Chapter 27 Twenty-three
Twenty-three
Lin
How the hell did Caine ever leave the apartment? If he felt all the time what I felt right now, he was the strongest person I knew for venturing outside at all.
Sitting at the sleek conference table, waiting for Gail Thorne to arrive, my skin felt shrunken over my skeleton. Too itchy, too tight. Impatience mounted, and every moment felt like I was a wolf in the dark wilderness, hackles raised, wary and ready for danger.
Restarting the alpha supplements had been a gradual process since returning home. I’d finally reached my previous dosage, but I still felt off. They didn’t fit me right anymore, like I’d put my shoes on the wrong feet.
I’d been hesitant to go back on them at all. Wainwright had the near-monopoly on alpha and omega meds. It felt wrong to take them after all we’d endured, but more than that, I simply didn’t trust the meds themselves anymore.
Caine, however, had insisted. He was a walking case file on the importance of being on the supplements. Engaging with literally anyone without the meds was an exercise in restraint and strength—literally sometimes, as I’d fought down my alpha.
So for the time being at least, I was on the meds.
A hand closed around my knee, and I snapped my head toward Caine. The chair I’d been swiveling from side to side stopped. “You’re making me motion sick,” he mumbled before giving a light squeeze and retreating.
I sighed, running my palm over my face as I tried to force my body to release the tension.
“Sorry.”
A slow, tentative wave of warmth flowed through the bond before Caine resumed his former stern expression.
He’d been doing that more since the Greysmoke cabin. Soothing touches and gentle comforts that, previously, were rare treats. Maybe through all the bullshit of the last few months, he’d healed some. Maybe he just sensed that, for the first time in a long time, I needed more from him.
The door opened, and a small team of pristine-suited lawyers strolled in.
“I apologize for the delay,” said the woman leading the group. Light brown hair was twisted into a simple but polished clip at the back of her head, and her deep burgundy suit evoked power and poise in equal measure.
Gail placed her leather folio on the table and pulled out the seat directly across from me. “Deposition ran long. My assistant has been briefing me on the developments of our case on the drive over, however, so we can jump straight to business.”
“Good.” Caine’s voice was rough. His arms were crossed, shoulders tense. I straightened in my seat, folded my hands on the tabletop, stretching for the mask of coolness that had always been in easy reach before.
I nodded once, meeting Gail’s eye across the table. The beta was one of the youngest assistant district attorney in recent years with a reputation for her sharp questions and sharper arguments. She also happened to be a childhood friend of our dear detective friend, Vikki Banarjee.
And, supposedly, was game for taking on the behemoth that was Wainwright Corp., bringing them to account for the hurt they’d done Taryn and so many others.
Yet, we’d been home for two months and had fuck all to show for it. Just a handful of meetings, platitudes and promises that things were spinning behind the scenes.
How about let’s get some shit stirring front and center stage?
“There’s good news and bad news to report,” Gail said, opening her folio while her beta assistant sat a few seats down, already furiously scribbling notes.
I stifled a sigh as best I could. “Bad news first.”
Gail nodded. “My team has exhausted the avenues available to us to make the case against Wainwright,” she said, voice stony. “We’re still short.”
Caine swore beside me. “No, we saw the paper trail linking Phoenix and Wainwright. Fuck, we have hard drives of evidence of what happened to Nova and Taryn. How can there be no case?”
“Most of what Vikki and Sevrin managed to smuggle out implicates Phoenix Labs alone,” Gail replied.
“It’s on Wainwright letterhead!”
“And all that letterhead shows us is Wainwright commissioned Phoenix Labs decades ago to run clinical trials of a drug they hoped to bring to market.” Gail’s eyes betrayed no emotion.
“By all accounts, the drug failed and they scrapped the project. Any further statistical analysis can be explained by either Phoenix going rogue, or Wainwright simply searching the data they legally obtained for salient information.”
The angry alpha inside me wanted to snarl. The angry alpha beside me did so.
“Is this the end of the road, then?” I asked.
Gail swallowed, the only sign she was affected at all. “I want to see Wainwright held responsible for all they’ve done,” she hedged. “I’m not ready yet to give up.”
“So what do we do?”
She pulled out a packet of stapled papers. “We shift gears.” She slid the packet across the table toward me.
I grabbed the paper and held it between Caine and me so we could both look it over. The top page was a scan of a memo on Wainwright letterhead. An old one, dated from before Brooks and I even met.
Attn: Board of Trustees
ProGeneE has failed. H.C. relieved of duty.
B.W.
I shook my head, looking back up at Gail. “What is this?”
“That,” she said, “is the last existing proof of the link between Bertram Wainwright and Heston Callaway.”
I blinked a handful of times. “Corinth’s dad and the Lineage guy?”
“Corinth’s dad and the geneticist,” Gail corrected, “who amassed a fortune with do-it-yourself DNA analysis.”
I’d seen the ads. Spit in a tube, mail it off, get a report back on your genetic background, where your ancestors hailed from, all kinds of fun stuff.
Over the years, as other companies picked up their schtick, Lineage branched out—medical, health and diet, fertility.
Hell, they had kits claiming that your little tube of spit could tell them if you’d go prematurely bald.
Some people just loved throwing their money away.
“And pro-gene is?” Caine asked.
“ProGenE”—Gail pronounced it like progeny—“was Callaway’s first big research project when he worked for Wainwright’s pharma division.
It was the pitch that got him hired, actually.
He claimed he could find the designation gene, determining what designation a child would become up to eight years before presenting and with ninety-six percent accuracy. ”
A chill ran up my spine. I looked at the memo again. “This is almost fifteen years old. What happened?”
“Some schism between Wainwright and Callaway. He left the company, amid a mountain of NDAs and gag orders. Afterward, Wainwright Corp. did all they could to erase Callaway from their corporate history. He’s nowhere to be found on any archival tax records, employment files. Nothing.”
I held up the page. “But this remains.”
Gail nodded. “This remains.”
My breath came in sharp bursts. Sweat burned at the corners of my eyes. Fire branched out through my veins like lightning from the point where I fucked my beta.
Brooks knelt before me, that head of beautiful honey-kissed curls bent down to the mattress.
Every inch of him was a study in art made life—the knobbed line of his spine, the elegant curve of his shoulder.
The downright sinful cheeks pressed back against my pelvis as my cock sank into him again, and again.
I leaned over his back, planting open-mouth kisses at his nape. “Goddamn,” I muttered against his skin. I laid over him so my lips rested against his ear, holding myself up on my palms so as not to fully crush him. “Feel so fucking good, babe.”
His knuckles were white where he gripped the sheets, his cheeks flushed when he turned his face to the side. “Need you deeper, Alpha.”
Say no more, love.
One hand clutched at his hip, the other at his shoulder, and I thrust as fucking deep as I could. He gave a choked moan, burying his face in the mattress.
“My perfect mate,” I said between gritted teeth.
Unleashing myself on him, I felt the fissures beginning. That roughness inside that was my alpha scratching at the door I’d locked him behind. Wood splintering. Shards catching in my skin.
World going gray. Smooth now rough. Like it had been in that place. When the alphadrenaline had surged for the first time in my life and I hadn’t actually been Lin anymore. Just the wolf.
“Stay with me, Alpha,.” Brooks’ fingers layered over mine where they dug into his shoulder. “You’re safe. We’re all safe.”
I breathed through my nostrils, willing the human to stay in control. I slowed my onslaught. I twined my fingers with his, holding tight to him as if he was all that kept me from dropping off a deadly cliff.
“You’re my everything, Brooks.” I burned behind my eyes. “I start breaking inside, and you’re what keeps me whole.”
Brooks turned around, pulling off my cock as he faced me, grasping my face in one hand. “You,” he breathed, “are always whole. You”—A languid kiss landed on my collarbone, and the hum of words prickled my skin—“are you. And you are your wolf.”
Slow, thorough kisses marked his journey across my chest and up the opposite side of my neck.
Warm palms smoothed up and into my hair.
Fingers threaded through the strands with the barest tension of a pull that brought goosebumps over my body.
Brooks dragged the very tip of his tongue up until he could draw my earlobe into his ear with a careful, decadent nibble.
Then he whispered, low and slow into my ear, “You’ve always played a balancing game between them. But however the scales fall, you are always whole.”
A different heat overtook me then. Burning embers of shame.
I’d always felt the part of a head alpha down to my core—effortlessly controlled, patently dominant. Even where I’d been challenged, my strength had always come from my easy restraint. The question of validation had never even arisen. I’d always just been.
Since Phoenix, though, I had more sympathy for Caine than I ever had in my life. Ferality broke something inside me. Or, if not broken, shifted. It altered my body, my chemistry. It added doubt to the mix.
And he knew, my sweet beta.
My head dropped down, burying my face among his curls. Salt and eucalyptus that normally erased all unease were only half measures.
His words moved me. I hated that I didn’t believe them.
“I don’t feel like I’m balancing.” My broken whisper was so faint I barely heard it myself. “I feel like I’m tipping over. How the fuck am I supposed to lead us?”
Strong arms circled my waist. “No one claimed you had to be perfect to lead this pack,” he answered, holding me so gently I could’ve melted. “You certainly don’t have to be perfect to lead me.”
I pressed myself further into his scent. Tried to absorb his body into my own so I’d never have to go without his love, his loyalty, his trust, his support ever again.
He held me to him. My tears dried on his skin. His arms cradled me to sleep.