Chapter Six
Reese had openly glared Cullen’s way when Kara had grabbed a cup of coffee and headed off to the shower first thing in the morning.
The moment the water turned on, Reese zeroed in on Cullen, who was pouring his own cup. “You fucked her?”
It wasn’t jealousy exactly, but rather annoyance that he’d been left out.
Cullen didn’t hurry as he finished his coffee. Finally, he lifted his green eyes. “She’s an omega.”
The words reached into Reese and gripped him. An omega? He guessed it explained a few things, like their instant attraction to her.
While alphas couldn’t scent designations like omegas could, he suspected they might still know on some instinctual level. The unbearable lust, the possessiveness…it all hinted that the alphas had been aware of her status as an omega.
And it only made his need for her grow, building inside him.
“You’re sure?”
Cullen took a slow sip of his black coffee before setting it down. “I might not always be observant, but I noticed when I knotted her.”
The thought of Cullen stretching her in that way, of him claiming the female so fully, had Reese groaning.
“Don’t get any ideas.”
Reese lifted his lip. “You already had her. Are you really in any place to tell me not to?”
“That’s not what I’m saying. You want to fuck her? Go for it, but I know you, Reese. Don’t let it go to your head.”
“I’m not stupid.” Even as he snapped, that niggling inside him said Cullen wasn’t out of place for saying it.
Reese knew what they’d always wanted. They lived a dangerous life, and they needed a sweet, quiet mate who would stay home where it was safe. It was best to stick to one-night stands until they found the right female, and that wasn’t Kara.
They’d seen what could happen to mates who ended up too close to the work they did. The lucky ones got quick deaths and the not-so-lucky ones didn’t. The only way a mate of theirs would make it was if she flew under the radar, and if she listened. Since Kara wasn’t likely to do either, she didn’t fit what they needed.
Which meant that, sure, Reese would give in to the urges that had swamped him since he’d first seen her. He’d tease and tempt her until he was buried so deep inside her sweet little body that he might just manage to quench the fire she’d started in him, but that was as far as it could go.
The door opened to the bathroom, and she came out, her hair appearing darker due to the water. She wore the same pants from the night before but had on one of Damon’s button-up white shirts, since he was the smallest of the three. It was tucked into the waist of her pants, showing off her toned figure, and the billowy fabric of the shirt teased the figure beneath.
He could fuck her and let her go…right?
The subtle ache between Kara’s thighs thrilled her. Cullen had more than lived up to her expectations, and when she’d crawled from his bed and back to her own, she’d fallen asleep without a problem.
He’d managed to force her body back to center, to let her regain control.
She hadn’t spoken to Cullen all morning, managing to grab her coffee and jump into the shower before having to. The night before, when his eyes had widened just like his knot, when he’d realized what she was, he’d tried to talk to her. Kara had shut that shit down, because being stuck on an alpha’s cock was so not the time to have a heart-to-heart.
Hell, she was pretty sure there was really no good time to have one.
By the time she left the safety of the bathroom, she’d rebuilt her armor.
He was nothing but a convenient knot, and she was the snarky omega who didn’t give a shit what he thought. In fact, she figured all three of them were nothing but thorns in her ass, causing her problems, which meant that using them to slake her lust seemed fitting.
Besides, they had other things to deal with. Most importantly, Kara needed a hell of a lot more details about whatever case they were working on. Clearly, these alphas were idiots. She couldn’t trust that they’d handle the issue themselves, meaning she needed to know exactly what they’d gotten themselves—and her—into.
That had left them back at Grimes’ place. He was inept for handling the actual coding of the cards, but even that moron could add the names and pictures to the ID badges Justin had created. Part of her didn’t want him to touch the cards, like they were Justin’s final masterpieces, but she shut down that strange, sentimental instinct.
While he worked, they sat in his shitty little waiting room out front. His shopfront doubled as a locksmith, which always made Kara roll her eyes.
“The omega’s name is Grace Singer,” Damon said, his computer away for once. His glasses were ever-so-slightly askew, and it added to his almost puppy-dog cuteness. “She’s been missing for two weeks.”
“Two weeks? She’d probably just out having a good time.”
Damon shook his head. “I doubt it. Her friend, Bran, hired us because he spoke to her the night before she took off. She was nervous and told him she appreciated everything he’d done before she’d gone home.”
“Well, that sounds like she left on purpose, since she gave him the famously vague goodbye.”
Reese picked up the story. “We know she left on her own. The alpha searched her place, and she took a journal she never went anywhere without.”
“If she left on her own, why the hell are you trying to find her?”
He sighed and rubbed his fingers against the bridge of his nose. “Because in addition to running, she stole Bran’s pistol. He hired us because he wants to make sure she’s safe, because obviously she needs help.”
Kara leaned back in the shop’s hard plastic chair, crossing her legs to show just how little she cared. “So you are going to come along all white-knight and rescue the poor damsel?”
Cullen spoke up, and she hated that his words sparked back to life every fire he’d started the night before, as though his voice alone could bring forth those memories and make them real again. “She was working as an intern at a pharmaceutical company in her home town, the same company whose main location is here. We were able to get a bank statement showing she pulled cash out here in town, and Bran said in the last week or two she’d become obsessed with researching information about the lab, but she refused to tell him why. The best lead is that lab.”
“And that’s why you need the keycards?”
“If I can get inside, I can access their computer system, see what we can find out about if she went to the main lab and when,” Damon said.
“So your brilliant plan is to go into the place you think she might have been, despite having no idea why she was there, and hope maybe you’ll figure something out?”
It was Reese who frowned the hardest in response, telling her who exactly had come up with that crack-shot plan. “Do you have a better idea? Because clearly there’s a problem with that lab or no one would have come looking for those keycards.”
She pressed her lips into a tight line when she could come up with nothing better. They could sit on the lab, watch it for a few days, but she had no idea what they were looking for. Plus, since people had come to her place looking for her, it seemed she was short on time. Getting inside afforded them the best chance of catching that one useful piece of information that would bring everything else together.
She didn’t care about the omega—at least, she kept telling herself that—but she cared a lot about her own skin, and right then her skin was on the line, and it pissed her off not to even know why.
She’d done far cooler things in her life to end up in the crosshairs of some bigwig. Why couldn’t she be in trouble over the time she’d stolen a car from a mob boss? Or when she’d drawn a mustache on the portrait of the largest tech guru in the country while it hung over the mantel of his highly secure private home? So that one hadn’t paid anything, but she’d felt slightly better after having spent hours on the phone with tech support over her newest cellphone not working. Honestly, the whole thing was almost insulting.
If this is what kills me, I’m going to go poltergeist on these assholes forever.
Grimes walked back into the main shop area, his gaze not nearly careful enough for Kara’s comfort. Then again, that was why she didn’t use him. He was a hack. “Here you go.”
Damon took the cards, lifting them to check the craftsmanship.
He didn’t need to. Grimes could handle adding a few pictures and laminating a pre-done card. That shit was child’s play. Justin had done the hard work, the coding, creating duplicate cards that would function to get them into the building without setting off red flags. Grimes only needed to add the names and pictures to the physical cards.
“Looks good.” Damon tucked the cards into his laptop case, then looked over at Kara. “So, are you in?”
Despite everything inside Kara screaming that this was a bad idea, that she should spend as little time around these alphas as possible, she shrugged. “Fuck it, why not?”