Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
Gage
BESIDE ME, TONY SLAPPED a hand over his eyes and whirled to face away from the open doorway. “Oh, my god!” he yelped, sounding about as appalled as I felt.
In the next instant, the full force of an omega’s heat pheromones hit me like a slap in the face. But not just any omega’s pheromones.
Mate, the scent screamed. Pack. Belonging. Need.
I opened my mouth to gasp air like a fish, and of course that only made everything worse.
The overwhelming urge to tear off my clothes and dive face-first into Jez’s pussy tugged me forward a step.
Before I could take a second one, a hand wrapped around my upper arm and yanked me back the way we’d come.
A growl rose up in my chest before I connected the hand to the harmless beta kid standing next to me.
“What the fuck?” Tony was whisper-shouting; his voice an ugly, strangled thing. “Gage, what the fuck? What is Heath even doing here?”
Right now, he’s doing Jez. I managed to keep the words from making it out of my brain and past my lips, at least. The heat scent was still wrapped around my spinal cord like a ravenous anaconda, but as I stumbled after Tony, it faded to the point that I could think again.
“She’s in heat,” I said hoarsely. “Heath’s in rut. They probably couldn’t stop themselves.”
Tony came to an abrupt halt and let my arm go. “She’s in...” He shook his head sharply, as though trying to shake something loose. “If her heat was this close, wouldn’t she have said something? And, I mean, wouldn’t you have been able to smell it on her before now?”
My mouth opened and closed, but the words were all jumbled up against the wreckage of my higher brain functions. I nodded instead. I’d stake my knot that Jez hadn’t been coming into heat when I’d had her in my bed, less than half a day ago.
Tony paced up and down the short stretch of hallway, his hand pressed over his mouth as though he wasn’t sure what would come out of it next if he uncovered it. Beta scents were weird, but in my heightened state of awareness, I could sense the distress coming off him in waves.
Once again, he came to a stop without warning. His hand dropped to his side.
“There was a camera in that cell,” he said. “And that omega kid who ran past us looked like he was escaping from something terrible. If Jez wasn’t in heat before, but now she is...”
“Maybe that’s what they do here,” I finished, feeling nausea roil in my gut.
Tony looked just as queasy, but he raked me up and down with a worried look. “Jez is your scent match. If she’s in heat, are you going to be able to keep it together?”
“Probably not,” I admitted, all too aware of the painful ache in my cock—not to mention the way it was making a spirited attempt to split the seams of my trousers.
Tony licked his lips, and I made a valiant effort not to stare at the quick dart of his tongue over the pink flesh—because what the fuck, brain? I realized I was openly panting, and took a hasty step back. Tony did the same.
“There was, um... I saw a room with a medical gurney sitting outside as we went past,” he said. “If those dead alphas back there by the cells brought on Jez’s heat artificially, they probably had dampeners on hand so they wouldn’t be too distracted to do their work, right?”
I slogged through the torrent of words, trying to make sense of them past my growing haze of incoherency.
When I didn’t respond fast enough, Tony blinked at me.
“Dampeners?” he repeated, with understandable worry. “Would that help?”
I nodded wordlessly again.
“This way,” he said.
Resisting the painful pull that insisted I was going in the wrong direction, I followed him.
I remembered passing the gurney earlier, but it hadn’t been the most important thing at the time.
The room next to it was just as dingy and run-down as everywhere else in this place, but it had better lighting and a small fridge plugged into a self-contained battery-powered inverter.
A long counter by the far wall had been wiped off. Several plastic drawers and boxes were scattered across it, along with a couple of laptops. Tony ignored the computers in favor of rummaging through the mini-fridge, taking out little bottles and examining the labels before putting them back.
“There’s stuff labeled heat-stim and rut-stim in here,” he said, his distracting mouth curling down in disgust. Then he paused. “Wait. Here we go. Alpha scent dampener. Someone’s definitely been using it; the bottle’s two-thirds empty.”
“Yeah,” I said, my tongue feeling thick and numb. “That. Give me that.”
This far away from Jez and Heath, the effects of her pheromones were already starting to wear off. But I needed to be able to get close to them again without losing my shit.
Tony set the bottle down and started searching through the plastic drawers until he came up with a sealed syringe and needle. “Intramuscular, right? Because if it’s intravenous, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”
“Jus’ stick it in my arm,” I slurred. “S’good enough.”
Tony squinted at the tiny print on the side of the bottle. Apparently satisfied, he squinted at the markings on the syringe and nodded. “Okay. No big deal. Just a little jab.”
I peeled off my jacket as I watched him draw up the dose through the little rubber membrane on the bottle lid.
He let out a breath and came over to my left side, shoving my shirtsleeve out of his way.
I barely felt the needle going in, past the clamoring inside my body for mate-pack-sex.
The contents of the syringe were cold, but they still burned as they spread outward from the injection site.
Tony backed off and looked around uncertainly before placing the spent needle on the countertop. “Better?” he asked.
“About the same,” I told him. “But give it a minute, and I’ll be able to get close to them without freaking out.”
Tony nodded. “Look... I don’t want to be the one to tempt fate.
But if there are cameras recording everything in this place, doesn’t that mean other people might be watching?
And if they know what’s been happening, isn’t there a pretty good chance of them showing up with a bunch of musclebound guys and guns? ”
“Uh-huh,” I agreed. “There sure is. Which is why we need to get Jez and Heath, and get the fuck outta here.”
Tony blanched. “O-kay. And... how are we going to do that, exactly?”
I closed my eyes, trying to force my gray matter to work.
“We need the van,” I muttered.
“There’s a van outside,” Tony pointed out. “We could steal it, I guess?”
But I immediately shook my head. “I don’t want anything connecting us to this place, once we leave.” Thoughts were coming more easily now. I pulled out my recovered phone. “I’ll get our van here.”
I texted Bud, the driver who chauffeured Knox’s limo in addition to helping us run recovered omegas to safety.
How fast do you need it? came the reply.
Triple your hourly rate if you can get it here in twenty minutes, I replied.
“On its way,” I told Tony. “Next order of business—I want to do a search of this warehouse before we leave. That kid who ran off didn’t come outta nowhere. Can you keep an eye on the lovebirds while I do that?”
Tony blanched. “Maybe you should watch them while I search.”
I patted my shoulder holster. “I’m the one with the gun. You don’t have to go in with them or nothing. Just camp out in the hallway where you can yell like crazy if anyone tries to go in or out.”
The kid looked like he’d rather pull his own toenails out by the roots, but after a short hesitation, he nodded.
“Don’t take too long,” he said.
I knew I should probably be more worried about the fact that his panties were in a twist... but whatever his problem was, he was going to have to deal with it until we were safely out of this shithole. Pulling my gun, I gave him a final nod and headed out for the quickest search I could manage.
Dampeners or no, I gave the hallway where Heath was knotting our mate a wide berth, sticking to the areas that seemed to be in use.
My first major find was a room set up with tables and a dozen or more CCTV screens.
The setup was powered by another one of those big portable battery-powered inverters, with a spaghetti tangle of extension cords and power strips.
It took precious time to sort out the file storage system, and there was some shit on there that seriously made me want to puke. I clenched my jaw and sorted through the folders until I found the footage they’d taken of Heath and Jez.
I had to pause and rewind the part where Jez nearly chewed an alpha asshole’s hand off at the wrist, then stabbed him in the neck with his own knife despite the fact that her wrists were bound together.
Jesus H. Christ. That was another corpse for her collection.
When I was pretty confident that I had everything I needed, I wiped my packmate’s files and left the rest for the police. Because as unhappy as it made me, the police were about to become involved.
One of the cameras was pointed at a cell full of underage omegas packed in like sardines.
And while I might want a perfect world where Tony and I could whisk them away to safety without the additional trauma of getting chewed up and spat out by the legal system, they weren’t exactly going to be able to share the back of the van with Heath and Jez.
I trudged back to join Tony, feeling slow-burning hatred for the human race pulse through my veins alongside the dampeners.
“There’s a bunch of other kids being held here,” I told him, keeping my eyes firmly away from the door to the dusty room. “I’m gonna have to call the police in, once we’re safely out of this fucking place.”
Tony already looked like he’d aged ten years since we got here; at that, he aged another five before my eyes.
“Can’t we just let them go?” he asked. “Like the one who got out earlier?”
It occurred to me that he had more experience than most people, when it came to being an underage victim navigating the court system.
But I shook my head. “Throwing them into the ocean to sink or swim on their own is how you end up with people like Jez.”
After a long moment, Tony gave a reluctant nod.
“I’d rather me and Knox and Heath were taking care of things directly,” I told him. “But Knox is in the hospital, and Heath is... well.” I gestured toward the room where he was still curled up with Jez. “This way, the kids will at least get some kind of support.”
The distant sound of a familiar eight-cylinder engine filtered through from outside.
“Van’s here,” I said. “I’ll go meet Bud and give him the keys to the Yukon, so he can get out of here pronto. It’ll be up to you and me to get these two loaded into the van. And, um, you’re probably gonna have to drive. Sorry.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” Tony mumbled. “Seriously, I can hardly wait.”
“Be right back,” I told him.
Jez and Heath were at least separated after their knotting, but the less said about getting them out of the warehouse and into the van, the better.
Heath insisted on carrying Jez, despite the fact that he was practically reeling with exhaustion and artificial hormones.
He also kept trying to sniff Tony’s hair, which wasn’t helping the situation one goddamned bit.
There was still a pretty big question of what the hell Heath was even doing here in the first place. According to the surveillance video, he’d been hauled in unconscious on that damned gurney, but why? How? Had he followed Jez here somehow, or been brought here separately?
I blew out a frustrated breath and set it aside.
The back of the van had been kitted out like a nest, to make it less stressful for the omega kids we transported. It was deep-cleaned after each run, to minimize the smell of unfamiliar omegas.
Heath seemed happy enough to get inside. It was familiar to him, even in his current fucked-up state. But Jez cringed back in his arms and whimpered in fear as they approached the double doors.
“Hey, sweetheart,” I said, bracing myself to come close and run a hand through her sweaty hair, soothing.
“Easy, now. You’ve got to trust us, all right?
It’s safe. We’re gonna take you home so you can fuck each other to your heart’s content for the next few days. It’s actually real nice inside, see?”
I gestured toward the dimly lit, blanket and cushion-strewn space. Huge gray eyes blinked up at me; then Jez turned her head, craning to follow the movement. And that was when I saw the livid, blood-spattered bite mark decorating the right side of her neck, just above her shoulder.
A fresh mating bite.
Fucking.
Shit.