6. Graeme #3
He scowled, unsure of me, but he asked me to follow him.
We walked down a long hallway, where a cluster of men stood at the doors of Remy’s bedroom, and I heard the charge and discharge of a camera flash, over and over.
As we passed the open doorway, I didn’t turn and look.
The metallic scent of blood was nearly overwhelming.
Remy was being held in the second to the last bedroom, the door guarded by two uniformed police officers. He was disheveled, possibly feverish, passed out on a bed that looked as if it could comfortably accommodate five adults.
And there was my mate, sitting beside the bed in a Chesterfield wingback chair.
He stood up as soon as I walked into the room, and moved behind the chair so it was between us as I came around the end of the bed. His beautiful silver gaze held mine for mere moments before he turned to look at Detective Massey.
“I need to go talk to the forensic guys, Avery, so I’ll leave you to explain things to Mr. Davenport. He was concerned that maybe you got hurt when his cousin jumped you. I’ll be right back.”
Avery nodded, and then his partner was gone, slipping back out the door and closing it behind him.
I moved fast, beside the chair, the only thing separating us. “What happened?”
“When—wait, what’s wrong with your eyes?” he asked, and the genuine concern I heard in his voice touched me deeply. “They’re all red and watery.”
“It’s nothing,” I assured him, knowing, of course, that there must have been a number of omegas in and out of Remy’s home quite recently.
There were so many scents, piled one on top of the other, suffocating, cloying, it was causing something like an allergic reaction in me.
It happened sometimes at gatherings, but if I moved around enough, didn’t get stuck in one spot for too long, I wouldn’t smother under the weight of roses and peonies, strawberries and vanilla, and what I could discern now was the rich scent of caramel.
“The residual omega pheromones are a bit overwhelming.”
“From the party, you mean?”
“No, the scent is––”
“So it’s me?” He jumped to the conclusion, moving as though to take a step back.
“No, not yours.” I rushed out the words, needing to make myself clear. “Your scent cuts through the others, allows me to breathe. Like tonight, when I met your friends, those who carried traces of your scent on them…I didn’t want to breathe in theirs for fear I would lose yours.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes,” I murmured, staring into his beautiful eyes. “I suspect they didn’t mention that I asked about you.”
“No,” he replied, giving me a slight grin. “But I’m not surprised. They were both so pissed off, that was all they could focus on.”
It was typical omega behavior, and the polar opposite of everything I already knew Avery to be.
“Tell me what happened here,” I ordered, wanting to get this part over with so I could speak to my mate.
He took a breath. “When we arrived on the scene, I asked who made the call to 911. Since no one had an answer for me, I figured it had to be an alarm.”
“I don’t understand what this––”
He lifted his hand to stop me. “With me”—the grin made his eyes glint—“you always get the whole story.”
“Police officer,” I murmured, smiling in return. “Please, continue.”
“According to the incident report, a security alarm was triggered, and the monitoring company followed up and alerted the police. Someone had locked themselves in a panic room.”
“And that someone was Remy? He locked himself in, and that’s why the police showed up.”
He nodded. “The uniforms were first on the scene, and missed the panic room on this floor when they initially swept the house. Knowing there had to be one up here, I was walking around looking for it, and when I passed it by, he must have caught my scent and couldn’t help himself; he came charging out at me… I think, because I smell like you.”
I nodded, putting my hand on the back of the chair, taking a step closer. “And so he came at you?”
“He came to me, not at me. In spite of whatever he witnessed tonight, or did, I was able to subdue him fairly easily because he recognized your scent.”
“But he’s an alpha.” I looked my mate over, seeing marks that would become bruises and scratches that had not been there a few short hours prior. The scrape on the side of his neck, in the exact place where my mark would go, was especially startling. “He could have killed you.”
He scoffed. “Not today, and I’ve tangled with many alphas and come out just fine.”
I scowled at him. “You’ve fought other alphas?”
“Among other things,” he confessed, holding my gaze, making the connotation crystal clear just in case I missed it. “You should know that in case it changes anything you might be thinking about me.”
The only thing it changed was that I felt even luckier to have found him.
Other alphas had not only seen him but had him in bed, and then made the deliberate decision to let him go.
I was dumbfounded. They had missed his value completely.
I wondered at their blindness, and was grateful even as I was bone-deep jealous.
“Graeme?” He croaked out my name. “Does it…change anything?”
“No,” I declared, letting him hear the truth in my voice. “I’m sorry, I’m merely surprised. Normally, an omega would inform their family immediately to secure a bonding. In your case, you could have forced any of the alphas you slept with to offer for you, given the liberties they took.”
“Nobody took anything,” he assured me. “I gave what I wanted to, nothing more, and I had no interest in seeing any of them again.”
I was quiet, didn’t push. I wanted him to say more. Hoped he would say more.
“I would—” He took a gulp of air. “—like to see you, though, if that’s okay.”
“It would be my privilege,” I promised him, driven to distraction by his abraded skin. “Where did you––how was your neck scraped?”
His gaze met mine and held. “In the scuffle with your cousin.”
Remy…had tried to mark my mate.
A cold jolt of fear slammed into me, and anger coursed alongside it through my veins. I closed my eyes and breathed amid the tremor of raw hatred that thundered close behind.
“It’s not what you think,” he murmured, and I heard him, but his voice was muted, as though he spoke to me from across the room. “When he saw I wasn’t you, he went for my throat. He was scared, so yeah…he was trying to kill me, not mark me.”
I should have been more horrified over Remy attacking my mate, but I was embarrassed to admit to myself the greater fear was that another had tried to mark him.
“He came at me, but his attack was clumsy. One of his claws caught me, not a fang. His mouth was nowhere near my throat.”
Simple words, illuminating words, and they cleared my head and meant my cousin would live.
It was my right to take his life for any trespass I saw fit to punish.
Certainly, I would have gutted him for trying to put his mark on my mate, whether he knew who Avery was to me or not.
One did not mark omegas without their permission, and since Remy was raised better, I had to wonder what happened.
“Was he drugged?” I asked Avery.
“I don’t think so, but they’ll do a tox screen at the hospital.”
“Your best guess?”
“My guess would be no. I got a good look at him when I put him on the ground. His pupils weren’t blown, and he seemed lucid.
I mean”––he gestured at Remy on the bed––“he hasn’t moved since we put him there.
We can both hear that he’s breathing, and his heart is pumping. This reads like shock to me.”
I nodded. “So the chances are good that whatever he saw in his bedroom scared him to death, and your scent––or mine, as it were––jolted him, but only momentarily.”
“Yeah, that’s what I think.”
“And who is dead in the other room?”
His brows furrowed.
“This shouldn’t have to be said, you should know it, feel it, but you can trust me.”
He took a breath. “It’s just not—this is a police matter.”
“But perhaps I know the man and can be of assistance.”
His gaze held mine, weighing his decision. “We know who he is; we ran his prints. His name is Trent Highmore,” he revealed. “Do you know him?”
“I know of him,” I answered, scowling. “We belonged to the same country club, but his membership was revoked after the charges.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I bet. Suspicion of felony criminal sexual assault and criminal sexual abuse by force will get you bounced out of lots of nice places.”
“And they were human women.”
“What I got from the case notes was that he preyed on them because he was banned from any interaction with omegas, even as an alpha, for his treatment of several of them at the gatherings.”
“That was my understanding, yes.”
As a cyne I was given access to information that others were not, and that included sensitive information about crimes that had been committed. I couldn’t recall them all, but certainly Trent Highmore’s offenses had made an impression.
“If the omegas who accused him are mated now, their bond mates should certainly be questioned,” I prodded Avery.
“I’ll have to track them all down, but another alpha would have challenged him to a duel, wouldn’t they?”
“It depends on how highly the alpha values their omega,” I replied honestly. “Certainly, I would challenge and defend you, but you’re more than my bonded omega.”
He said nothing, just continued to stare at me.
I took a step closer. “You’re certain my cousin didn’t hurt you?”
“Yeah,” he answered, and my breath caught when he took a step toward me, around the chair, still holding my gaze. “Like I said, I’m stronger than you think, and even though there’s something wrong with me, I held my own.”