The Office
Elowen
Then I feel it through our bond.
A cold spike of worry. It’s there and gone in less than a second, reeled back so fast I almost convince myself I imagined it.
"Stay behind me." Cliff steps back from me, zipping his pants and straightening his shirt.
Perrin grabs my arm and pulls me to one side, pressing us both flat against the wall so Cliff has a clear path to the door.
Then he opens it.
I quickly smooth down my shirt, take one breath, and follow Cliff.
The shop floor opens up around us, hot and stuffy. Raff is at the workbench, but he's not looking at the battery anymore. He's looking at the man standing right inside the bay doors, his hands in his pockets and his dark eyes moving over the shop.
Anton.
My stomach drops the second I see him.
It's involuntary and immediate, the same cold rush that hit me at the apartment. I know rationally that Anton isn't a threat to me here. Even if he has figured out that I’m an omega, he can’t exactly do anything about it.
I'm mated, and surrounded by my pack. A group of men who would put themselves between me and anyone that dared to even threaten me.
But old habits are hard to break.
"Elowen," Anton says with a small dip of his head.
"Hey," I say, staying close to Cliff.
Anton looks at me for a long moment, something shifting behind his eyes that I can't quite read. Then he looks at Cliff.
"I found something," he says. "Thought you'd want to hear it in person."
Cliff jerks his chin toward the bay doors, making it clear he wants to talk to him alone. Anton follows the pack alpha out of the shop, his hands still in his pockets. His eyes do one more sweep of the space before settling.
Raff wipes his hands on the shop towel. He doesn't move toward Anton, but he doesn't step back either. He simply stands at the workbench with his arms crossed and his gray eyes tracking every movement.
Perrin moves to my side, close enough that his arm brushes mine. A moment later I feel Adam step in right behind us, his presence warm and quiet at my back.
Anton stops in the middle of the shop floor and looks at Cliff. "The Cassville Care murders," he says, keeping his voice low and even. "I asked around."
I go still, listening.
"What did you find?" Cliff asks.
Anton shifts slightly, squaring his shoulders. "The official story was bullshit," he says simply. "It's pretty clear that someone paid to make it go away. Robbery was the easiest cover story."
"What makes you say that?" Raff asks.
Anton's eyes cut to me. They're filled with something I wasn't expecting. A deep, quiet sadness sits so plainly on his face that I have to look away from it. I fix my gaze on the concrete ground in front of me and hold very still.
"Because of the amount of violence," Anton says softly. "No one does…that to rob a place."
Adam's arms come around me from behind, crossing over my stomach, pulling me back against his chest without a word. On my other side Perrin shifts, angling his body slightly in front of mine, like he can put himself between me and Anton’s words if he positions himself just right.
He can't. But I love him for trying.
"Who paid them off?" Raff asks, and I hear him move, his boots on the concrete floor, stepping a little closer to where I'm standing.
"That I don't know," Anton says. "But whoever it was, they had reach.”
"What else?" Cliff asks.
"Whoever did it wasn't a professional," Anton says. "The scene was messy. Clearly improvised. Someone who knew what they were doing would have made it look cleaner." He pauses. "This looked like panic."
Panic?
I think about the blood spray on that cardboard box in the prep room. The way it arced across the top like a cough or a sneeze.
How many other people have died because someone panicked?
"That's all you have?" Cliff asks. "We're looking for someone connected enough to buy a police investigation, but not connected enough to send a professional?"
"That's how I read it," Anton says.
I risk a glance at the alpha.
Anton is still looking right at me, and the expression on his face almost hurts to see. It's not pity. It's more like remorse. Like a man who feels bad for not having more to tell me.
It's a strange thing to see on Anton's face. It’s not like we really know each other.
I mean, I worked for him for six months, but we weren’t friends. He mostly just intimidated me. But he's looking at me right now like he feels personally responsible for what happened to me.
"So we're looking for someone young," Raff says quietly. "Or new. Someone who hadn't done it before and had the connections to call in a favor afterward to clean it up."
Anton says nothing, which is its own kind of answer.
The shop is so quiet I can hear the generator humming outside and the distant sound of traffic on the road beyond the tree line. Adam's arms tighten around me slightly, and I press back into him and let him hold me up while I think.
Someone who panicked.
Someone with powerful enough connections to make a police investigation disappear.
Someone who had been running collections from small independent pharmacies…maybe.
I turn it all over slowly in my head, trying to make sense of it. I need to get my hands on my notebook.
"That's all I have," Anton says finally. He looks at Cliff. "For now."
Cliff nods once. "Thank you."
Anton turns to leave, and something moves through me before I can stop it.
"Anton."
He stops. Turns back.
Everyone in the shop freezes.
I step forward, out of Adam's arms, and look at him directly. "Why are you helping me?"
The question hangs in the air between us, plain and honest and slightly too vulnerable for a shop full of people, but I need to know. I've been turning it over since Raff told me he'd gone to Anton, and I can't make it make sense. We weren't friends. We were barely colleagues.
He intimidated me, and I spent most of my time actively avoiding his attention.
"You're a good kid, Pérez," he finally says.
"And there aren't many good people in my line of work.
" He looks down at the floor for a second, then back up at me.
"And my parents were killed when I was young.
I never got any answers." His jaw tightens slightly.
"I know exactly how shitty that is. I know what it feels like to… " He takes a breath. "To not know."
He holds my gaze for one more second. Then, almost as an afterthought, "Milo misses you, by the way."
Something catches in my chest before I can stop it. A small, involuntary warmth that I immediately feel slightly ridiculous about. Milo is probably just bored. He never did well without someone to talk at, and I was convenient. But still.
"Tell him I said hi," I say.
The corner of Anton's mouth moves. Not quite a smile. Then he turns and walks back through the bay doors into the afternoon sun.
The second he's gone, Adam's hand finds my shoulder, squeezing once, and I exhale slowly through my nose and turn back to the shop.
I can feel Cliff searching our bond, trying to figure out what I'm feeling.
Raff has his arms crossed, his jaw set, his gray eyes still fixed on the spot where Anton was standing like he's replaying the conversation.
“Are you okay?” Perrin asks.
“Yeah,” I say. "But I’d like to go home. I need my notebook." I look at Cliff. "I need to go through it. All of it. Everything I wrote down."
"Then let's go home," my mate says simply. "We'll look at it together."
For some reason, my notebook looks smaller on the coffee table than I remembered it. All my tiny notes are spread around, everyone taking turns reading everything through.
Raff shifts slightly beneath me, adjusting his grip on my hips. I lean back against his chest and look at the papers spread across the table.
I've gone over everything, front to back, pulling out every loose scrap of paper and laying them flat on the little table.
Receipts. Torn envelope corners. Pages of dates and locations and partial names connected by lines I drew at two in the morning when I was too tired to be thinking clearly.
Hell, I even have a cocktail napkin with a detailed description of a dented soda can.
Cliff is on the edge of the couch to my left, his elbows on his knees, eyes moving slowly across everything laid out in front of him. Perrin is beside the pack alpha in the same position, reading glasses perched on his nose, turning a folded piece of paper over in his hands.
But Adam hasn’t sat down once since we got home.
He's currently in the kitchen.
I can hear him opening and closing drawers. He reappeared three minutes ago with a pad of yellow sticky notes and a fistful of different colored pens, deposited them on the corner of the coffee table, then disappeared again to get everyone drinks that nobody asked for.
"Adam," Perrin says without looking up. "Sit down."
"I'm getting water," Adam calls back.
"We have water."
"I'm getting more water."
Perrin looks at me over his reading glasses, and I press my lips together.
Adam reappears with five glasses of water on a tray, which is four more glasses of water than anyone needed, and sets them down on the corner of the coffee table.
Then he stands there looking at the mess of papers.
“Sit, Adam,” Cliff says gently, but there’s a slight edge of command running through it.
Adam's body immediately obeys, dropping onto the nearest open spot on the couch like two magnets clicking together. He blinks, looking faintly startled by himself.
"I will never get used to that," he says, staring at his own knees. "It's so weird that my body can’t stop."
"I know," I say. "Alpha commands still catch me off guard."
"Does it bother you?" Adam asks, looking at me.
"Not with them," I say simply, smiling up at Cliff as I lean a little further into Raff's chest. "It’s terrifying with the wrong alphas. But with our boys, it’s more annoying than anything else.”
“Hand me the notebook?” Perrin says to no one in particular. The beta is still completely focused on the task at hand.