Chapter Four
True
Her family was looking for her. Supposedly. According to the agency that hired us, at least. We never knew precisely who was hunting for the omegas, but there were often hints.
What could be wrong with that? If this had been our first job, I would have let it go at that, but I’d been in the business too long to think anything was ever what it seemed.
We were hired to search and bring in many people, but the omegas were most difficult for many reasons, not the least of which were the stories we were given were rarely completely true.
People wanted them back for many reasons, some actually legit and not threatening to the omega.
That would often be a parent or some other relative.
Back at the beginning, we had been contacted directly.
When it was a female family member, we were more inclined to be trusting, but ever since one turned out to be a very bad situation, we investigated each carefully.
In that case, we’d been approached by two non-omega females who sat in front of my desk and wept copious tears about their poor missing sister who had been kidnapped by a male from their town.
They were so convincing, they nearly had me crying along with them.
We came within minutes of turning the omega over to her family—half sisters who had not even been reared with her—before learning they had sold her to a much older alpha for enough money to keep their household running for ten years.
We managed to save her, but we learned our lesson.
Where omegas were concerned, lots of people were willing to lie.
Since they were in high demand, they were bought and sold, sometimes by those closest to them, and genetics did not always make for love.
So, we listened carefully to what those who hired us were willing to say—which was often almost nothing—and then did our own research.
Were there omegas who had committed crimes and needed to be returned to custody?
Absolutely. Omegas were no different than anyone else in their abilities to do good and bad things.
It was just that most other people weren’t being captured and returned to those who did not consider them people with free will.
As a business partner of Lindon, we came into the game with a certain reputation and an almost-automatic acceptance in the hunter community.
Our location was far enough from his father’s that we were not in competition, and he had given us solid recommendations.
Handy, since it meant we received less scrutiny than if we’d had to prove ourselves.
In the latest case, I read over the specs, which were quite limited beyond the “bring home the wayward omega” vibes. It gave me little to go on, which was nothing new.
Apparently, this “bad girl” had fled her pack lands, convincing other omegas to go with her, possibly against their will.
She needed to be caught as quickly as possible before the others were harmed.
There was even a hint that she might be going to cause her friends harm in some way.
Possibly treat them as something she could sell to her benefit.
Not in so many words, but the meaning was clear.
And a huge red flag for me.
No reason to believe it wasn’t possible, and if it were true, we could complete the contract and make a lot of money ourselves. An omega prepared to do something so awful to those who trusted her? We should be able to return her with no bad conscience.
I stayed late that night and set up the file for the job.
We had a series of steps we went through with each one, and part of my work was assigning them to the partners.
In general, we all had our strengths and I tried to make sure to follow those, but with each case being so different, things could vary.
Never before, had I been faced with the claim that an omega had virtually kidnapped others in her flight.
Generally, whether or not they had committed a crime, they fled in a panic, escaping from whatever horrors waited them back home.
The story presented to us was of someone who had planned this well in advance in order to take her friends along and use them in such a way.
This tale was why we had made the price so high, but it was also why it sounded questionable.
I hated the industry we were part of. With each passing month, I learned more about how brutal the omegas’ lives could be and how many were treated.
I’d have left and done something else, anything else, except for the fact that it would be so much worse if another company took on some of these cases.
Someone with no empathy. Someone who saw the omegas as a source of money, just like those who hired them.
The information we received didn’t even give us a direction to look in.
They were believed to have fled on foot so probably hadn’t gone far.
I pulled up a map of the region where she’d come from and used the software tools to draw concentric circles.
Ten miles from her home, twenty, thirty, and so on.
We had contacts in many of the towns within these zones, and Lindon would reach out to them first. Ask them what they’d seen, request they watch for our quarry and anyone traveling with her, for example. Shiloh would go out in response to any possible sightings. And me?
I operated best behind the scenes, at least in the early stages of a job.
Cameras were everywhere. Airports, bus stations, city streets, all sorts of personal systems I could access.
We had found a whole lot of our omegas that way.
Standing, I stretched and went to make a cup of coffee.
The plethora of data available to me was a great tool, but it took time to narrow it down, and the sooner I started, the sooner we would find her.
If she wasn’t the criminal they implied, she was a scared young omega who would need support. Which we had the ability to provide.