Chapter Thirty-Eight #2
I sit in the silence and I breathe and I run the numbers. Five floors down. One lift. One corridor. One door. The males are modified somehow. Alpha but wrong, their chemical scent stinging my eyes. My cheek throbs. The sedative is leaving my system.
I bolt upright when the door opens and a blond male steps into the room. I know exactly who this is.
I don't need him to introduce himself. I have had his face on my desk for months. A thin file. An old passport photo that didn't capture him right, and two surveillance grabs from after he went to ground. It was never a face I could look at for long without wanting to put my fist through the paper.
Ethan Wallace. The man I have been hunting since the night I pulled my omega off his IV lines, barefoot and shaking, his chemical signature wrecked through her gardenia.
He's thirty-six, maybe. His blond hair is combed so precisely it doesn't look like hair. His eyes are pale blue and they track across my face. He wears a tailored shirt with the sleeves rolled twice, and a watch that costs more than my car.
I've pulled against the steel, imagining my hands around his neck. All that happens is new blood where the metal bites me. The chair doesn't move and I wrench my shoulder.
His brows lift. “I see you recognize me.”
Yeah, it's all about you, asshole.
“If looks could kill.” He drags a second metal chair across the floor with his foot. He sits across from me and crosses one ankle over the other knee. “Seraphine Vidal. You're a hard female to catch.”
His voice is warmer than I expected. Pleasant. Academic.
“You took down two of my alpha. They don't go down easily.”
“They went down easy enough.”
“Bravo.” He says it without warmth, the way you'd note a good result in a trial. “People who fight back give me better data. Cooperation tells me very little.”
He leans back, eyes locked on me. “Do you know why you're here, Ms. Vidal?”
I'm here because you're a dead male walking. I'm here because you're a degenerate who harms the vulnerable.
I press my tongue flat against the roof of my mouth and don't speak.
“You think you came to rescue omegas.” He tilts his head. “To be the hero. To matter. Do you know what happens when a population becomes biologically unstable, Ms. Vidal? Civilizations collapse. Wars begin over reproductive viability. I’m not creating monsters. I’m trying to prevent extinction.”
“The old railway network is standard enough.” I keep my voice flat. “But this level is interesting. How deep does it go?”
His jaw moves half a millimeter. “Very good, Ms. Vidal. You're running fast for someone on that much sedative.”
He turns his wrist, studies the back of his own hand.
“The city decommissioned this network in the eighties and sealed the access points.
What they didn't do, rather carelessly in my view, was check whether anyone else had already found the other way in.
All we had to do was dig deeper in a system that was already mapped out.
We're completely invisible from the surface. No satellite, no radio, no GPS. You could stand in the right field, above the right ceiling, and not know we were five floors down.” He leans forward.
“You won't be found unless I want you to be found.”
I keep my face flat. Don't give him anything.
He huffs. “You're the Head of Omega Affairs for Silverpine County.”
“You know about me?”
“I know your intervention programs. Your Outreach Squad. Your case closure rates. The fact that you're a rare female alpha.”
His words land behind my sternum. “Then you'll know people will be coming for me.”
His smile widens, showing even white teeth. “Oh, I'm counting on that. In particular, your scent-matched omegas.”
“You will not touch them!” I struggle against the metal. My skin rips but I pay it no heed. I'll rip his head off. I'll gut him and wrap his intestines around his neck. I'll—
He laughs. It's the first real laugh he's given me, small and amused. “You are a delight.”
He produces a tablet from inside his jacket and turns the screen toward me. Espie and Aubrey on the sunroom floor under the duvet. My scent goes sharp.
He swipes.
Kev bolting a beam, shirt stretched across his shoulders. Lex beside him with a level, that look he gets when he's drowning his own thoughts in someone else's project. Ezra in the kitchen window, blurred by glass.
Mine. Every one of them is mine.
He swipes.
Espie planting strawberries.
He swipes.
Aubrey alone. Sitting in the sun on the patio. His damaged hand resting on his knee.
“Stop.”
His eyebrow lifts a fraction.
He swipes anyway.
Aubrey and Espie at the nursery looking scared, Ezra, Lex and Kev surrounding them as they hustle them down an aisle, a full cart forgotten behind them. Air turns to cement as I try to draw it in.
He swipes. The next image is a grainy still and I understand what I'm looking at.
The loading dock. Security-camera angle, top-down. A woman in tac gear moving through the frame with a small body in her arms. Me. The night I pulled Espie off his table.
The cameras I clocked on entry that night. The ones I knew were wrong for an abandoned building and walked past anyway. I noted them. I moved through them. I told myself the east side had a blind spot I could exploit.
He kept the footage. The blind spot was never a blind spot. It was a view.
“I lost three of my alphas and a very valuable specimen the night you came through my door.” His voice has gone quieter. Almost fond. “I have watched that footage more times than I should probably admit, Ms. Vidal. I have been paying close attention to you ever since.”
He has been sitting in the dark watching me hunt him, and I didn't know. And I led him straight to them.
Fuck.
“You know where they are,” I say. “Why haven't you gone in.”
He uncrosses his ankle from his knee and leans forward slightly, the posture of a man settling in to give an answer he's thought about.
“Kev Dawson's home is defensible. Three male alphas on protected ground, scent-matched omegas, a healer with combat training, the Canton network a phone call away.
I estimated losses at sixty percent of my assets to secure the targets alive.
The nursery was worse. Public space, witnesses, Ronan's people twelve minutes out.”
He tilts his head. “Draw is cleaner than siege. You know this. You'd do the same in my position.”
I would. It's much easier to have your target come to you. Better to defend when you're set up for it.
“Kev Dawson. Alexander Cheng. Ezra Whitfield.” He reads the names like a menu.
“And these two.” He taps Espie's face on the tablet with a manicured nail.
“Esperance Durant. And Aubrey Turns. Both scent-matched to all three alphas. And to each other. And to you. Quite the interesting pack you have here.”
The basil in my scent goes sharp enough that I can taste it on my own tongue.
Wallace inhales once, slow. “Do you understand what your pack is, Ms. Vidal? What it represents biologically?”
I don't answer.
“Scent-matched packs are rare. A pack with four matched alphas is exceptional. A pack with two matched omegas is effectively unheard of. A pack of six all scent-matched.” He lets it hang. “The research potential is extraordinary.”
“You've got it wrong. I'm not scent-matched to the male alphas. The omegas are. I'm scent-matched to the omegas. That's it. You've wasted the operation.”
Wallace stares at me. Then he laughs. It goes on two beats longer than it should. “Oh, Ms. Vidal. Oh. You really don't know.”
The drop starts in my belly, moves to my chest, and reaches the back of my throat.
“Ah. I see you don't. Gods know you would have felt the pull. Never mind, I'll spell it out to you now, such is the power of scent-matched omegas.” He leans forward on his elbows, his voice dropping into something almost reverent.
“They're a conduit. Any alpha bonded to a scent-matched omega becomes, by extension, scent-matched to every other alpha in that omega's pack.” He leans back.
“You've been scent-matched to those three males since the moment your omegas claimed you.
No one knows why and I'm going to be the first to offer that to the everyday beta. Can you imagine how much I can charge for a scent-matching drug that bonds? My name will go down in history for eons.”
The fluorescent stutter and the hum and the cold concrete under my feet all stop registering. My pulse thuds in the cuffs.
I'm remembering the drive out of Kev's driveway.
The feeling in my sternum when I put the car in reverse and backed out.
It wasn't only grief. It was a bond pulling at me to go back to my family.
The pain started behind my sternum and spread outward through my lungs and my spine and the base of my skull.
I told myself it was the price of doing the brave thing.
It was the sound my body made being pulled off a scent-match, and it wasn't one. It was five.
I am scent-matched to all of them, and I walked out the door.
My hands curl against the cuff. The wound on my wrist screams and I don't care.
He is not getting near my pack. That is the only thought holding me together right now. Everything else can wait.
“Kev, Lex and Ezra will never let Aubrey and Espie out of their sight. You'll never get your hands on them,” I say.
“So let's give them some motivation.”
He clicks his fingers and three males walk through the door, one of them holding a surgical tray.
Two come to me, ozone and chemical-copper, flanking me.
I thrash in the chair and the cuffs bite and the chair doesn't move.
A third male stands next to Wallace and lowers the tray.
The instruments are laid out in descending size on a folded sterile drape.
One beta unlocks my left cuff. The other pins my wrist down. They wrench my arm forward and slam my hand flat against the arm rest.
Wallace crouches in front of me.
“Don't you fucking touch me.”
“It's the fastest guaranteed draw.” He says it the way a man explains which screwdriver is correct for a job. “A scent-matched pack will respond to severed tissue of a mate. Besides, you’ll need them soon enough. A scent-matched alpha without their mates turn feral after a while.”
I jolt, eyes flaring wide before I can stop my response.
Wallace takes it all in. Of course he does.
“Another thing you didn’t know, I take it.
Well, let’s get them here as fast as we can.
” He picks up the scalpel. “The smallest finger.
Clean cut. I don't want you bleeding out. At least, not yet. Your blood is too valuable.”
My heart pounds. My hand is on metal. The male holds my fingers splayed, pinning each one separately.
Wallace brings the blade down. The pain is white. I go rigid and a sound rips out of me. I am going to burn this place to the ground. And I'm going to make sure Wallace is incinerated in the inferno.
Wallace inspects my finger under the light, his head tilting. His thumb finds the cut edge and traces it.
“Beautiful,” he says. Quietly. To himself. “The capillary structure in female alpha tissue really is distinctive.”
He wraps the finger in sterile cloth and hands the parcel to the male who has been waiting at his elbow.
“Adrian Blackwood will have this at the OHC by breakfast.”
Rage surges up so hard it burns.
“I’m going to end you, Wallace.” My voice comes out raw. “I’m going to end you so completely there’ll be nothing left to send to hell.”
I spit in his face.
It lands on his cheek.
Wallace reaches calmly into his pocket, unfolds a handkerchief, and wipes it away.
Then he backhands me hard enough to turn the world black.