Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
Knox
THREE DAYS AFTER I woke up from nearly getting my stupid ass killed, the doctors finally agreed to let me go home. This was simultaneously a relief, because hospitals were hell on earth, and not a relief, because I still felt like two-week-old dog shit.
That was going to be a problem on a few different levels. Because, from what I’d been able to gather, someone had basically set off a nuclear bomb in my pack while I was busy drooling onto a hospital pillow.
I wasn’t sure how long it was going to take before the congealed lump of porridge between my ears was working well enough to deal with international trade delivery duties, demurrage, HS code, and all the other things that I’d built a business on.
For now, I was struggling to wrap my head around the things Tony and Gage had let slip.
.. and, just as importantly, the things they hadn’t let slip.
Heath’s protégé had been the one at my bedside when I’d finally swum up from the murky depths of my coma. Not Heath himself. Not Gage. Just a sweet beta kid who I’d had maybe half a dozen short conversations with, since Heath had picked him up a couple of years ago.
I barely remembered anything of what Tony had been talking about when I’d first woken up.
Just that he’d been babbling, speaking faster and faster while saying less and less.
Then he’d said something about calling the others to let them know I was awake, after which he’d disappeared for more than a day, only to return looking like he’d just peered into the mouth of Hell itself.
After twenty-four hours of radio silence—and still not so much as a call or a text from either of my packmates—I laid into the kid pretty hard when he finally slunk back into my private hospital room. And then I felt like a total ass when he physically cringed away from me.
“Look,” I said, doing my best to modulate my voice. “Just tell me they’re okay, Tony. What the hell’s been happening the past few days?”
Tony’s eyes darted around like he was looking for hidden cameras in the room.
And, to be fair, there may have been one.
With all the lawsuits in the medical industry, hospitals probably had good reason to use surveillance cameras for recorded evidence.
None of which explained what Tony might know that he didn’t want the hospital’s security staff to hear.
He cleared his throat and stuffed his hands in his jean pockets. His shoulders had been tense before, but now they were practically hunched up around his ears.
He cleared his throat. “The others? Oh, y’know... they’re, um, okay. They’re at the pack house. It’s... a bit complicated?”
I stared at him. “It’s complicated that they’re at our house? Where they live?”
Tony looked like he wanted to sink straight through the floor. “Yeah. Some stuff went down, but we should, uh, maybe not talk about it here? You’re supposed to be resting, after all.”
I wasn’t proud of the fact that my spiking blood pressure triggered a medical alarm and brought two nurses running into the room at that point. Worse, it gave Tony the cover he needed to dart out the door and disappear again.
It was only when I got my phone back later in the day and bribed one of the nurses into buying me a charger from the gift shop, that I finally got some answers. As soon as I had enough battery to power up the cell, I tried texting Heath.
No answer.
So, I tried texting Gage instead, and thank all that was holy, he answered almost immediately.
Knox? God, it’s good to hear from you, man. How are you?
I instantly hit the call button.
“How am I?” I echoed as soon as he picked up. “What the fuck, Gage? Start talking. Now.”
I could feel the heavy awkwardness behind the silence that followed.
“Yeah. So,” Gage said slowly. “Before I say anything, are you at all still likely to have a heart attack?”
I breathed deeply in and out through my nose, shooting the bank of medical readouts an evil side-eye.
“If I was, you would not be helping with that right now,” I said with deadly calm. “Don’t make me say this a third time. Start. Fucking. Talking.”
I heard him blow out a breath over the connection.
“Okay. How much do you remember about what happened at the Aurora Hotel on the night you were attacked?”
That was a sore point, despite the doctors’ reassurances that some memory loss was normal. I swallowed and licked my lips.
“There was a woman,” I said reluctantly. “I think I wanted to take her up to the penthouse with me. Which I know is out of character.”
“Yeah, it is,” Gage mumbled.
“Then I woke up yesterday in a hospital bed,” I finished, ignoring the interruption. “That’s it. Nothing in between.”
It was the same thing I’d told the cops when they’d showed up earlier in the morning, except with a vague description of platinum-blond hair and the smell of sweet coffee.
“Fun fact,” Gage said, his tone grim. “You probably wanted to get closer to this woman because she’s our pack’s scent match.”
“What?” I asked faintly, even as the rightness of it settled into my truncated memory.
“Less fun fact,” Gage went on. “She’s also the one who tried to kill you.”
The heart monitor next to the bed beeped ominously. I fumbled around and disconnected the lead before it could start screaming an alarm. Of course, disconnecting it would bring a nurse in as well, but it might give me a bit of extra time.
“Where is this woman now?” I demanded. “Did the police get her?”
The pause on the other end felt like it lasted about a million years.
“Gage!” I half-shouted.
“I don’t think I should say anything else over the phone, Knox. Everyone’s safe; just focus on that for now, okay?”
Did he think our phones were compromised? What the hell?
I tried to focus on his reassurance. If he was lying about them both being safe, I’d be able to tell. Wouldn’t I?
A nurse bustled in, tutting when she saw the dangling wires. I resisted the urge to yell at her until she left the room. Grasping the shreds of my self-control, I covered the phone mic with one hand and dredged up my best tone of contrition.
I was sadly out of practice at it.
“Sorry, nurse,” I said. “I was trying to get more comfortable when the wires came loose. Could I just finish up my phone conversation real quick? Won’t be a minute.”
The nurse made a disapproving humming noise, which I chose to interpret as a yes.
“Look, Gage,” I said. “You already know I’m not happy about this. But before we hang up, are your sister’s kids doing okay?”
It was a not-very-subtle code for the group of omegas who’d been staying at the house when I’d been taken out of commission.
“Oh, yeah,” Gage said. “They’re safely off to camp, as planned. You focus on getting better so you can come home, okay? We need you here.”
“I’ll do my best,” wondering if I was ever going to be able to sleep again after this conversation. “Gotta go.”
A heavy thud sounded from his end, followed by feral growling.
“Yeah, me too,” he said, which was perhaps the least reassuring sign-off in the history of phone calls.
Two days later, an orderly wheeled me out of the hospital in a wheelchair, my wrist aching from the number of release forms that had needed to be signed, dated, and initialed.
Tony was waiting for me under the portico with a battered white Volvo station wagon from the previous century.
He’d been my only visitor except for a steady trickle of police detectives and lifestyle reporters.
The former had received the same—completely truthful—story that I had no memory of the attack itself.
The latter were barred at the door, except for one chirpy alpha woman from The Daily Gab, who’d managed to force her way in and demand to know if the rumors about the attack being a revenge-for-hire plot by a jilted former mate were true.
Since I didn’t have any former mates, jilted or otherwise, that angle seemed like a bit of a non-starter. It would probably sell tabloid copies, though.
Every time he’d stopped by, Tony had acted as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I’d eventually decided that if both he and Gage thought it was a bad idea to discuss things in a place where it might be overheard or recorded, they must have a reason.
Tony looked as anxious out here as he had during his visits. So, I waited until I was safely in the passenger seat, and the nurse had disappeared back into the hospital, before I spoke.
“Okay. Spill it,” I said, no-nonsense.
Tony gave an audible gulp. “Let me find a parking spot first. I don’t think I should be driving for this.”
I set my jaw and looked straight ahead. “You know, you and Gage could both use some work on acting reassuring.”
Tony pulled out of the pick-up area and into one of the large visitors’ lots. “Pretty sure no one offers classes on dealing with shit like this,” he muttered.
“Still not helping,” I told him.
He found a spot at the back of the lot and parked the car, leaving it running. His chest rose and fell on a deep breath.
“Okay. So... when I first moved here, I had a friend named Jez who lived on the streets and busked with me sometimes,” he said in a rush.
“When my abusive stepdad tracked me down in Chicago and cornered me in my apartment, Jez showed up and bashed him over the head with a table lamp. Killed him stone dead.”
I blinked. “And this is relevant because...?”
He shook his head almost angrily. “I’m getting to that. Afterward, she ran off. I’d been doing odd jobs for your pack, and I didn’t know who else to call to clean up the body, so I called Heath.”
My eyebrows shot up. I’d had no idea about any of this.
“I didn’t see Jez again, until just recently,” Tony went on. “Turns out, she liked the feeling of getting revenge on a predator so much that she kept doing it. She got a reputation as the person you went to if you needed to deal with alpha vermin.”
“She became a vigilante?” I asked, getting a glimmer of where this might be going, and not liking it one bit.
“That’s... one word for it.” The words were delivered in a monotone.
“Unfortunately, she’s also a fucking idiot.
Because a few weeks ago, someone sold her a story about you.
And because that story played into the same things that had been done to her when she was young, she bought the lies hook, line, and sinker. ”
The glimmer grew into a flashing neon sign.
“So, she came at me,” I said. “And nearly succeeded.”
Tony nodded. “Except she had no clue she was your pack’s scent match.
Not that knowing would have necessarily stopped her.
” He took another centering breath. “Gage and Heath captured her in your hotel suite. Gage brought her back to the pack house while Heath got help for you, because he couldn’t bear the thought of turning your scent match over to the cops for attempted murder. ”
“Gage is also a fucking idiot,” I said, without much rancor. This was old news, and fortunately for all of us, he had plenty of attributes that made up for it.
“Yeah,” Tony agreed heavily. “Anyway, Jez assumed she’d been captured by omega child sex traffickers, just like the people who abused her when she was a kid. And Gage and Heath assumed they were holding a murderer. Which, um... they were.”
“Fuck,” I said, because this was a lot to take in when you’d been in a coma seventy-two hours ago.
“Definitely.” Tony shot me a concerned glance. “And here’s where it gets worse. Your heart’s okay now, right?”
“I really wish people would stop asking me that,” I told him.
“Sorry.” Pink flooded his cheeks, and he looked away again.
“From what I gather, Heath went looking for the omega who told Jez this story about you. Then Jez managed to get free and sneak away with Gage’s phone, and she did exactly the same thing.
I guess she was pretty desperate to figure out who was lying to her, and who was telling the truth. ”
“Understandable,” I said carefully.
“As best as Gage and I can figure out, they both confronted this omega who hired her, and they both got captured for their trouble. Gage and I tracked his stolen phone to the old abandoned grain silos near McKinley, where someone was holding a bunch of underage omegas and using them to film kiddie porn.”
I tensed. “Do we know who it was?”
Tony shook his head. “Gage thinks it’s the Vozzinas, but he doesn’t have proof. Whoever it was, they were holding Heath and Jez there, too, and we were more concerned with getting them out than anything else.”
“Are they all right?” I asked sharply. Surely, he and Gage couldn’t have been lying to me this whole time about Heath being safe. But Heath hadn’t called or texted me—
“They injected Heath with a rut-stim and Jez with a heat-stim before we got there,” Tony said. “They must have smelled each other, because they killed the guards and got free of their cells. By the time we showed up, they were already... um... you know.”
I could guess.
Immediately, my porridge brain jumped to the practicalities. Birth control... sexually transmitted diseases... not to mention the psychological fallout—
Tony hunched lower in the driver’s seat, like he was trying to make himself small. “And... uh... he’d already mated her before we got there.”
He sounded like the words had been pulled from him one at a time with needle-nose pliers. My thoughts crashed to a standstill as the sense of what he’d said penetrated.
“He... what?” I asked.
“Gage is staying with them until the heat wears off,” Tony added miserably. “But once that happens... well. I actually have no idea. I can’t imagine it’s going to be good, though.”
I slumped back in my seat. “No,” I said. “I can’t imagine it will.”