Chapter 3: Chapter Three

Kara flicked the keycard, holding it up to the light as if that would tell her a damned thing.

Getting it had been her easiest job in months. She’d picked the deadbolt on the back door—no alarm system at all—crept through the dark house while the owner of the coveted little piece of plastic snored away in his bed, and stolen the card from the briefcase.

It wouldn’t be missed anytime soon, since his calendar showed he wouldn’t be back for at least a month. The keycard was a visitor badge for one of the many companies who supplied test subjects for experiments. The companies screened potential subjects and connected them with the lab.

Hythen Pharmaceuticals worked on a number of things, most far above her level of schooling—which was fuck all—and surrounding alpha and omega biology. They worked on drugs specially formulated to the hormones of alphas and omegas, and also on things like birth control options or heat suppressant medications.

Why the alphas needed it, she didn’t know and really didn’t care.

Justin walked into the small back room behind a hole-in-the-wall cafe that served horrible coffee and worse food. The beta was quiet and always nervous around her. He’d asked her out once, after she’d slept with him on an especially bad day of hers, but she’d turned him down.

He was too sweet, and it would mean too much to him. He wasn’t the type to hit it and quit it like her. Despite the whole criminal thing, she’d actually call him a good person.

“Kara,” he said, a timid smile crossing his thin lips. He pushed his glasses up his nose, though they remained askew as they usually were. “I didn’t expect you.”

Kara held up the keycard she’d swiped. “I need your help.”

He took the card, flipping it over and studying it carefully before walking toward a table full of a few computer monitors and random bits of technology she didn’t come close to understanding.

Kara could manage security systems and basic computer usage, but anything this complicated? Nope.

He slid the card through a reader, then glanced at the laptop connected to it. “How soon do you need this? It’s surprisingly complex.”

“I need that one or an exact copy immediately. After that, I’ll take four ones already encoded but with the name and picture blank whenever you can get them to me.”

He turned a disapproving look on her. Not a glare, because Justin wouldn’t ever glare at her. “Please tell me you aren’t double-crossing a client again.”

“Not exactly. They’re going to get what they paid me for. I’m just making some copies because you never know what that will come in handy.” Kara offered a smile that she’d bet wouldn’t reassure him, but he’d always melted easily for her. “Besides, the client is going to Grimes.”

“Grimes?” Justin snorted, his cheeks turning red afterward, as though he hadn’t meant to do something like that in front of her. “He’ll never make a decent copy of this.”

“I know, which is why I came to you. Hell, maybe I’ll sell them one of your good copies for an even better profit after Grimes fails.”

Justin shook his head, his gaze dropping back to his screen. “Give me an hour and you can have the original back. They’ll never know I did a thing.”

Kara waited in the small café out front, a cup of their horrible coffee in front of her.

“How do you drink that?” The new, disapproving voice of Torrin had her smiling.

She lifted her gaze to his familiar face. “Pour enough cream and sugar into anything and it becomes tolerable. Besides, it’s three in the morning—what else are you going to do but drink coffee?”

Torrin undid the buttons of his suit jacket before sitting across from Kara. He always looked regal, no matter the situation or place. One lift of his finger had the waitress hurrying over, another cup of coffee in her hand.

He grimaced when the black liquid touched his lips, then put the cup down and pushed it toward the middle of the table.

“Did you really need to check up on me? I called Liam and thanked him, told him I was fine.” With that, she glanced out of the large glass windows to spot both Liam and Erik standing beside the dark town car. Liam’s lips twisted into a smile when he met her gaze, though Erik only nodded.

Torrin folded his hands and set them on the table. “Yes, they told me you were fine, but I wanted to see for myself. I’ve never had to rescue you from a police station before.”

“It was nothing, just a job gone wrong. They happen.”

“Well, now I need to know the story.”

Kara sighed and leaned back in the seat, kicking her feet up onto the bench beside Torrin. Refusing to tell him would only make the protective alpha need to know all the more, and it would go easier if she just told him and made him leave. “Mario Navarro hired me.”

Torrin showed no reaction, which was pretty much on par for him. She knew him well, or as well as she suspected anyone knew him, given how tight-lipped he tended to be. “To steal the files held by Tracy Pera.”

Kara should have been shocked he knew, but nothing much surprised her when it came to Torrin. He knew everything. “Mario thought it was just a few things on him, maybe one or two other people, but Richard Pera had files on everyone.”

“Mario never got them, so what happened?”

“I burned them. I couldn’t risk letting Mario, or anyone else, get hold of what was there, and I didn’t have time to get them all out.”

A tic in Torrin’s jaw was his only outward reaction. “You burned such useful information?”

Kara took another drink, allowing the sickly-sweet coffee to slide down her throat and keep her awake despite the late hour. “I might have taken a few pictures of important things we’d find interesting.” She offered a grin full of mischief. “Which is why it took me so long before I could destroy them.”

Torrin only stared, his startling bright green eyes trained on her. “What did you do with the photos?”

“I sent them to our private email. I think you’ll like it. Got some blackmail on a few politicians, figured out who was behind the hit on your pill shipment about three years ago, and a handful of other things.”

Torrin nodded, his gaze finding the coffee as though tempted to try it again. “Tracy came to find me a few days ago. She wanted to make a deal. Her silence about the contents of those files in exchange for my protection of her, her mates and her child.”

Kara huffed softly. “Well, I never figured that omega would have it in her. Good for her.”

“I’ve found omegas to be far more resilient than we give them credit for.” Torrin didn’t say it as though he were happy about the fact. “I agreed, and even had our man who worked for Navarro save her mate and offspring.”

“And Mario?”

“Dead.”

Kara frowned at that, given that Torrin rarely killed people without good reason, and Mario was a useful patsy. “Why?”

Torrin’s shoulders lifted, the subtle movement he did when an answer might reveal too much. She suspected anyone else would have gotten only that, but for Kara, he offered a hair more. “Mario struck the child.”

Ah, that explained it. While she didn’t know much of Torrin’s past, or much about the past of his cousins, she knew it wasn’t pretty. While he easily stomached all sorts of violence, he never had dealt well with the idea of children being hurt.

“Are you going to honor her deal, even though you know there aren’t any files?”

“Yes. The hard work is already done. She’s already played me, and I sent out word that they are not to be touched. If I revoked it now, it would be more work and make me look weak. I suppose I have to give her credit on this one. Not many outwit me or manage to lie to me.”

Kara swirled the coffee in her mug, chuckling at the annoyance in Torrin’s voice. He didn’t like being beaten, especially at his own game. Though, if Kara were being honest, she’d suspect he knew all along that Tracy didn’t have the files. Torrin had a soft spot, and while he rarely showed it and few would ever believe it, he did good every now and then. With him, though, who knew?

After a long moment of silence, Torrin released a soft sigh, one of the rare shows of anything other than the unflappable and ruthless businessman he displayed to the world. “You could have been hurt, Kara.” The words came from Torrin in a low voice, the way he always spoke when he set aside that face, when she saw what was underneath the monster other people feared.

“It wasn’t a big deal.” She played it off. “Besides, I wasn’t about to let that sort of stuff get into the wrong hands, not when it could have come down on you, since your name was on quite a few of those pages.”

She tried to let that say what they never would outright—Torrin was important to her. He and his cousins had taken her in when she’d had nothing, protected her, given her a family of a sort, a purpose, a life.

“You should know better. I would have much rather taken that risk instead of you. Liam and Erik would agree.” He leaned back, though still alert, on edge. Torrin always did that. Despite all their years of friendship, she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him relaxed. “I think sometimes about the night we met.”

She winced at the reminder, at the story he so rarely brought up.

After the night she didn’t think about, and sure as hell didn’t talk about, after the subsequent hospital stay, she’d had no pain pills. Broke and living on the streets, she hadn’t been able to afford anything, and once what the hospital had pumped her full of had run out, Kara had been so desperate, she’d broken into an expensive townhouse in the center of the city. She’d expected some waspy woman hooked on opioids to have something in her medicine cabinet worth a damn.

Instead, she’d found Torrin.

Her silence allowed him to continue. “I wonder sometimes if I did the right thing.”

“You helped me.”

“Maybe, or maybe I ruined you. I could have easily afforded a boarding school for you, could have set you up for a good life. I wonder if bringing you deeper into my world didn’t cause more harm than good.”

Kara fidgeted in the seat, the heart-to-heart uncomfortable and unsettling between two people who had as much emotional depth as shallow puddles. “If you’d done that, I would have snuck out. I was never going to be strait-laced. I would have tried to do exactly what I’m doing now, except I wouldn’t have had the training, so I’d probably be dead or in jail.”

Torrin met her gaze with a hard stare, his eyes bright in the empty cafe. “Are you ever going to tell your brother you’re alive?”

“Who?” she asked in a not-at-all-convincing squeak.

Torrin’s gaze never shifted as he said the name Kara tried her hardest not to think about, not to remember. “Kane.”

* * * *

Damon traced his gaze over the other people at the park, mostly children and the stressed-out and over-tired mothers who chased them.

The three alphas stuck out, but Kara hadn’t budged on the meeting place. Then again, she knew they worked as private investigators, so she probably figured they weren’t likely to do anything that might endanger the sort of people who were at a park at ten in the morning.

A smart choice, if he had to admit it.

He’d spent more than a few hours on his computer the night before, searching for any concrete information about her. Rumors had credited a few jobs to her, but nothing definite. Her name floated around like some bogeyman no one wanted to tangle with. She seemed to be a ghost, something talked about in the shadows but without solid form.

It made Damon nervous.

He liked plans. He liked knowing what was going to happen and having a contingency for any potential problems.

He did not like meeting some female criminal who had pulled a gun on Cullen and Reese and escaped a police station.

Not the sort of woman we should be trusting.

Reese kicked Damon’s foot, scolding him softly. “Stop worrying so much.”

How many times had someone told him that? Countless.

Damon was a born worrier. He’d lived his life always knowing everything that could go wrong and working hard to keep it from doing so.

People liked to poke fun at him about it, but then again, he’d never been caught with his metaphorical pants down. No one had ever needed to bail him out of anywhere, to save him.

Nope, Damon was on top of shit. Always.

“I’m not worrying. I’m just aware of how terrible this plan is.”

“It’s just some female thief. No need to get this worked up. It’s not like we’re waiting for an assassin here.”

Just some female?

“Some female thief is just as capable of putting a bullet in each of us as anyone else,” Damon pointed out.

Cullen grunted softly from the other side, leaning against a tree in the shade. “Just as capable and probably more likely. Nature made women smaller because they were already more vicious. It had to give us men a shot at survival.”

Damon pressed his lips together instead of responding. The two alphas had become his friends, but that didn’t change that they were very different. Both liked to mention how young Damon was, as though he were some kid in need of their help.

Which amused him as much as it annoyed him, since the two of them could barely use the GPS on their phones to find an address. They weren’t in a position to mock him for a lack of knowledge.

Still, having them around filled a void for him. He’d never had the stability before, and they offered a counter to his slightly neurotic nature.

From around the corner came a small figure, dressed in a bright red shirt that clashed with the absurd neon blue of her hair. Kara. Cullen had mentioned that the brown she’d had in the elevator had been fake, but Damon hadn’t believed it would be this obnoxious.

Not that the blue dampened the instant shot of attraction as he took in her narrow waist and her toned thighs clothed in black jeans. Her chest wasn’t large, and the front of her shirt read nice truck, sorry about your dick.

She held an ice-cream cone, one of the cheap ones bought from a fast-food chain. When she darted her tongue out to stroke up the side, Damon nearly dropped his water bottle to the sidewalk.

“You know, you three look like creepy predators here.”

“Maybe next time, don’t schedule a meeting at a park.”

“Well, the good thing is, even if you get picked up by the police, I’ve heard they don’t have great security.” She grinned, her lips damp from the ice cream and glistening in the sunlight. It made her hair impossibly brighter.

Reese laughed, the man always so easily swayed by a pretty face.

Cullen chimed in, as though trying to silence his clearly smitten friend, “Do you have the card?”

Kara reached down the front of her shirt, pulled the card free and held it between two fingers as though keeping it in her bra were in any way normal.

Cullen plucked it away and handed it to Damon.

“So, this is the whiz-kid?”

Damon ignored Kara as he studied the card, looking for signs of damage or trickery. He wouldn’t put it past the woman to try to pull one over on them.

“This is Damon,” Cullen said. “Any problems getting the key?”

“None. Easy job. In and out. They’ll never know I was there. He’ll assume he lost the key the next time he needs it, but when I took a glance at the planner in his briefcase, he isn’t scheduled back there for a month.”

Damon nodded and tucked the keycard into his laptop case. “It looks good.” He removed the envelope of cash, already prepared for her, and held it out.

Kara grabbed it, folded the envelope over and stuck it into her back jeans pocket. “I can expect a five-star review from you, right?” That damned tongue of hers darted out again, like a thing with a life of its own, and gathered up more of the white ice cream.

A similar groan left the three alphas at once, the sort that always happened along with the hardening of someone’s dick.

And Kara, the minx, curled her lips into a sharper smirk and did it again.

Reese gave in first, always quicker to break when it came to women. He crossed the short distance, the two large steps it took to stand just before her, close enough that she had to look up—way up, given he had over a foot on her—to meet his gaze. “Come back to our room.”

“I don’t fuck clients.”

“Job is over. We aren’t clients anymore.”

Damon shifted on the bench, openly staring at the play between the two. He wasn’t a virgin by any means, having spent his time exploring like any guy his age, driven by the higher libido of an alpha, yet he wasn’t sure he’d ever felt a pull like this.

He had no idea if he was even part of us. Cullen and Reese routinely fucked women together. The alphas seemed joined at the hip, like some strange married couple who just didn’t have sex with one another. Damon hadn’t joined in, hadn’t tried or been invited to.

Still, in those brief moments between Reese and Kara, Damon knew he’d either join in or bare his teeth for a shot of his own.

Which was absolutely insane. It was just a woman, one he didn’t even know. Why would he react like this?

She lifted her ice-cream cone and twisted that teasing tongue along the swirled top, making a show of slowly swallowing it down. And didn’t that fire up Damon’s filthy thoughts about what else that wicked tongue could do?

Reese responded the way they all probably wanted to. He leaned down and captured a tiny speck of ice cream that rested on her lip.

Damon would have taken the kiss. He wouldn’t have been able to stop himself, not so close, not with how much temptation sat there, or the teasing, mocking promise in Kara’s eyes.

Reese didn’t give in, though. After he licked clean the spot of dessert, he pulled back.

Kara’s pupils spread until they ate up the blue.

Her scent… It was probably something that shouldn’t have happened at a damned park, but the soft breeze drew it to him.

He’d never smelled anything more amazing, more succulent. Full of spice and heat and something so distinctly female. A beta had never drawn him in so deeply, but she couldn’t be an omega.

Omegas weren’t common and, being in high demand, tended to keep a low profile, especially ones of her age. By the time an omega reached twenty-five, they were mated or running. Either way, they didn’t parade around like she did.

Which made his reaction all the stranger. Not that his cock would listen to reason.

Kara leaned in, as though she would kiss Reese, like she’d cross that threshold, but just before they touched, she lifted the ice cream between them. She pressed the cone into Reese’s hand and moved backward, a playful bounce in her step that made her look like the best kind of prey. “Enjoy that.” She nodded at the dessert clutched in Reese’s palm. “It’s the closest you’re gonna get.”

She backed away, tracing her gaze over each of the alphas in a very slow perusal. She caught her full bottom lip between her white teeth, openly enjoying the sight of each alpha.

And Damon was included, despite not being nearly as aggressive or obvious as Cullen and Reese. As the youngest, as the planner, the nerdy one, Damon was used to women not noticing him.

In Kara’s hungry gaze, though? She noticed him.

And no matter how much he told himself all the good and valid the reasons it was stupid to consider anything, for him to even want to see her again, he did.