Dallas
Chapter Fourteen
Leaving Bonnie to head into town and open the shop was rough.
If I didn’t know she was with Archer, and that he would do anything to keep her safe, I wouldn’t have been able to.
My bear was definitely not for it. He was so close to the surface.
At times, I could scent him, and that wasn’t good.
Most of my customers were humans, and they wouldn’t notice his agitation, but for shifters who came in, it would be off-putting at best.
I had to reorganize the shelves to fill the hole left where so many of her pieces had sold. I looked at it with pride. The patience and time it took to piece those together were not something I had, and I was a craftsman, too.
I’d seen miniatures before when I took my carvings to different craft shows, but most of them used a lot of pre-made supplies. The artist basically just gluing it all together. Not her. These were truly handcrafted, one of many ways she impressed me.
Every time the door opened, I looked up, hoping it would be her. It wasn’t. Just regulars coming in, tourists stopping by on their way through town—the usual.
How many times a day, a week, a month…many times since we opened had that door swung and someone walked in? Only one of them mattered. The one where Bonnie walked into our lives.
I wondered if she was having fun with Archer, if she loved the animals and didn’t mind the menial tasks that came along with them, or if they were just better than where she’d been.
Archer was the perfect person to spend her first day with, though.
He was safe, with a calm, caregiving nature.
He brought a lot to our sleuth, and I was grateful that he was taking care of her today.
Yet, as safe and calm and caring as he was, he’d tear apart anyone who sought to do her harm.
I heard the familiar sound of Justice’s truck, which badly needed a tune-up. He loved that thing but wasn’t so great about leaving it at the mechanic and even worse at attempting any repairs. His skill set lay firmly in tech spaces.
Why was he here? Had he brought Bonnie?
I found myself brushing the dust from my pants, making sure I was put together.
She didn’t seem the type to care about those things, but, apparently, I was.
And then Justice walked in alone. He was not one to leave his work, and, from what I remembered, he had a big meeting today.
My stomach dropped. He’d found something.
“This is a we’ll be back in a moment moment, isn’t it?”
He nodded, and I flipped the sign over to closed, locked the door, and put the little clock sign on saying when we would be back.
No one around here would find that suspicious.
When we went to lunch together, or if I needed to run an errand, I did the same thing.
Our hours of operation mentioned by chance, but mostly over the hours.
We sat behind the counter, and he pulled out his phone, opening a folder filled with screenshots. “So, here’s the deal.”
Justice was able to make his long, convoluted connect-the-dot journeys concise and to the point. Initially, that hadn’t been the case. He would tell us about his day as if we understood his work jargon. But now, he went straight to it.
He showed me screenshot after screenshot as he told me about the bike and custom run, and how it was commissioned for a particular pack.
“That doesn’t mean she’s from there, though,” I said. “It’s not like it’s brand new.”
“I didn’t get to the part that has me here trying to figure out what to do next.”
I nodded, feeling bad for interrupting. Of course, he had more.
He wasn’t one to share his discoveries before he had all the answers.
He talked about omega scarcity, something I thought was only in history books, and about alpha-heavy bloodlines and stillbirths.
I nodded, my heart beating fast. There was no sugar-coating it. The pack practiced gendercide.
“It gets worse,” he said. “They haven’t had an omega in generations, except for one, and she died young. An omega had multiple pregnancies, the last one a stillbirth. One, though, would be Bonnie’s age now. The timing lines up.”
I sat with all that he said. Unlike him, this was the first time I’d heard any of it, and I wanted to be sure I was connecting everything together correctly.
I asked a few clarifying questions, but mostly we sat in silence.
The nice thing about being a sleuth was that he understood me and gave me that time.
“What if that baby didn’t die? And what if we’re guessing her age wrong?” I eventually asked.
This was a horror story, not something that should be true to life. My eyes were tearing up. It made me sick to think about.
“It’s a possibility, not a fact,” I tacked on the end, not wanting the path I was following to be the correct one.
“I couldn’t believe it myself.” Justice grabbed my coffee and downed it. He was welcome to it. The guy must be running on fumes. “Though, her fear, not having an identity, not having a history, being isolated—all of it lined up. But if she came from there, how is she alive?”
We both agreed she wouldn’t have been able to escape on her own, which meant somebody would have had to help her. Or maybe they took her.
“But who would do that?” Justice asked.
“Maybe someone wanted to protect her,” I conjectured. “But who would have access? They would have put it down in the records, right? You weren’t looking at public ones, I’m assuming. You dug deeper.”
Justice had access to a scary amount of information, the kind people thought was tucked safely behind security walls.
He nodded.
“A midwife might, or a nanny. Possibly another family member or a housekeeper.” He listed all the potential people who would have access, but all we had now were a bunch of theories.
No matter who it was, if we’re right, she didn’t just leave on her own.
She was taken, which means somebody made that choice for her.
I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to make sense of everything. If someone made that choice for her, they might be looking for her now.
“They wouldn’t be the only ones,” Justice said. “There are also her parents, her birth family, and her pack.”
“We can’t act on guesses,” I told him.
“I know, but we can’t ignore this either. I hate to say it, but we’re going to need answers from her.” He pressed the heel of his hand into his eye.
“I don’t want to scare her away, but we can’t protect her if we don’t know what’s happening.”
She was finally feeling safe, and here we were discussing interrogating her. No, not interrogating. Information-seeking.
But it was going to feel like an interrogation to her. I rationalized it. If we didn’t find out the truth, how could we help her survive? And that was one thing I would not negotiate. She was going to survive.
No.
She was going to thrive, no matter what it took.