir was never at risk of true suffocation.
But that was half the fun for them, he was sure.
The fact that the mask could only do so much.
Keep him alive but still make him feel like he was choking.
His lungs would tighten, and he’d heave through it, gasping for clean oxygen.
The high temperatures of the room would ensure the air was too dry for him to summon so much as a snowflake for longer than a flash in the pan.
The energy within him would react poorly. Snapping and growing uncomfortable beneath his skin, until he felt bloated and overwhelmed on top of everything else.
Depending on the severity of his offence, they’d leave him there for days, sometimes a full week. The result? A twisted fear of fire, but only when he was trapped with it. Only when he couldn’t get away.
The cave had been a small reminder, nothing major. Easily laughed off, especially with his alpha’s care. But a reminder nonetheless, and thinking on it now, Fenrir was pissed.
That damn Shout irrational fury would cost him.
He wasn’t subtle when he kicked open the door to the office at the far end of the hall, blaster raised and ready. The first shot landed in the back of the man seated at the desk, the next through his skull.
It wasn’t until the third shot that Fenrir realized the person he was shooting was too short to be the target he was after.
Almost as soon as he recognized his error, a heavy weight slammed into him from the right, taking him down instantly.
He landed on his left shoulder, hard enough he heard a crack a second before exploding pain shot down his nerve endings. Somehow, he held onto the gun, twisting beneath the solid mass on top of him, managing to get the barrel between them.
Fen fired, a rush of satisfaction blanketing over the pain as he watched a bullet rip through his attacker’s chest.
Trick howled and fell backwards, shuffling away from Fenrir, who got off one more shot before the weapon clicked with every pull of the trigger, signaling an empty magazine. With a curse he tossed it to the side, shoving to his feet the same second as Trick.
The two of them squared off for a moment before Trick glanced at the dead man sitting in his chair and then leapt for the holster attached to his belt.
Fenrir reacted without thinking, forming ice shards in the air and sending them flying. Many of them landed, piercing through clothing and the alpha’s flesh.
But Trick wasn’t the only thing he hit.
Fen’s first mistake had been in being too hasty—he should have checked to be sure it was Trick seated in front of the electronics.
His second mistake…was also in being too hasty.
Shards of ice speared through one of the computer systems, sparks flickering. There were a few popping sounds, and a small waft of smoke, but then nothing.
Fenrir released the breath he’d been holding but quickly felt that same panic swell when Trick grabbed a cup of coffee from the corner of the desk and dumped the entire contents over the outlet.
This time the flames took, bursting forth to engulf half the wall before Fen got his wits about him.
While his gaze was latched onto the spreading fire, Trick’s fist connected with his jaw, sending him flying back into a filing cabinet. He hit his already dislocated shoulder and cursed, momentarily seeing stars wink in front of his eyes.
“The dead should stay dead,” Trick declared, his parting laugh mocking.
Through blurred vision, Fen saw him reach the door, but by the time he straightened, it was too late to stop Trick from leaving.
The sound of the lock being set from the outside was deafening.