Pack of Lies, page 3
Reese snorted and placed the clothes on the bed beside me. “He’s not all bad. He just wasn’t expecting to find you. None of us were.”
My understanding was that finding a scent match shouldn’t be a huge shock. The theory was that any number of packs could be a scent match for an omega and vice versa, but once you found your first match, that was it.
You were stuck together for life, unless your first scent match died.
What Reese meant to say was they weren’t expecting to find their scent match at the Centre, specifically. And a scent match who didn’t even truly believe they weren’t lying about it to lull me into a false sense of security. Usually this would be a joyous time for a pack, where they would welcome the new member in with open arms and courting.
“I’m waiting to see that side of him that’s not bad,” I said, swinging my legs over the side of the bed.
The clothes I was wearing — my grey cotton uniform — were stained with splotches of blood and marked with my sweat from when I’d passed out. I’d happily accept the offer of another set, and hoped there was a toothbrush in it for me too. My mouth tasted faintly of bile.
“Bathroom is through there,” Reese said, pointing to an open door on the far side of the room. “I’m going to have to ask you to keep the door open a crack, though.”
“Denzel’s order, I assume.”
“He doesn’t want to risk you running.”
I couldn’t imagine where he thought I would bolt to. I had no idea where we were and I hadn’t been in society since I was fifteen years old. It’s not like I knew how to drive. Fuck, I barely knew how to take a bus. The community where I’d grown up had been small and I’d walked everywhere.
“It’s fine. I lived in a medical facility with cameras in every room. I’m no longer modest.”
A low growl rumbled from him, but he stifled it. Grabbing the bundle of clothing, I went to the bathroom, keeping the door fully open. I did my business, brushed my teeth with the unopened toothbrush on the counter, and pulled my shirt over my head. Reese let out a low hiss.
So, he was watching.
I was facing mostly away from him. He didn’t get more than a glimpse, but what he did see, he was a fan of. I wondered if he could see the medical scars from when they’d done surgeries on me. The lines were faint, but they were all over my body.
I dropped my pants next, leaving me in only a pair of plain cotton panties with my ass facing him. From the pile of new clothes, I picked up what looked like a shirt. It was a dark green button-up and looked like it was sized for Jubilee, the smallest of the men. Lifting it to my nose, I inhaled deeply to confirm.
I’d thought his scent was antiseptic, but it wasn’t. Not quite. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, though.
I pulled the fabric over my shoulders and did up the buttons.
Next I tested the scent on the pants. They belonged to Reese and were ridiculously oversized for me, but they were black sweatpants with a drawstring waist so it didn’t matter. I pulled them up and tightened the string as much as I could.
The final item of clothing was a sweatshirt, also black. I knew which scent was going to be on it before I tested it. Ginger and molasses. Denzel.
I left it in the bathroom.
Reese glanced between me and the discarded sweater. “You should wear it. It’s only spring, and chilly outside.”
“You know who it belongs to?”
He nodded.
“I’d honestly rather freeze.”
THREE
THORN
“Thorn?”
I was in the backseat again, staring out the window at passing fields. It took me a second to realize Jubilee was talking to me, my new name still foreign. He was in the back this time, with Denzel driving again. The man was a control freak. He’d growled when I’d come out of the hotel without his sweatshirt on, insisting I wear one.
Reese’s scent surrounded me from the soft, warm fabric, because Denzel couldn’t force me to wear his clothes.
“Yeah?” I asked, after an awkward pause.
“Have you ever been to the city before?”
I shook my head.
A lie, technically, but my time in New Oxford hadn’t been pleasant. I did better pretending it never happened. Besides, all I’d seen was the inside of a room and a windowless van.
“My parents didn’t like it.”
“You never went by yourself?”
“I was young when I was taken by the Centre. It isn’t as if I had ample opportunity to venture out on my own. I didn’t have any money.”
Jubilee’s nose crinkled in confusion, his hands trembling over the mess of papers in his lap. They always did that when I spoke about where I’d come from. I wasn’t sure why it sparked such anxiety in him, but he always seemed to have more he wanted to say.
He never said it, because Denzel’s aura would flare in an aggressive warning.
“We grew up differently, then. I’ve been in the city my whole life. If I didn’t have money, I pickpocketed someone or snuck onto a bus without paying.”
I was skeptical. He didn’t seem quick on his feet. Sure, he had weapons like the others, but he was clearly the information guy. “Hard to sneak onto a bus when you’re the only one on it,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Tell me about the city,” I suggested.
Talking was more interesting than staring at the passing scenery. Plus, the more they talked, the more likely they were to let something slip. None of them were keen on me knowing why they raided the Centre.
“Well, it’s so big it depends on the area you’re in. We didn’t grow up in the nicest area. Actually, Reese was middle class, but the rest of the pack wasn’t.”
Something struck me as odd about his phrasing, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. I didn’t call it out either, knowing Denzel would shut this conversation down in an instant. His strong jaw was already ticking, uncomfortable with where this was going.
“My area wasn’t nice either,” I said. “But my whole town was shoddy.”
“In New Oxford, there are some gorgeous areas. Giant mansions up on manicured hills, stuff like that. We live in a nice enough area now. Cute little house with neighbours who say hello over the fences,” Jubilee said.
Another oddity. Why did three eligible alpha bachelors live in suburbia?
Smiling, I nodded along.
“But where we grew up there was a lot of crime. You couldn’t walk down the street without seeing glass on the asphalt from where someone broke into a parked car. People went missing all the time. No one knew to where. We met when we were teenagers and became a pack kind of because we had to. Surviving alone was impossible for alphas, and especially for omegas.”
“This isn’t what Thorn wants to hear about the city,” Denzel said abruptly. “Tell her about now. Where you work or something.”
Jubilee startled at the words, glancing to the front seat and nodding. “Um, yeah. You’re probably right.”
He cleared his throat and I avoided the urge to glare at Denzel. I did want to know about where they came from. The seedy underbelly. If I was going to escape them — not that I planned to, but it might later become the best option — that was where I would have to live and hide. Those were the people who knew how to avoid the grasping hands of the GPRE.
“I’m a scientist,” Jubilee said. “I work at the local university.”
Letting my gaze rove over his clothing, which hadn’t been changed since I’d first seen him, I raised an eyebrow. “I’m shocked.”
He huffed a bit. “These pants have more pockets than anything else I own. This isn’t reflective of my typical fashion choices.”
“You owning them says enough about your fashion choices, but I didn’t say anything about your clothing. You just have the look of a scientist. Trust me, I’ve met enough of them to know the vibes.”
Jubilee quieted again, guilt in his suddenly tense posture. The shaking in his hands got worse, too. I may not be getting much information from their words, but watching their mannerisms was proving fruitful.
“What kind of science do you do?” I asked.
“My specialties are in arkology, genetics, and epidemiology, with side projects in genealogy.”
I couldn’t say his answer was a comfort to me.
Arkology was the study of alpha and omega auras. I was a genetic lab rat and I imagined my aura had been fucked up in the process. Hiding my discomfort, I probed him for information. “How do all those specialties go together?”
“I’m exploring aura sickness in alphas. There’s speculation it’s a disease, or can at least be treated in the same manner as one. My opinion is that it happens because of a gene mutation, but I needed to be respected enough in the field of epidemiology to rule out the disease theory. Not that I’m skewing my results. If it proves to be a disease, I’ll accept the facts. Currently, though, the only reason the theory exists is because epidemiologists are idiots and have no concept of how alphas and omegas work.”
He had some fire in his words at the end, and through the whole explanation he was filled with excitement. It lit up his expression, his hands holding still for once. The urge was there to lean in and kiss him. What a horrible desire. Why would I kiss a scientist? One who might be lying to me about being my scent match?
I pinned it down to being an omega in the presence of an alpha. We were built to please.
I chose to ignore the fact that I’d never had the urge to kiss any of the alphas I’d met at the Centre.
“Don’t you have to study each scientific field for years to be proficient? You don’t look old enough to be well-respected in three different ones.”
Jubilee blushed.
Now I definitely wanted to kiss him.
“I’m twenty-seven,” he said. “Not that young.”
I raised an eyebrow. He was older than I’d thought, but every scientist I’d ever met was at least thirty-five. And at the Centre, none of them had double specialties, let alone triple.
“He was a prodigy,” Reese explained. “Jubilee got his bachelor’s degree at sixteen and a PhD by twenty. He powers through university level course work like it’s a third-grade art project.”
Damn. His IQ had to be astronomical.
“The coursework I do is extremely challenging,” Jubilee refuted. “None of it is easy.”
“On a regular basis, he puzzles through extremely challenging chemistry problems while sipping coffee like he’s doing sudoku in the Sunday paper.”
“I find chemistry very difficult. It’s not my area of expertise.”
“And yet you finished a bachelor’s degree in it last week,” Reese said, shaking his head.
“It took me a whole year to do that.”
“Bachelor’s degrees should take four.”
Jubilee ran out of rebuttals, settling back against his seat with a pout and flushed cheeks. So far, what I knew about my supposed pack was that Jubilee was a genius, Denzel was a dick, and Reese was protective, but not in that overbearing alpha way Denzel was.
“So, Reese comes from a different part of the city? How did he meet you guys, then?”
He’d been peering back at us with a faint smile softening his harsh features, but turned to face the front at my question. My interest piqued; I waited in silence to see what he was going to say.
“We met through a friend when we were a bit older,” Denzel said.
I almost snapped that I didn’t ask him, but this was interesting. What was Reese not willing to say? Something about his childhood? How he grew up? And if they met Reese when they were older, why had Jubilee mentioned they banded together as a pack? Two alphas didn’t make a pack. It was more of a partnership.
They were all hiding something.
Letting the conversation lapse into tense silence, I tried to work out the puzzle of what it was.
Skyscrapers.
There were fucking skyscrapers.
I’d seen movies when I was younger, but they’d always seemed fake. Something made up to look cool. How the fuck did they get the buildings to be so tall without them toppling over? There was engineering involved that went far beyond my shaky dirt castles I’d made in the local park as a kid.
I couldn’t help staring out the window in awe as the highway brought us closer and closer to a city that was vaster than all my expectations. The sky-high buildings were concentrated in one part of the city, their upper levels brushing clouds, but even as the city expanded outward the buildings weren’t small. They still towered thirteen stories or higher above our heads.
We’d passed through the suburbs on the way in, and Jubilee had pointed vaguely in the direction of a sea of neatly spaced houses. They lived over there, but we would be going to a safe house in the city until they could determine if the GPRE or Centre were coming after me.
Denzel had continued driving the entire trip and he navigated us off the highway and through narrow city streets. There wasn’t a street corner without a person waiting to cross the road, nothing like the ghost town I’d grown up in. We ended up on a tree-lined street with older apartment buildings, the brick covered in moss and vines, but charming nonetheless.
He pulled the SUV into the only parking spot on the block and turned off the engine. The men were quick to get out of the vehicle, gathering what they needed from the trunk, but I stayed seated inside it.
I could get used to this.
Everything was so green and lively. The air that had whooshed in when the guys opened their doors didn’t have a hint of antiseptic in its scent. If my sense of smell was as good as it used to be, I imagined it would smell like dirt and gasoline.
People had smiles on their faces, and not the faux-kind ones the nurses plastered on when they came to take my blood or inform me of yet another test I had to take. Real smiles. Like they were happy to live here.
Those were dangerous thoughts.
Reese was the one to pull open the door and gesture for me to exit the vehicle. Denzel and Jubilee were already steps ahead of us, making a beeline for a building with a bright blue sign out front. White lettering declared it Sirena Estates.
“You seem shocked,” Reese said.
I took his offered hand as I stepped out, careful to avoid the lip of the curb.
“The city wasn’t like this in my head,” I said.
He chuckled and smiled at me, keeping me in front of him as we meandered down the street. I took my time, taking small steps and watching the little brown birds flit around in the manicured trees. A squirrel even darted across the sidewalk in front of us, having no fear of humans.
We had an outdoor courtyard at the Centre with a couple of trees and some bushes, but animals stayed away.
It was like they sensed how dangerous it was to living beings. Their instincts warned them against visiting.
“Hurry it up,” Denzel barked from the glass entry door. “We shouldn’t be outside.”
Reese was amused by his intensity, but placed a hand on my shoulder all the same. I didn’t shake off the touch. Denzel’s eyes narrowed, possibly more irritated than he had been before.
Perfect. I’d let Reese touch me plenty if it was going to annoy the pack lead.
I was hustled through the lobby and into an elevator. The walls of the elevator were bright blue, like the sign out front, with a golden diamond pattern. I was grateful it wasn’t the minimalist stainless steel look some elevators had. Being surrounded by silver metal…
Shaking off the thought, I let myself be herded until we reached unit 304. Denzel went in first, looking through every room as if a detainment squad was going to be lurking behind the couch. He only let us come in after he’d cleared each individual room and shut the blinds.
Darkness was preferable for my constant low-grade headache, but I missed the faint light from the gloomy cloudy day all the same.
“Welcome to your new home for the next few days,” Denzel said, gesturing around the space. It was quaint, but had more personality than my usual accommodations. “You’ll be sleeping in the den.”
He threw open a door and I balked.
“Absolutely the fuck not.”
The ‘den’ was a glorified closet. No window, one flickering overhead light, and a bed filled the entire space. A twin, like what I’d had at the Centre, except this room was worse. The door almost hit the bed, barely having enough space to swing inward.
“This is the most secure location in this apartment,” Denzel said.
“Denzel, I hope you’re joking,” Reese said quietly.
His aura got stronger for a second and I tensed, though the irritation wasn’t aimed at me.
Denzel glared. “She needs to be protected.”
Jubilee’s hand came to rest on my arm and he tugged me further into the living room. I settled on the overstuffed couch and he perched beside me. Knowing I was being ignored by the warring alphas on the other side of the room, I discreetly leaned in and took a deep breath of Jubilee.
Vodka.
That’s what he smelled like. Vodka and licorice.
My entire body relaxed. Thank fuck I didn’t have a mate who smelled like antiseptic. Vodka was equally as strong, but the intensity didn’t bother me because I could hardly smell it. I imagined most omegas would be offended by it.
“You are not putting our mate in a closet,” Reese said through gritted teeth, drawing my attention back to the face-off.
“Where else is she supposed to stay? She’s not going to want one of us sleeping with her in one of the bedrooms, and she’ll be vulnerable there. Someone could get in through the window.”
Unsaid, he implied I could also go through the window. To escape.
“She’s staying in a bedroom,” Reese said. “I’m not letting you pull rank on this, Denzel. We are going to treat our scent match like a person and not a prisoner.”
Denzel growled, slamming the door of the den. “I am trying to keep her secure and with us.”
“Whether she stays with us or not isn’t your fucking choice.”
My heart may have fluttered. Maybe. A little bit. It could have been attributed to the sheer amount of alpha pheromones in the room right now. Any omega would respond to that, especially with an alpha protecting her.
