Chapter 42
All things considered, I was relatively happy with my performance at breakfast. Eva had wailed on and off the entire time, wiping her disgusting, snotty face on Indigo, and I hadn’t even made a comment.
But, once we arrived to her apartment and the tears started again… I was already at the end of my rope.
This continued for most of the day. Eva wandering between members of the pack to seek comfort in the form of cuddling or distraction, neither of which were particularly enjoyable for me while she was a faucet of bodily fluids.
And, after a very long morning, an afternoon, and then an evening of managing the unruly omega’s feelings—I’d hit my limit.
Even if I thought that being upset about her unfortunate circumstances was reasonable, the sounds that came along with crying made the vein in my temple pulse with discomfort.
Sobbing. Coughing. Sniffling.
My teeth were on edge just thinking about it.
I’d never been particularly adept at managing my own emotions, much less anyone else’s.
But the way this omega did it—big fat wet tears, drooling, snot flowing—was so inherently despicable to me that my alpha instincts didn't stand a chance against my need for distance, leaving me in this sort of wax-figure like state where I wanted to approach Eva, but I was physically unable to.
Of course I wanted to comfort my omega, to make her feel better.
But I was at the end of my rope, and something told me that ordering her to stop being such a miserable crybaby and shut up wouldn’t have garnered the results I was hoping for.
Surely, it wasn’t exactly the most tactful, or helpful thing to do.
Luckily for us, Eva had plenty of alphas around that were far more emotionally viable than I was.
Indigo, to their credit, was dedicated to making Eva feel at home. So much so that they were, for the time being, ignoring their bruised ego with Marcus and Joon… still. Things in the house were unusually tense. I’d never heard the alpha say so few words in a day.
It was strange; there was a time where I would have celebrated this change. Indigo’s constant yapping did wonders for ensuring that none of us saw any peace. But now?
I was man enough to admit when I was wrong. Without Indigo’s terminally unserious chattering the entire house felt… off.
I didn’t like it, but I wasn’t sure how to resolve it either. Our time with Eva was supposed to give them an outlet, a chance to work through their negative emotions so they could get back on board with the program—that this was a good thing.
That Joon bonding into our pack, no matter with who, meant he was going to be a permanent fixture in our lives.
And now, there was only one piece of the puzzle left to place before our family was complete.
I ducked under the yellow do not cross police tape stuck to the doorframe of Eva's apartment with a roll of my eyes. The door itself was so damaged it didn’t close properly, and the tape? What a joke.
No one and nothing was going to be deterred from entering because of a little yellow plastic. Though, perhaps once they got a look at the disaster inside they’d change their mind anyway.
I adjusted my black latex gloves, nose wrinkling at the crunch of glass—from the shattered mirror that used to hang near her front door—underfoot.
Law enforcement were excellent at embezzling money and harassing minorities without cause, but for the most part I thought of them as being ineffectual high school dropouts who fell prey to targeted ad campaigns looking for men who felt small.
Oddly enough, my solution for building the self-esteem of loser piss babies with no social skills didn’t involve handing them a gun, but perhaps that was just my European sensibilities getting in the way of the good old fashioned American Dream.
Still, when it came to the job that the police were allegedly hired to do—solving crimes—they were so ineffective it made me wonder whether the industrial complex of justice was a money laundering scheme.
When it came to protecting my family, I wasn’t taking any chances. This was a job better left to someone who was sufficiently motivated to find the culprit, and who wasn’t bogged down by bureaucratic nonsense.
Me.
I tried the lightswitch, making the damaged lightfixture overhead spark before it sputtered out entirely.
Great.
Using my phone as a flashlight, I studied the wreckage. In the cover of nightfall, without the steady buzz of activity from the detectives and water remediation workers, the place felt eerie.
Unfinished.
Like a haunted house without the cobwebs.
Paper, glass and potting soil littered the floor in a bed of debris that crunched underfoot as I moved further inside, my nose wrinkling at the smell of Eva’s stale dismay hanging in the air.
Carefully, I picked my way through the living room, wincing a little at Eva's ruined collection of physical games. One thing was clear to me, from the depotted plants to the knife split sofa, this hadn’t been about theft.
It’d been about doing the most damage possible.
They wanted to scare her. To make her feel hopeless.
And when I found out who had done this, the terror that I would inflict upon them would make this look like a new neighbor bringing over a pie.
I passed the kitchen, my lip curling away from my teeth in disgust at the paint scrawled over the cabinets—YOUR MINE WHORE—the grammatically incorrect as well as entirely false message doing nothing but making me angrier.
My nose wrinkled, picking up on the remnants of Marcus’ scent in the hall as I made my way towards Eva’s room.
He’d left work early to come to wait for the cops so we could take Eva home, letting the detectives ask their questions somewhere that didn’t more closely resemble the trash island floating in the middle of the pacific than her apartment.
The carpet squished underfoot, loud fans in her bathroom and bedroom running with the intent to dry out the floors and walls.
It was bad luck that it’d been a week day, Eva’s downstairs neighbor was a commuter and went into the office uptown, meaning they hadn’t been home during the incident.
Unfortunate, since it meant that their apartment flooded too, once the water from the plugged sinks and shower started to seep through Eva’s floor and into their ceiling.
Credit where credit was due, shoving one of Eva’s dildos into the sink drain to plug it? Inventive.
I was going to shove it through their fucking eye socket.
In Eva’s bedroom, her stream setup had suffered the brunt of the intruder's fury. The desk was nearly cracked in half, her equipment smashed nearly beyond recognition.
I took a few photos. When it came to the rest of the room, it was well documented through her streams, and would be easy enough to pick out items from the footage she had, but her desk was rarely seen on camera.
It would take a little more guesswork to determine what she had so it could be replaced.
Her clothes, ripped from her closet and sopping wet, had been cut with a knife or a pair of scissors, her makeup smushed overtop in a glom of multicolored paste.
Whoever had done this, they'd been efficient.
As poorly written and repetitive as the dead man's messages were, they painted a clear enough picture. They were angry. And they were sorely mistaken on who the fuck Eva belonged to.
When I found out who they were, I was going to make them wish that they'd never been born, much less heard the name Eva Kent.
It was one thing when I broke in and terrorized my little omega whore, it was another thing entirely for someone else to defile Eva’s autonomy and walk through our contract.
I picked over the mess, looking for anything that wasn’t broken with no luck. Adjusting my gloves, I pressed the power button on Eva's computer.
Unsurprisingly, nothing happened. The water had absolutely gotten into the case and fried the entire thing. I’d need to bring it home and see if I could get her files to transfer, but it would have to wait.
Dead man's most irritating move in this was absolutely the fucking water.
Well… actually it might’ve been the holes in the drywall. Or the cereal poured all over the kitchen.
No, it was the message, the incorrect use of your so careless that it made my blood boil.
I ran the back of my hand over my forehead with a sigh. Going to her closet, I found a few items that hadn’t been cut or soaked, taking the small drawstring bag from the pocket of my jacket, I added the items inside. Along with a handbag that appeared to be undamaged… even if it was a little ugly.
Digging through Eva’s vanity yielded similar results. A few of her cosmetics and brushes had survived the assault, though the rest would need to be replaced. After snapping a few more photos, I was fairly certain that I’d be able to identify everything, with the help of the internet or Tara.
Or Joon.
I smiled a little at the thought of my omegas taking my credit card to go on a shopping spree, mentally tucking away that activity for when the dust had settled and it was safe for Eva to be without one of her alphas again.
It’d be fun for them to get to replace everything, build some new memories together…
But for the time being I would at least handle the basics.
I documented as much as I could, trying to give myself a deep cache of evidence. But, with Eva’s computer being a bust, there really wasn’t much more that I could do. My time would be best spent at home sifting through whatever chatlogs I could access in the hopes of unmasking this creep.
Let’s just hope that Eva uses cloud storage, not local.
The longer I remained in the ruined space, the angrier I became. If anyone was going to sneak around in my omegas house, steal her shit, and terrify her, it was going to be me. I had a signed contract consenting to it.
This loser? He was about to learn that when you stuck your hand into the mouth of a fucking shark, you got your goddamn fingers bitten off.
I knew I couldn't go back out the front door without leaving footprints, so I took my leave through her bedroom window, pausing halfway through the opening when a familiar scent caught in my nose.
I turned, looking for the source of the smell, finding a strip of torn fabric caught on the wonky nail sticking from the lefthand side of the sill.
I plucked the little scrap from where it'd caught, bringing it close to my nose for a deeper sniff.
Menthol cigarettes.
"Got you, cunt," I whispered, taking a plastic baggy from the front pouch of my bag and placing the fabric inside.
From what I could tell in the dark, it was likely part of a shirt—ripped in the middle of a hasty getaway.
A fatal mistake, because now I knew that this wasn’t an isolated event.
This creep had been after my sweet tesoro for weeks.
I ran my fingers along the closure of the bag, sealing it shut with a smirk.
All I needed to do was have Eva scent the scrap, and we'd be one step closer to making sure that no one was foolish enough to come near what was mine again. Even if she couldn’t identify the scent, any information she could provide would provide useful context for me to narrow down my list of suspects.
Better run, fuck head. Because when I catch you I’m going to make the guillotine look like a beach vacation.