Hide or Die, page 11
part #1 of Secret Pack Series
She cut in abruptly. “That’s a special situation and you know it. Not to mention, one that’s going to go down in spectacular flames one day, probably taking all of us with it.”
I growled at her, my heat-induced frustration boiling over. Alex didn’t call me on it, since that was the kind of leader she was.
“What she and Patel are doing is important,” she said. “We need them as high-level assets in the government more than you need to get your dick wet. Also, there’s the small matter that they’d have to be crazy to risk a mating bond with anyone... much less us.”
I clenched my jaw to keep from saying anything else, since even I could tell I was still sporting a bad case of knot-brain. That didn’t stop the thought from whispering through my head.
But what if they did?
FOURTEEN
Leona
THERE WAS a second alpha in the house. The scent of jasmine and sandalwood drifted to me from elsewhere in the cabin. Still, Flynn was alone when he returned to the nest, just as my need began ratcheting up yet again.
“Alex is back,” he said. “Jax is still alive, in case you were wondering.”
I held onto enough of the sense of the words to feel a swell of relief.
“That’s wonderful news,” Kam said, sounding equally relieved. “I hope that also means he’ll recover completely?”
“Dunno about that part yet.” The alpha lowered himself into the nest, still frustratingly separated from me by the barrier of Kam’s body. “Let’s not worry about that right now. I’d much rather see how many times you can get our girl off before she takes the knot again. You like that idea, sweet thing?”
My heat rose, cutting off all rational thought as I nodded frantic agreement. And so it began again—the seemingly endless cycle of fuck, knot, sleep. It was no longer the nightmarish hallucinatory haze that it had been at first, but even now, the sense of important things happening around me nipped at the edges of my awareness like a stubborn terrier with a cornered rat.
I was growing more and more exhausted, despite the hours spent dozing between peaks. Two cycles... three... four... and then a long period of blankness before I woke in what felt like the middle of the night. My mind was finally clear, though my body felt like I’d gone ten rounds with a professional boxer.
Also, I was famished.
“Ugh,” I groaned. “Ow. Fuck.”
My pillow rose and fell beneath my cheek as someone let out a relieved breath. I lifted my aching head, and found Kam curled beneath me on the mountain of cushions.
“Flynn says your heat has broken,” he told me, in that carefully neutral voice he used when he was particularly worried about something. “I won’t bother asking how you’re feeling.”
Memories of the last several days began to filter into my mind, backwards.
“Oh my god,” I said. “I... don’t currently have enough brain cells functioning to even begin to deal with the burning radioactive fallout from this. Kam, I am so sorry.”
His arm was around my shoulders, holding me against him. At that, his fingers clasped my bicep convulsively. “Please don’t apologize,” he said, a bit desperately. “I don’t think I can handle it right now.”
I nodded, and tried to focus on something practical. “Okay. I’m starving right now. Is there food?”
In fact, I was having a hard time not grabbing Kam’s shirt and shaking him until he gave me a blow-by-blow report on what the hell had happened in the days since an I.E.D. had blown up our motorcade. Were we still in Romania? What had happened with the summit? If we’d been rescued by our own security forces, why hadn’t we been arrested immediately afterward? I gave my head a sharp shake to clear it, and instantly regretted it when my brain sloshed around like a pickled egg in a jar.
“Alex is getting you something to eat,” Kam said. “You haven’t had any food in four days. I expect Flynn already found somewhere to crash, now that the pheromones have subsided.”
“Right,” I said, wincing a bit when my stomach audibly gurgled its displeasure. Rather than focus on it, I moved on to the next important thing that I could potentially do something about. “How are you? And please don’t say ‘fine.’”
“Fine,” he said, way too quickly.
“Kameron Patel, I swear to god—” I began, only to be cut off when a knock sounded at the door.
It opened a moment later, and the female alpha, Alex, entered. She gave a hesitant sniff, visibly steeling herself before entering with a bowl of something held in one hand, and a bottle of water tucked under her arm. I glanced down at my body reflexively, but an oversized black T-shirt covered me from neck to mid-thigh. It smelled of stale sweat and spicy alpha.
Flynn.
I was wearing Flynn’s T-shirt.
Jesus Christ.
I shoved the realization aside. “Hello. Is that for me?”
“It is... assuming you can choke down something that’s supposedly pork and lentils, based on the picture on the can,” Alex said. “Spoiler alert—it bears no actual resemblance to the picture. Welcome to rural Eastern Europe.”
“If she tries to give you anything containing either fish meatballs or preserved cod liver, run for the hills,” Kam counseled.
At this point, I would have considered cat food if she’d offered it. Which, it turned out, was fortunate. I accepted the bowl of steaming, gelatinous, pinkish-brown mush and started spooning it into my mouth without paying much attention to the taste—pausing at intervals to wash it down with bottled water.
“You’ll be wanting a briefing on recent events, Madam Ambassador,” Alex said formally. She was standing at parade rest a short distance away—eyes front, not looking at me directly.
“Already?” Kam appeared distinctly uncomfortable. “Maybe you should rest for a day or two first, Leo.”
“Will that make me like what I’m about to hear any better?” I asked.
“Doubtful,” Alex said.
“Then go ahead and hit me with it now,” I told her. “Meanwhile, we’ll all pretend that I’m not sitting in an omega nest wearing nothing but a sex-stained T-shirt belonging to an alpha—one who’s supposed to be chemically castrated, but isn’t. First, though, are there any updates on Jax’s condition? I know he was hurt, even though I can’t remember the details.”
“No, ma’am,” Alex said. “We’ve had no outside contact since I returned here with the vehicle two days ago.”
Two days? God, I’d been even more out of it than I’d realized.
“All right,” I replied, my heart sinking. “In that case, tell me the rest of it.”
In clipped and professional tones, Alex related the details of the roadside attack and kidnapping, painting their subsequent rescue efforts in broad strokes—collecting satellite and spy plane intel, then spending days in a systematic search of the known cave systems in an ever expanding grid. I nearly dropped my spoon when her recitation jarred loose my hazy memories of the videotaped speech the kidnappers had wanted us to make, with its spine-chilling reference to a targeted alphomic weapon.
She went on to describe the early findings related to the modified chemical nerve agent that had been given to Jax, and had almost been given to me. Kam, still curled up beside me, wrapped his arms around his knees, hugging himself.
After freeing us, they’d brought us here, to this isolated cabin in the Carpathians that Beckett had somehow magically conjured for use as a safehouse—another thing that didn’t add up. Then she and Beckett had driven Jax to a hospital in Bucharest, before dropping the sample of the chemical at a government lab. Once Jax’s condition was stabilized, he’d been transferred to a private clinic with a specialist in alphomic medicine on staff, and Alex had returned here with the vehicle.
“As far as the press is concerned, you’re both being held at an undisclosed location due to credible ongoing threats to your safety,” Alex concluded.
It was all terribly neat... and parts of it made no sense whatsoever upon closer examination.
“What about the summit?” I asked, since her report had been focused on the nuts and bolts of our kidnapping and subsequent rescue.
“Cancelled,” she said. “Or rather, postponed. As far as I’m aware there’s been no firm date or location announced for a future meeting.”
I placed the spoon in the empty bowl and set them aside, lifting both hands to rub at my temples in hopes of banishing my throbbing headache.
“Okay. Let me think for a minute. We should be able to spin this in the administration’s favor somehow. Paint this so-called Beta Liberation Front as a symptom of the wider problem of anti-alphomic extremism. It could shift public sentiment, at least back home.” I let my hands fall abruptly. “That is, assuming you’re not waiting for me to get my shit together and get cleaned up so you can arrest the two of us. Which... I mean, you seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to avoid that so far, but...?”
“You’re not under arrest,” Alex said stiffly.
I exchanged a glance with Kam, whose expression clearly said, could you please not pick at this until she ends up changing her mind?
“Why not?” I demanded, ignoring his silent plea.
“I have no orders to arrest you.” The words were delivered in a wooden monotone.
“And you take your orders from Beckett.” I studied her as best I could in the soothing red-tinged light of the makeshift nest, but there was nothing to see. That granite poker face had probably been honed in the military alpha program, and I wouldn’t be seeing past it anytime soon. “Does that mean he’s a sympathizer?” I prodded.
There wasn’t so much as a flicker in response. “You’d have to ask him, ma’am. It’s not my place to speculate about my team leader.”
Her striking green eyes finally moved to mine, pinning me. So close after heat, the alpha power in that gaze sent a purely physical jolt through me, strong enough that she almost certainly saw it. “That being said, you’ve both got a decision to make,” she continued. “The cave system where you were being held had at least two exits, and we’re pretty sure some of the terrorists got away. That means that somewhere out there, someone else knows your secret.”
Ah. That probably explained why Kam still looked like he wanted to curl up and sink straight through the floor.
“You’ll have to decide whether or not you’re going to disappear. Maybe start over somewhere out of the limelight,” Alex said. “You know it’s possible with the right connections—and there’s no way you two got where you are today without help from the underground.”
While every word of that was true, I had no intention of scuttling off to Jamaica to huddle in obscurity with my parents—not now, when the next few months would be more important than ever. Not after everything they’d sacrificed to hide my omega status. But... it wasn’t just about me any more. There was someone else to consider.
“Kam and I will need to discuss that privately,” I told her. “In the meantime, though, I have vague memories of there being a shower in this place. Please tell me I wasn’t hallucinating that part.”
“I’ll show you where it is,” Kam muttered, uncurling from his miserable hunch.
“Of course,” Alex agreed. “I’ll be outside if you need me, patrolling the perimeter of the property.”
With that, she turned and left. Her stride was purposeful but unhurried—and yet, I couldn’t help the impression that she was somehow fleeing the scene. When her footsteps had faded and the muffled sound of the front door opening and closing reached us, I turned to regard my packmate.
“I think she’s been really uncomfortable scenting you,” Kam said. “She wasn’t in here at all, if you’re wondering. Not in the nest. Not... during.”
My utter and complete mortification at what I could remember of the past few days threatened to rise up and swallow me whole, but I didn’t have time for it.
“Okay,” I said. “Good to know, I suppose. Now, about that shower?”
But he stopped me from rising with a hand on my arm. “Leo. Odama. Please—I need to know. Are we... okay? You kept telling me it was all right... what I was doing. But you weren’t yourself, and I still don’t know if—”
“Kam.” My voice was as soft as I could make it. My heart ached for him, once I pulled my head out of my ass long enough to consider what he must have been going through these past horrible days. I scooted forward and wrapped my arms around him. “Of course it was all right. You kept me from unraveling... from boiling away until there was nothing left. My dearest heart... of course we’re okay.”
The tension in his shoulders flowed out, on the back of a heavy sigh of relief. His arms wrapped around me in turn, squeezing so tight that I couldn’t breathe for a moment. He tucked his face against the crook of my neck, and I felt his lips press a kiss over the sensitive skin covering my mating gland. It was still inflamed after my estrus cycle, and the nerves throbbed with wanting under the light touch.
I thought of what he’d said earlier—that I hadn’t been myself during heat. “You’re wrong, though,” I whispered against the shell of his ear. “I was myself. In fact, it’s probably the first time in fifteen years that I’ve been who I was born to be.”
“Me, too,” he said unsteadily. “Oh, Leo. What are we going to do?”
I stroked his beautiful black hair. “We’ll talk about the rest of it later. But right now, odama, we’re going to take a shower.”
FIFTEEN
Leona
IT WASN’T THE Hotel Epoque in Bucharest by any stretch of the imagination, but there was soap, shampoo, and a towel. I wasn’t sure if Kam would want to shower with me or not, and in the end, he didn’t. It was pretty likely that he’d been glued to my side continuously for the last week or more. I couldn’t blame him for needing a bit of space.
Wonder of wonders, Alex had brought our—admittedly slightly battered—luggage along with her when she’d returned from Bucharest. They’d been able to salvage it from the destroyed car, apparently, and the Samsonite suitcases and carry-ons had, in fact, lived up to the promise of toughness from the over-the-top TV commercials. I scrabbled at the zippered interior pocket of my carry-on with shaking fingers and drew out an innocuous looking bottle of painkillers.
The irony wasn’t lost on me as I shook them out on the top of the dresser and started sniffing them one by one. The heat-blocker mocked me when I found it about halfway through the bottle’s contents... but it would still be useful three months from now, for my next heat. I put it with the normal pills and kept going until I found one of the pheromone suppressors, which I swallowed dry.
It bothered me inordinately that I would have to get used to taking my suppressors on a different day of the week than I’d been doing for the past fifteen years.
Nevertheless, in an hour or two, all trace of my omega perfume would be gone. Back to normal. The thought shouldn’t have made me cringe the way it did.
Freshly showered and dressed in something that didn’t smell like an alpha in rut, I made my way to the cabin’s front room, figuring I could wait there for Kam to get out of the shower. Unfortunately, I hadn’t banked on finding Flynn sprawled across the battered sofa, fast asleep.
My scent wasn’t suppressed yet, so it was with a sense of inevitability that I watched him blink awake from his post-heat snooze.
“Hey. Good morning, sweet thing,” he said, the gravel of sleep roughening his deep voice.
Something low in my belly clenched, and I silently cursed all things hormonal and heat-related. It suddenly seemed deeply unfair that I knew exactly how his cock looked right after he’d come all over himself and popped a knot.
“Good morning,” I said, frankly amazed when the words didn’t emerge breathless and girly-sounding.
He rolled into a sitting position, muscles rippling beneath dark brown skin. He was wearing a T-shirt identical to the one I’d woken up in, along with black, military-style pants.
His feet were bare.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “Sorry. Alex says I’m supposed to start calling you Madam Ambassador again. Blame it on the heat hangover, I guess.”
I swallowed, reaching for professionalism and probably falling several miles short. “While I’d appreciate that in public, it does seem a bit ridiculous in private. Maybe we can compromise on Leona.”
A smile tugged at his sensuous lips. “Sure thing, Leona. I’d like that.” He scrubbed a hand over his close-shorn black hair and stretched, vertebrae popping.
I tried not to stare.
“How are you feeling?” he asked. “Are you hungry?”
My body feels like it’s been turned inside out seemed like a bit too much information, so I ignored the first question in favor of the second. “I think my stomach’s still processing the canned pork mush Alex brought me earlier, honestly.” With a deep breath, I plunged onward. “I wanted to thank you. Not just for agreeing to help me without taking advantage... but also for watching over Kam. I can’t imagine what he’s been through emotionally since this mess started.”
Flynn nodded, not trying to sidestep the subject or make it out to be no big deal. “He’s strong, Leona. He’d have to be, to survive what they did to him as a pup. I just let him be an omega for a bit, that’s all.”
“I know,” I told him. “But it still means a lot to me.”
Flynn leaned back, resting his arms along the sofa back as he regarded me. He was taking up space—all alpha—and my omega was here for it no matter how hard I tried to push her back inside her box.
“What will you do now?” he asked.
The weight of the world came crashing back, slamming the lid of the box shut.
“I’ll need to discuss that with Kam, once we’ve both had a little more time to recover,” I said carefully. “But at a guess, we’ll keep doing pretty much what we’ve been doing—hiding in plain sight, trying to make a difference. Kostya Nikolayev and all the other monsters like him are still out there. So is the Beta Liberation Front, apparently—and at this point, that might almost be worse.”
