42. Phineas
Chapter 42
Phineas
December, Los Angeles
“ S weets, we’re home!”
Meadow had gone down for a nap before Arlo and I left to run a myriad of errands so everything would be ready for Hendrix to come home. We also picked up a few final touches for the nursery while Beckett was dealing with the cops again.
“Sweets?”
There was no answer. Maybe she was sleeping really hard. I trotted up the stairs and into Meadow’s nest, but it was completely empty. I checked her bathroom, the nursery, and every other bedroom, but she was nowhere to be found.
Weird. I went to the banister and called down. “Arlo, is Meadow downstairs?”
I heard him running around and went to look as well, but our omega didn’t seem to be home at all.
“Where is she?” Arlo asked.
“I don’t know.” I checked the group chat and my private texts, but there was nothing from Meadow.
Phin:
Sweets, where are you?
Beckett:
She’s not at home?
Arlo:
Not unless she’s invisible
Or a hide and seek champion
Nerves twisted in my belly when a read receipt from Meadow popped up, but no answer followed.
“I think something’s wrong,” I told Arlo.
“Let me check the doorbell cam footage.” A moment later, he cursed and turned the phone to me. We didn’t usually have the notifications turned on, so we didn’t get a million pings a day, with all of us going in and out, but that meant we had missed Meadow leaving the pack house. “Does she look like she’s crying?”
Her face did look a lot pinker than usual. “Why would she leave? What happened?”
I retraced my steps back up to her nest, hoping for a clue. On the opposite side of the bed, her tablet was face down on the floor. When I turned it over, I found the screen cracked, but it was still open to tabloid photos of Ellie kissing Hendrix.
“What the fuck?”
Arlo appeared behind me. “Shit. Why the hell is he locking lips with that monster?”
“Fuck if I know.” I snapped a photo and sent it through a separate group chat that was just between Beckett, Arlo, and me.
Beckett:
What the hell???
I’m going to kick his ass
Phin:
We’ll go down and ask him about it
Pretty sure this is why Meadow’s gone
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Arlo protested. “He’s never given any indication he likes Ellie, and that sure as shit looks like the rehab center. He wouldn’t be fucking kissing her after everything we found out.”
“The pictures say otherwise.” I pulled up the locator app for the pack, seeing the dot for Meadow’s phone a couple of hours north of LA and moving. “Where’s she going?”
“She’d better not be driving all the way to Seattle when she’s that full of baby. That doesn’t seem very safe.”
“Fuck. Okay, goddamn it, let’s go talk to Hendrix first, so we actually have an explanation when we catch up to Meadow.”
“I could follow after her right now, and you could go talk to Hendrix by yourself,” Arlo suggested instead.
“Dude, that’s an eighteen-hour drive. You can’t make that by yourself.”
“Neither can she. She’s going to have to stop somewhere for the night.”
“Fine. You get ready for that drive, and I’ll go to the rehab facility.”
We split up, and I white-knuckled my way through the entire drive. Hendrix had better have a damn good explanation for those photos.
I waited impatiently and as politely as I could manage while the front desk staff checked me in and went to locate Hendrix. I paced the visitors’ room. It looked weirdly familiar, and I pulled up the tabloid images, noting the same windows, the same couch.
As soon as Hendrix stepped into the room, I shoved the phone in his face. “Explain yourself.”
Hendrix shoved the phone away, his eyes wide. “Hello to you too.”
“Don’t be fucking cute with me. Those pictures were on Meadow’s tablet, and now she’s on her way north.”
“What?”
“Why were you kissing Ellie? And why are there fucking photos of it?”
“Fuck’s sake, I wasn’t kissing Ellie. She kissed me when she impersonated our omega to get in here. She even dyed her goddamn hair, so I would think she was Meadow from a distance. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Shit. “How are you going to prove that to Meadow?”
If she was upset enough to run, I wasn’t sure she would accept his explanation.
Hendrix growled, running his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know.”
My gaze swiveled to the cameras tucked into the corners of the room. Oh no. I yanked him close and whispered in his ear, “Look at the angles of the photos.”
His eyes flickered over them for a few seconds before realization dawned on him. “They were taken from inside and outside. Did she tell someone she was coming here? Did they hack into the footage, or did someone give it to them?”
“Hack seems more likely. At least, if they want to keep up their business. The celebs staying here would sue them into the fucking ground if they got caught leaking photos of clients in here.”
“I pushed Ellie off after half a second, I swear. They should still have the footage of that. They reported her to the police when I told them who she was. As far as I know, they didn’t catch up with her, though.”
“Of course not.” I sighed. “That would be way too helpful. Okay, let me go ask for someone who has access to footage.”
We waited an agonizing hour and a half for someone with the authorization and expertise to arrive and go through the footage. Relief poured through me as I watched Hendrix do exactly as he had said on the screen.
“We need a copy of that.”
“I’m afraid we would need a court order to surrender security footage of the facility.”
“It’s footage of me ,” countered Hendrix. “Footage that, might I add, was screenshotted and given to the tabloids. You’re going to give it to me, or I will sue this place completely out of operation and blacklist you in every social circle I have.”
One of the directors, who had been supervising the process, let out a sigh. “That’s not fair.”
“What’s not fair is that I came to you for help, and I’m paying out the ass for it, only for your staff to allow my abuser in here and fail to secure your footage of the clients in the facility, and now my omega thinks I’ve been fucking cheating on her. Fix it.”
Damn, Henny was growing a spine.
“Our lawyer’s on speed dial at this point,” I said to them, calmly, but the threat was there.
“You may record the footage with your own device,” the director said after a few moments of silence.
“I’ll be checking out early,” Hendrix added.
“That’s not a good idea.”
“My omega needs me, and I’m going to go to her.”
“But your therapy…”
“I’ll get back on track when things are fixed with Meadow.”
The director pursed her lips, giving us both a look of disdain before speaking to me. “Keep a close eye on him. His consumption may not have been voluntary, but his body doesn’t know the difference.”
“We’ll take care of him,” I promised. We would do a hell of a lot better job taking care of him than we had for all these years.
I stared at Meadow’s location in the app while Hendrix packed up his few belongings. She wasn’t moving very fast, but she hadn’t stopped once. Arlo’s dot was moving quickly, eating up the distance between them.
Phin:
Ellie broke in
We have a video of her throwing herself at Hen and him pushing her away
Beckett:
Thank fuck
Phin:
We’re going to follow Arlo
Beckett:
Please wait for me
Once Arlo gets her to stop, we can fly
Hendrix read over my shoulder. “You guys have a group chat without me? That’s mean. Why do we have to wait?”
“Probably so we’re not racing up the West Coast like idiots in three different vehicles. I don’t like the idea of waiting, but Beckett makes a valid point.”
Beckett:
Holy shit
You’ll never guess who they just brought in here in cuffs
Phin:
Don’t keep us in suspense, asshole
Beckett:
They got Ellie
“Shit. That’s a huge fucking relief.” Hendrix sucked in a deep breath and let it go slowly. “I hated the idea of her running around out there.”
Beckett:
Get your asses down here
I bet she would talk to Hen if he showed up
He sent a location pin.
Hendrix was a nervous wreck on the way over, but he held it together better than I expected, after everything he had been through. Beckett met us at the entrance, and thank god I had cleared up things about the kiss because, instead of punching him in the face, Beckett pulled Hendrix into a hug.
One of the officers approached us, his lips pressed into a grim line. “Do you think you can get her to talk?”
“If she’ll see me,” said Hendrix.
“Oh, she’ll see you. I told her you were on the way and she started crying. Come on.”
We followed him, the officer depositing me and Beckett behind a two-way mirror and going in with Hendrix. Ellie looked rough, barely anything like I remembered.
“Hendrix,” she gasped.
“I need you to tell them what you did.”
Her lip wobbled.
“Ellie, this is important. If you cooperate, it’ll be better for you.”
It didn’t take much for her to crack and spill to the officer that she had been drugging Meadow and Hendrix.
“Why?” Hendrix asked, his voice cracking.
“It was all Gary!” she shrieked. “He promised you would love me if I helped him get Meadow to leave the tour, so you could forget about her. She wasn’t supposed to have what we gave you. I was just giving her a sedative, so she’d be fucking miserable and want to go home.”
“You do realize how fucked up that is, don’t you?”
“It’s not my fault! I believed him. I was only fucking that asshole to get close to you. He promised it wouldn’t hurt you.”
“Whoa,” I whispered.
“Where is Gary now?” Hendrix asked.
“He has a house in Malibu under a fake name. Reggie Thomas.” Ellie rattled off the address. “He told me to go there if things went south. I assume he’s still there.”
I was already on my phone, looking up the address. “I’ll be back.”
“Where are you going?” Beckett hissed.
“I’ll be back,” I said again. “Don’t leave Hen here.”
I slipped away and got in my car for a brisk drive to Malibu. When I reached the address Ellie had provided, I walked around to the beach, seeing Gary standing in the sand barefoot, watching the ocean like he didn’t have a worry in the world.
It took a lot to push me to the edge, but listening to Ellie sing like a canary about all of his evil and duplicity had silent rage sinking into my bones.
I crept up quietly behind him. “Don’t move,” I ordered.
Gary jolted and took off sprinting, racing up the wooden steps of his deck. I followed, grabbing him by the shirt and wrenching backward with all of my strength at the same time I leapt over the railing. The sand cushioned my landing, but Gary hit the stairs hard, tumbling ass over feet to sprawl, panting, in the sand below.
“The police are already on their way here,” I told him.
Gary swallowed hard, staring up at me with frightened eyes, groaning when he tried to move. “Then why are you here?”
“Because whatever justice you face will never be enough suffering for what you did to Meadow and Hendrix, and, fuck it, to the rest of us too, with all of your goddamn bullshit over the years. You’re a fucking worm, Gary. You deserve to rot in the ground, in an unmarked grave, getting pissed on by the animals who eat you.”
By the whimper he let out, it seemed like he was about to piss himself and get a head start on that. “Don’t hurt me.”
I planted my boot in the middle of his back and ground down. “You don’t get to ask that. How long have you been torturing Hendrix?”
“Fuck, he needed it. He would’ve ruined everything for all of you if I didn’t step in. He’s been a basket case since your first tour.”
“He needed support , not drugs.” I heard the wailing of police sirens and hauled my foot back, kicking him so hard in the ass, he could probably taste the rubber soles. “You’d better be grateful they showed up when they did, because the ocean is not that far away, Gary. If you somehow get out after what you’ve done, I’ll make sure that you’re never found. Do I make myself clear?”
Gary wheezed, his eyes watering. “Crystal.”
At the slam of the car doors, I shouted up the hill, “He’s down here.”
I stood numbly as they took him away. I had never really liked him, but he had been a father figure in our lives for a decade. There was no joy in seeing him brought this low, only vindication that his crimes might be answered for. The courts took omega safety seriously, doubly so when they were pregnant. With any luck, Gary and Ellie would be locked away until they died, but that was probably wishful thinking.
Beckett:
Arlo says she’s on a train?
I’m betting she’s going all the way to Seattle
Let’s go get our omega