Chapter Twenty-One

The bath hadn’t help to shed any additional light on Tracy’s life. She’d sat back, resting in the nearly scalding water, hoping some epiphany would overtake her. She’d look around in the steamed bathroom and suddenly everything would make sense.

She’d know that the alphas were the right choice for her. She’d know how to deal with Mario. She’d feel like she had control in her life for once.

Instead, she’d only been warm.

Warm and still completely confused.

How could she feel so lost when she’d also never felt happier? Shouldn’t that make it easy? The fact that she had within her grasp what she’d always wanted should have made the choice obvious.

Instead, it only made it cloudier. For the first time, she had the chance of losing what she’d really wanted, and now she knew how it felt to have it. Could she stand to lose it now that she’d had a taste?

She’d left the bath when her fingers and toes had wrinkled, when the water had drifted toward chilly.

The house felt strange empty. No Karen, no Sam, no Mason, no Dylan. The silence wasn’t threatening, just sad, like a dead Christmas tree in January, and it made her miss the sounds of them all in the walls of the only home she’d had for a long time.

She wanted Karen’s shrieking laughter, Mason’s conspiratorial whispers, Sam telling them all to be careful and Dylan who would complain and yet join in.

They’d left three hours before, and she expected them gone another hour or two. Claire and her alphas had taken Karen to a cabin their friend owned out of town. She knew they wouldn’t speed with Karen in the car, and the girl would probably talk them into stopping every half an hour for something.

The idea of those large, intimidating alphas being completely manipulated by an eight-year-old who couldn’t weigh more than sixty pounds made Tracy smile. The reaction surprised and delighted her, that she could find not just passion, but humor with them. Lust was easy, that was biological, but fun? Comfort? Security? She could laugh at them and it wasn’t scary, wasn’t dangerous. Is this what it’s supposed to feel like when you have a mate?

Her phone went off in the other room, and Tracy didn’t bother to smother the smile. It had to be her alphas, right? She jogged over to it, and sure enough, Dylan’s name popped up.

Strange. He isn’t the type to call.

“Hello?”

Nothing came through at first, and Tracy pulled the phone away to ensure the call had connected.

Finally, a voice that sent chills down her back answered. “Hello, Tracy.” Mario.

Tracy leaned against the counter her phone had been on, trying to keep herself standing as every muscle in her suddenly went useless. Mario had Dylan’s phone. What did that mean? Was Dylan even alive? What about Mason and Sam? What about Karen?

“What do you want?” Her words came out quiet, and she knew they vibrated with a tremble. She couldn’t sound confident. She wasn’t.

Mario, however, didn’t have the slightest quiver to his voice. He spoke with absolute authority. “You already know that, omega. I want the files.”

“I don’t have them.”

He offered a soft tsk, as though she were a dog behaving poorly. “Don’t lie to me. I had a tracker on the truck you’ve been using. That’s how I know you picked something up from the storage unit. I had someone go in afterward to find out your mate had a unit under a false name there. It was why I sent someone to your house looking for the files. When I didn’t hear back from her, I had to assume she’d been caught, and that the files are elsewhere. A pity, as she’d come rather highly recommended. That track is also how I was able to so easily find and subdue the alphas and your child.”

“They’re alive?”

“For the moment, yes. None of the alphas can speak, but here.”

A pause, then a voice that did cause Tracy to collapse to the hard, wooden floor came through the line. “Mom?”

“Hey, sweetheart, are you okay?”

There was the slightest of unease in her voice, but Karen had always been stronger than she should have been, than she should have needed to be. “I’m okay. Sam, Mason and Dylan won’t wake up, though.”

“I’m going to get you, Karen, okay? Don’t worry, it’ll be fine—”

A rustle said the phone had been snatched back, and Mario’s voice held nothing but pleasure.

He thought he had won.

Hasn’t he?

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, omega. Things will be fine if you bring me what I’ve asked for. Don’t think I’m stupid, here. You’ve had the files for days now and no word. Were you hoping to find something in them to turn over to the police? The people in those files would have never let that happen. You realize that, right? Your only way out of this is to hand over the files to me.”

But she didn’t have the files. They didn’t exist anymore. If she told him that, he wouldn’t believe her. Even if he did, he’d realize he had no reason to keep any of them alive anymore.

It meant she had to lie. She had to make him believe she’d get him what he wanted, at least for long enough that she could figure out a plan.

“Okay. I’ll bring them, just don’t hurt them.”

A hard laugh came from him, and she knew right there that even if she had the files, even if she turned them over to him, he’d never let them go.

Why would he? Once he had what he wanted, they were just liabilities to him. There would be no reason to let any of them live. Even if he got the files, they were dead.

“You’ve got three hours, omega. If you aren’t here by then, I’ll kill one of the alphas. Don’t test me, because I have no problem following through. Tell me you understand.”

The words bubbled from her throat like a trained response. She’d learned beneath Richard’s thumb to follow orders when given with that tone of voice, so she sold the lie with everything she had. Play the part. Be the good little omega just one more time. “I understand.”

He gave her the address, a place out of town she didn’t recognize, then hung up.

Tracy stood numb for what had to be ten minutes, waiting as if someone was going to tell her what to do. She’d always relied on others, never trusting herself to figure things out. She had no one, now. She could call Claire, could involve those alphas, but what would that do? Mario had abducted three alphas and a girl without a problem. He’d given her the address, which meant he knew someone could come after him. All of that meant the same thing. He was ready for trouble.

The last thing Tracy would do was endanger even more people. If anyone showed up, Mario would kill one of the people she loved, one of the people she couldn’t lose.

She pulled herself off the floor with no idea what to do, no plan in mind. She went to the only place she could think of, the room that still smelt of smoke and ash, where the remnants of the files had been taken away, save for the copies of the scraps left behind.

Tracy sat on the floor and spread out the crisp white pages from the file. The copies meant nothing, most of them not even full words let alone complete ideas.

One scrap had a date on it, another the first three numbers of a street address, maybe. She went from page to page, desperate to find something, anything.

Hopelessness dragged at her as ten minutes turned to twenty, then thirty and she’d found nothing.

She picked up one of the pages, squinting to try to make more out of it. She tilted her head, peering at the letters that didn’t make any sense.

in Kansas

What was in Kansas? Why couldn’t Richard have done this one thing for her, have helped her this one time? After everything he’d stolen from her, after all the ways he’d torn away a good life, he left her in this lurch at the end?

Tracy rubbed her eyes, thinking about the man he’d been at the start, at the way things had seemed so effortless. She recalled how he’d smile at her, the way he introduced her to friends back when they’d been young and still starting out.

Kansas

Tracy froze.

Maybe that wasn’t a place. She recalled meeting a client back at the start, in the first years of their mating, when she’d come home early and found them both in Richard’s home office.

She took her phone and searched the last name.

It couldn’t be a coincidence, could it?

The face of the man she recalled meeting briefly flashed across the screen of her phone.

The same perfectly styled almost-white hair, the same dark eyes. He was older, but it was him.

Torrin Kansas. in Kansas. She read what she could on the internet, though it included little. He was a successful businessman, and it was only once she’d gone back a few pages that she found dirt, as if it had all been swept past the first few pages of results.

Tracy went off that, piecing together the scraps of information she had. Most had come from the same box, the one near the bottom that hadn’t fully burned. The copies showed the charred tidbits of information left over, and she tried to turn them into something useful.

Together, it gave her a lot of nothing, but she had no other choice.

No other option came to mind, nothing else she could do that might save the people she loved more than anything.

Tracy might have been beaten down by Richard, but now it was up to her to clean up his mess.

He might have been the predator in their relationship, in her life, and she’d never thought she’d be able to fight him.

Mario had turned into the same monster, into the beast that stalked her and threatened everything she had. Standing toe to toe wouldn’t work. Maybe she wasn’t bigger or faster or stronger, but she was smarter.

The best way to deal with a predator was an even larger predator, and she suspected Torrin Kansas was a much bigger fish in their little pond.

It could work, if she didn’t get killed first.

* * * *

Sam woke, groggy and with his head throbbing.

What the hell had happened?

It took a moment to force his eyes open, gunk having developed in his lashes to glue them shut. It reminded him of waking up after his run-in with Mario’s goons, when his body had rejected the entire idea of being awake.

“Sam?” Karen’s whisper shook his laziness.

Why am I sleeping upright? Where am I?

“Hey, kid,” he grumbled, voice rough as he finally woke enough to take in the details of the room.

He was bound to a chair. His fingers brushed the wall, telling him he was against one. To his left, Dylan and Mason slumped forward in their own bonds.

Karen was on his other side, and while bound, she wasn’t nearly as securely tied. Her hands were in front of her rather than behind, and her ankles had a zip tie keeping them in place. Still, she wasn’t connected to the actual chair.

“You were asleep a long time.”

“Yeah, seems that way.” He swallowed to clear the dryness of his mouth. “You okay? Not hurt, right?”

She shook her head, wide eyes showing the white around her irises. Even so, she hadn’t fallen apart.

The girl was tough, like he’d always said.

“Some people put us in the back of a van. I couldn’t wake you up. When we got here, they tied us up.”

Sam wanted to ask who they were, but he already had a good damned guess. Who else but Mario and his thugs?

He shifted his hands, testing the binding. The arm in the cast was bent at a bad angle, and he had more slack between his wrists because they couldn’t quite meet in the middle. His attempt ended up giving him rope burn, but nothing else. Seemed they at least knew how to properly tie someone up. Not that being killed by a competent bad guy really made him any happier.

“The fuck did I drink last night?” Dylan’s voice was even rougher than usual, but no less mean.

“Do you have any slack in your rope?” Sam asked without waiting for Dylan to catch up. He was smart, he’d get there.

The moment he did, the moment the other alpha realized where they were and what must have happened, a vicious snarl left his lips. “Kid okay?”

“I’m fine,” Karen answered for herself.

Sam looked toward the other alpha in time to see him let out a long breath, and he got that sort of relief. They’d had one job, which was to watch after Karen, and look where they’d ended up.

Mason was the last to wake, but then again, from Sam’s fuzzy memory, he might have been the last to go under. Sam recalled him kicking at the window in a bid to break it. He’d probably soaked more of that gas in beforehand, and given his size, they might have even dosed him a second time. He came to with the same unhappy confusion as the others, looking like a dog waking up as he shook his head and his long hair moved from the action.

Having them both awake helped Sam. It was harder to fall to despair with them beside him. Between them, they’d figure something out, right?

The door opened, and in walked a face Sam wouldn’t ever forget. He’d sworn to make the bastard pay, but that promise felt even more important considering this newest slight. Putting Sam in the hospital he could let go, but frightening Karen? That he planned to hold against him.

Mario smiled as though they were unimportant but amusing nonetheless. “Nice to have you here,” he said. “And Detective Franklin, you look as though you’re healing well.”

“Fuck off,” Dylan chimed in before Sam could say a thing.

Anger flashed in Mario’s eyes, reminding Sam not to underestimate the man. He was a coward, sure. He was a frightened little thing who hid behind others to do his dirty work, but for now he had the power to do anything he wanted. Pushing him wouldn’t end well.

Mario seemed to pull the anger in, the face of a man who didn’t want to admit anyone could get to him, especially those he considered beneath him. “You alphas are all the same, thinking you’re special, that you run things. I assure you, you don’t run anything here.”

When Dylan opened his mouth, Mason growled lowly as a warning, one Dylan took by turning his likely stupid words into a glare instead.

“What are you hoping this gets you?” Sam asked.

A scratching sound filled the space as Mario pulled a chair through the empty room. He said nothing and no one could speak over the high-pitched complaint of the move.

Posturing.

Finally, Mario had moved the chair to the center, in front of them, and sat in it with slowness that reeked of arrogance. He folded his hands and set them in his lap, his moves unhurried. All a game. “I’m not sure why everyone keeps asking me what I want. I’ve made my demands clear from the start. I want the files. It has never been that difficult.”

“We were getting them for you,” Mason said.

“No, you weren’t. I’m not as stupid as you seem to take me for. You had no intention of turning them over to me.”

“So, you think tying us up so we can’t get them is a good way for us to go get them?” Dylan’s grating voice threw a lot of ‘you stupid fucker’ into his words without having to say it.

“I think that with you here, the omega will be inclined to do as I say. I had thought an abstract threat would be enough, but she is harder-headed than I’d have expected.”

“She’d do better with help,” Mason pointed out.

“I doubt it. In fact, I bet if you’d never got involved, she’d have handed over what I wanted without a peep. I’ve seen her files from the police, from the hospital. After what Richard did to her, she’d have given me anything I wanted without a fight if you three hadn’t been giving her ideas. With you out of the way, she’ll cave and come crawling in here like the broken thing she is.”

Sam drew his hands into fists to keep his temper in check. If Mario thought that, he hadn’t the first idea about who Tracy really was. He’d never seen her when protecting the things she cared about.

Still, it didn’t matter how fierce Tracy could be, it didn’t change that she lacked options. They had to figure a way out themselves.

Sam kept the fact there were no files to himself. If Mario realized that, he’d kill them, no question.

He had no idea how long they could bluff, but it was their only chance.

Mario rose, as though the conversation had grown tedious. “I have things to attend to.”

“What’s going to happen to us?” Karen asked, voice steadier than it should have been.

Mario stopped and stared at her, his head tilting as though he couldn’t quite believe she’d addressed him. “If your mother doesn’t bring me the things I want, I’ll kill the alphas one at a time. As the female child of an omega, you’ll possibly be one as well. We’ll test you and if you are one, I’ll sell you off. Omegas fetch good prices, especially young ones. They’re easier to train.” Mario’s shoulders lifted in a casual shrug, as if he hadn’t been speaking of murder and slavery. “Then I’ll track down your worthless mother and kill her too, for the trouble.”

Karen swallowed but didn’t respond, didn’t break down. Not even a tremble of her lip.

Good girl.

Mario waited, as if he wanted the tears, but when nothing came, when the eight-year-old outlasted him, he turned his back and stormed from the room.

The loud click of a deadbolt said he’d secured them in.

Dylan spoke first. “Hey, kid, you still got the knife I gave you?”

“You gave her a knife?” Sam couldn’t hide the anger in his voice at the idea Dylan had armed the child.

Karen’s face lit up. “I do! I tucked it into my boot!”

“Good girl,” Dylan praised. “You can lean down far enough to grab it, I think, and cut your hands free.”

Karen lifted her bound feet up while reaching down, fingers feeling inside the ankle of her boot. Slowly, she withdrew a pocketknife, and Sam felt the need to cut another glare Dylan’s way.

The other alpha only shrugged, as though he didn’t give a fuck what Sam thought.

Then again, it had come in handy.

Karen opened the blade with a surprisingly practiced flick and started to work on her zip-tie at her wrist, twisting the blade to get it between her and the plastic. It was slow going without much leverage, but eventually, she broke the tie.

Again, she went to work on her ankles, and after what had to be twenty minutes, she’d broken free of all the ties with only a few minor slices to herself to show for it.

Karen came to Sam first and worked on the much thicker rope that bound him. It took longer than he’d have liked, but she got him free, as well.

Unfortunately, the moment he went to rise, his legs gave out and he ended up pitched forward and flat on his face. He wasn’t coordinated enough to catch himself, and even if he had been, the cast made it tougher. The gas hadn’t cleared his system, yet. Karen worked on Mason, then Dylan, but both had the same issue.

The gas used wouldn’t wear off all at once. They’d be disoriented and weak for at least a few hours, just like after Sam’s last stay in the hospital. How could they do anything if they couldn’t even stand?

Mason, already ahead, nodded toward an upper window. “Karen, sweetheart, there’s a window up there. It’s small, but you can get through it.”

“What about you?”

“Don’t worry about us, kid.” Dylan had pulled himself back into the chair, since he probably hated sitting on the floor. Still, sweat on his brow said he’d paid for the move. “We’ll be fine.”

Karen shook her head and tucked the blade into her pocket. “I’m not going to leave you.”

“You’ve gotta,” Mason said. “You get out, that’s the most important thing. We’ll be fine once we rest a little longer, then we’ll come out after you.”

She shook her head again, face taking on the same hard lines Tracy’s did, looking so much like her mother that Sam had a moment of regret.

He couldn’t think he wouldn’t see his omega again, even if he couldn’t quite figure a way it would happen.

They had nothing, their belongings gone, taken while unconscious. The room was sparse, and even in the bits of damaged furniture—a desk, a dresser, some stained and ratty boxes—he doubted Mario and his goons would have left anything useful.

“Okay, kid,” Dylan said, the first to bounce back after her refusal. Then again, given Dylan being the one who’d given her the knife, that didn’t shock Sam. Seemed Dylan had more faith in the kid than the rest of them. “Go check all those drawers for anything we can use.”

Sam watched Karen nod and move off, then exchanged heavy looks with the other alphas.

He had no idea how they were going to get out of this, but they had to figure it out, and fast.