Pack of Lies, page 26
“Why are we going to the nest?” I asked.
“This room doesn’t have enough pillows. Plus, if you’re going to be staying, you’ll be in the nest. Or we can each have our own nest, if you don’t want to share.”
He started confident but ended hesitant.
Of course I wanted to share a nest with him. The thought of an entire space to myself sounded lonely.
I tossed my feet off the edge of the bed. I was still wearing the guy’s clothing because I’d run upstairs too fast to wait for any of the stuff Marlowe had gotten me at the mall. When we opened the door and stepped out, I found it piled in the hall. Snatching up the bag that I knew had an extremely fluffy blanket in it, I clutched it to my chest and followed the other omega to the nest.
In the soft and padded room, I felt like a stranger.
Hesitating at the door, I was unsure of what to do. I’d never had my own nest before, let alone been invited into someone else’s. There had to be etiquette involved. Should I compliment him on it?
The room was gorgeous, and if I hadn’t been so nervous I probably would have felt at home. Everything was cushioned, including the walls.
That had to be Denzel’s influence. He wouldn’t want his omega bumping his head while he fucked him against the wall.
It was a cozy touch, though, and I was trying to push out the invasive image of Marlowe getting fucked that was threatening to make me wet with slick.
“Come on in,” Marlowe said.
He’d been wearing a pair of slippers but slipped them off behind the door and walked across the cushy mattresses like it was a normal carpeted floor. I followed suit by taking my socks off, leaving the bag beside them. My feet sank into the comfort of the unconventional floor, and I followed him until we made it to the far wall.
There was a curtained off corner there, the curtains gauzy and pale green. He pushed through them and flopped onto the pile of pillows within.
I stroked the curtain, wowed by the quality, before sitting gently on my knees beside him.
“You have a very nice nest,” I said, giving in to the urge to say something about it.
“You don’t have to say that,” he said. There was a flush to his cheeks. “We can turn the spare room into a nest for you if you stay.”
“I’m not just saying it. It’s cozy.”
“What would you do differently?”
Glancing around, I tried to figure out what would make it even better. With no nest experience, I could only go with my instincts. “It feels a little… big,” I said. “The ceilings are high.”
Marlowe’s hand disappeared into a crack between the cushions, pulling out a laptop.
That had to be some kind of fire hazard. Did Denzel know about that?
He had it booting up before I could comment, smile on his face. “Nesting Needs delivers,” he said. “We can fix it.”
“Fix it?”
“Fix the nest.”
My eyes widened. “Oh, no. This is your nest.”
“Our nest.”
He angled the screen so both of us could see it, navigating to a section labelled ‘compressing spaces’. There were all sorts of solutions, from hanging nets and blankets to make the ceiling seem lower, to smaller rooms to put inside a room.
“It’s a common compulsion,” Marlowe said, clicking on some soft nets that would match his current decor. “I just like soft, but if you like small, we can make it happen.”
“There’s no need to order this stuff.”
He clicked ‘add to cart’.
“We can give you the opposite corner,” Marlowe said, waving across the room. He was blatantly ignoring my objections. In some ways, he was as bad as Denzel, but when he did it, it was sweet.
When Denzel did it, it was annoying.
In any case, I gave in and pointed at a room divider. If we draped something from the wall and over the top of it, I would be able to create a much smaller space. Plus, this divider was translucent, so it wouldn’t block me off completely from the rest of the nest.
“I think that would help,” I murmured.
“You and Reese will never fit behind that thing. He’s huge.” Marlowe laughed.
“Is Reese allowed in here? I thought you two weren’t together like that.”
Platonic partners could be allowed in nests. It may have been presumptuous for me to assume he wasn’t, but Marlowe went bright red.
“No,” he said, stuttering a bit. “But he’s part of the pack. I certainly don’t mind him being in the nest. And you two will obviously… be together. Right? Or have you not forgiven him? He’s kind of hard to be mad at, because in the end he’s only a teddy bear.”
I raised an eyebrow, letting his ramble run to its natural end.
“I’m not sure if I forgive him, yet,” I said. “If I end up staying, I doubt I’ll stay mad at him for long though. As long as you’re OK with him in here…”
Marlowe’s head bobbed. “Absolutely. Yes. Totally. Of course, he has his bedroom too so you’re free to sleep with him in there, but I imagine you’ll want to stay in the nest while you’re in heat. Which will be totally fine. Our heats might even sync up, which would be fun. Everyone flies into a panic when I’m going into heat and does everything I ask. I bet they’ll combust if we both went into it at the same time.”
More rambling. There was something there with Marlowe and Reese, but I wasn’t going to push. It wasn’t my place. I wasn’t even confirmed to be staying.
The more times I said it in my head, the more false it rang.
THIRTY-FOUR
JUBILEE
Quentin’s fingers digging into my shoulders were the only thing keeping me grounded. The entire day had been delightfully sweet and cute, watching Thorn and Marlowe wander around the mall.
And then everything had toppled when her face had flashed across a screen. I was looking at the missing persons report right now, gritting my teeth at all the inflammatory language they’d used.
“We need to find something to nail them to the wall with,” I muttered.
I thumbed through pages rapidly, papercuts littering my trembling fingers. There were little spots of blood on the documents we’d stolen from the Centre, but I hadn’t found anything useful.
“You need to calm down, baby,” Quentin said. “You’re all tense again.”
“I can’t calm down until she’s safe.”
An overwhelming sense of shame flooded me whenever I thought about how unsafe she was. How unsafe she’d been for years. We should have done something sooner.
And I should tell her about my history now.
Quentin and Marlowe were being gentle about it, but I knew they wouldn’t be for long. It was just one more secret we’d kept from her. One more reason we could be pushing her away.
“If you wait until there’s no risk, you’ll be waiting a long time,” Quentin murmured.
His fingers pressed against my muscles, massaging them in a way that was pleasantly uncomfortable. I shoved my glasses up my nose and flipped through more pages.
There was nothing here.
What the fuck had our plan been, in going to the Centre? All we’d managed to do was find our traumatized scent-matched mate, lie to her, put her in more danger, and send the Centre for Omega Enhancement underground in the process.
“I just want…”
“You want to find the silver bullet, the thing she needs to save her, so she doesn’t resent you when you tell her about how we got to this point in the first place.”
“Yeah, that.”
I slumped, the papers fluttering to rest on the dining room table.
“We can’t tell you how she’s going to react, baby, but she’ll know you didn’t mean for this all to happen.”
“I lied,” I said softly.
“Denzel lied worse. You’ve got that going for you. No one could possibly be a bigger asshole than my brother.”
If that was all I had going for me, Thorn was definitely going to hate me.
My instinct was to put off the inevitable truth-bomb for as long as possible, but she deserved better. We’d kept things from her for long enough.
“I think I’m going to tell her tonight,” I murmured.
“It might be better to wait until morning, baby,” Quentin said. “She went through a lot today. I’m surprised she’s even letting Marlowe comfort her.”
“I need to tell her because she’s letting Marlowe comfort her. She’s starting to trust us again. I can feel it. It would only be harmful to let that trust grow only to crush it again. I should have told her the second we had her back from the traffickers again, but the way she talked about it… made me nervous. She thinks the young gold pack girl is going to end up with the Centre. If anything happens to her… it’s all my fault.”
Quentin’s hands went up to my temples, pushing aside my vibrant hair to massage them. His body was pressed to the back of the chair, his swirling scent of green apple and mulberry a soothing comfort. He was being so affectionate, and I didn’t deserve it.
I’d lied to him, too. He’d known I was lying, but that didn’t make it better.
Not when it was something as huge as this.
Thorn might never trust us again, and this secret I was keeping was far from the least of them.
“Tell her in the morning,” he said. “Sleep on what you want to say. I know you won’t want Marlowe or I to be there with you when you tell her, and if you go in without a plan you’ll have an anxiety attack.”
I bit my lip hard, but he had a point. My medication combined with my mates had a high success rate of stopping the crippling attacks I used to have, but they still happened.
It wouldn’t be fair for Thorn to see me like that while also being angry at me. Her instinct would be to help, and I didn’t deserve it.
“Fine,” I mumbled. “But only because you have a point.”
“I always do, baby. What do you need from me tonight?”
“Fuck me to sleep? It’s the only way I’m not going to wake up a million times.”
His fingers slid from my temples down to my neck, massaging the hickeys he’d left there the previous night. I groaned, cock plumping up in my pants already.
“Since we’re playing musical beds and Thorn and Marlowe ended up in the nest, we’re going to have to sully Reese’s sheets. You have five minutes to close down everything and put it away, and then I want you upstairs getting ready to sit on my cock.”
I shivered at Quentin’s words, nodding. As he stalked upstairs, my finger hovered over the ‘X’ at the top of the page showing Thorn’s missing person bulletin.
That was all my fault.
And even if I didn’t have the answer before the truth came out, I’d find it. I’d figure out how to shut the Centre down once and for all.
I was once again awake before dawn, Quentin’s sleeping form draped over me. He let out a grumble when I extracted myself from his hold, but grabbed the pillow and settled, still asleep. My body was pleasantly sore, but my previously calm mind was back to running a hundred miles a minute.
I still didn’t know the words I was going to use.
Should I tell her why? Or would that sound like an excuse?
After a quick shower, I was dressed and pacing the living room. The couch was tidy, no unmade bed to tell people Denzel was sleeping on it every night.
Fuck, I didn’t even know if he was.
He stayed out in the shed until the middle of the night and was up and gone before anyone woke up. Considering how much of an early riser Marlowe was regularly, he couldn’t be getting more than four hours of sleep.
I pushed open the screen door that led to our back porch, hardly realizing my pacing had taken me over here.
There was a light on in the shed, the door shut.
I stalked in slippered feet across the dewy grass, the world barely light enough for the birds to be chirping their morning song.
“How do I tell her, D?” I asked, swinging open the door.
He peered over his shoulder, the dark bags under his eyes visible even from here. There was a gun in his hand. By this point, he had to have taken apart and put back together every gun we owned about seven times.
“Just say it, and if she’s calm enough to not storm off or punch you in the face, then tell her why,” he grunted.
To his credit, he had the decency to avoid telling me to lie to her. Even Denzel knew we were past that.
“Telling her why would sound like an excuse. There is no excuse.”
My best friend sighed, putting down his gun and spinning to face me.
He was skinnier, too. It was only a tiny amount; it hadn’t been long enough to see much difference. But he was losing weight. His adamant refusal to change his ways was hurting him, too.
“It’s not an excuse, J, it’s the truth. She wants the truth. Unlike me, everything you’ve ever done wrong was an accident or because of naivety. If she’s mad at you when she should be mad at the Centre, then she doesn’t deserve you. But I already know she won’t be. Any fury will be short-lived.”
Hearing him speak of Thorn like she was her own intelligent human being and not some pawn to be moved around on a board was odd. An improvement, though. If only he would speak about her like this to her face. Then maybe the pack bonds wouldn’t be fraying as we all told him to fuck off.
“She has every right to be mad at me,” I said.
“No, she doesn’t. I’ll accept her being angry with me,” he said, “but I won’t accept her being mad at you. You’d just gotten yourself to a good place when we found out about this a few months ago. It fucking broke you all over again. There are times I wish we’d stayed in the dark because of how messed up you got.”
My heart clenched. What if I’d never found out?
Thorn would still be at the Centre for Omega Enhancement. She would never become Thorn, even. She’d always be known as Two, with memories of when her parents and school friends had called her Hannah.
“I would never wish we didn’t know,” I said.
“And that’s what makes you a good person, and me an overprotective dick. Lead with the truth, and I bet she’ll ask why. There’s no person on this planet who would believe you did it with the intention for it to turn out the way it did.”
At nineteen, I’d had no idea of the implications.
All I’d wanted to do was help.
I didn’t want what happened to Ava to ever happen again.
Sometimes having an analytical brain was a curse. The math didn’t always work out the way I intended for it to. Like on the date with Thorn, when she’d ended up in the hospital. That was probably how the Centre found her in the first place, so we could add that to the list of things that were ultimately my fault.
“You should apologize too.”
The words were out before I could think about my phrasing. Telling Denzel what he ‘should’ do never went well. His expression shuttered, blue eyes narrowing in annoyance.
“She liked you despite everything, D. You hurt her.”
“I was doing what I thought was best.”
He spun around and went back to his gun. Avoidance at its finest. Apologizing didn’t necessarily mean admitting you were wrong — though in this case, he was. It was about acknowledging you’d caused hurt. I couldn’t forget about how Thorn had asked for Denzel in the hospital, wanting him with her during a vulnerable moment.
I was trying to puzzle out another way to approach him when the back porch creaked. Spinning, I expected Marlowe but was instead met with Thorn. She seemed to have the same trouble sleeping as I did.
“You left the back door open,” she said. “Is Denzel in there?”
Closing the shed door, I nodded.
“I need to talk to him.”
“Can I talk to you first?” I asked.
It seemed dangerous to leave Thorn and Denzel together alone in a shed full of guns. We needed Quentin or Marlowe as a buffer. Besides, this was my chance.
She peered over my shoulder at the shed, brushing a mussed piece of green hair out of her face. The clothes she was wearing were ones she’d bought yesterday. A pair of tight black jeans and a brown corset-style top with a thin brown jacket over her shoulders. She was stunning this way, but I did miss the sight of her in my clothes.
“Yeah, sure. I’ll find him later,” she said.
My stress manifested in hand tremors and fidgeting as I led Thorn back into the house, sitting her down on the living room couch. I stayed standing, unable to stop pacing a small track beside the coffee table. She waited patiently, her eyebrows furrowed together.
“I’m sorry,” I said eventually. “We withheld something else from you.”
Her legs crossed then uncrossed at the ankles. She grabbed a pillow and held it to her chest. It functioned as a buffer between the two of us, not that I was planning on going close to her. If I got on my knees to beg forgiveness, it would be at a distance.
“Tell me, then,” she said.
“The Centre. It’s all my fault.” My voice cracked and I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry, Thorn. The injection they gave you… I created it. I made that formula, and I sold it to them years ago. That’s why we were there.”
I wasn’t emotionally intelligent enough to follow the feelings flickering through her expression. All I could do was hold my breath, waiting for her to give me some indication of how pissed off she was and what I would have to do to have even the slightest chance of her forgiveness.
THIRTY-FIVE
THORN
Jubilee stared at me intently, but all I could focus on were his words rattling around in my head.
“I made that formula and sold it to them.”
“The Centre is all my fault.”
None of it made sense.
He wouldn’t sell a potentially harmful formula to a testing facility that experimented on unwitting omegas. He’d been the most furious of the alphas when they found out I’d been forced to go gold pack. It didn’t add up, but his anxiety was real.
Jubilee was practically bouncing as he paced, his entire body trembling. He was nibbling on his lip so hard it had to be bleeding, and his scent was filling the room. The vodka and licorice was slightly sour with the intensity of his negative emotions.
