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“Dude, shut up.”
Trevor hit Theo with a pillow and I whined softly at it being out of place, then got annoyed with myself for caring about the placement of pillows.
“Don’t worry about it, Biscuit. We know your heat is coming, so we’ll do our best not to move anything from its spot.”
“Sorry, Omega. Where does it belong?”
Trevor handed me the pillow and I gave him a quick peck on the cheek before putting it back where it had come from. Theo tugged me back down into the space between them and wrapped his arm around my waist. He kissed his bondmark and laughed at how it made me squirm before molding himself to my back and drifting quickly off to sleep.
Facing Theo and I, Trevor had one arm tucked under the pillow his head laid on and the other resting on his stomach. I reached over to take that hand and thread our fingers together. He scooted a little closer as I brought our joined hands to my chest. Making sure I wouldn’t wake Theo but also that Trevor could hear me, I whispered.
“I loved Beauty and the Beasts too.”
I was starting to feel like one of those conspiracy theorists in a crime show as I stared at the not-murder-murder-board Cole, Trevor and I had put together on one of the dry erase boards in the BullPen—all that was missing was the red string.
Now that we weren’t worried about the mole, we’d moved out of the conference room that Cole and I had previously appropriated. Not that I’d known there had been someone working against us from the inside. I was all prepared to rip into Cole when I got into the BullPen until I saw how absolutely wrecked he was. I’d told Trevor to send him home and he went, reluctantly, but only after I promised to update him if we found anything.
Amy and I were going over our information again while we ran an algorithm to search for any hidden actions taken within the system by Derek or Trevor, since he’d been using a duped access card. So far, we didn’t have anything new. Jade had come in earlier and given me a kiss before going straight to Trevor’s office and closing herself inside with him. Theo had explained this morning that she’d been in questioning most of the night and had decided to stay in her room rather than risk disturbing us. We’d all let her sleep in, but I knew she wanted to check on Trevor after last night’s events.
Poppy’s taunts came back to the surface of my mind. I clenched my jaw, wishing I could have spared Trevor that confrontation but also savoring the memory of Aubs decking her. I hadn’t heard of Poppy Cabot before finding her pictured with the Jackals. Cabot Pharma was one of the most well-known pharmaceutical and research companies in the country, but we didn’t find any links between the company and the Jackals.
Everything I found suggested that Poppy Cabot had been quietly expelled from her social circles after she attacked Trevor and that her parents had stopped paying for anything beyond her trust fund. Even after a fall from grace from her social strata, she would still be welcomed into the wealthy circles my parents and their peers traveled in. She knew enough about me to know that my fathers had tried to match me with the Rothchild pack and how that had failed. I suddenly stilled. Oh. How could I have been so dumb?
“Amy, did you run any checks on our search for connections between Poppy Cabot and other rich packs?”
“No, not since trying to find out how she ended up with the Jackals in the first place. We set that line of questioning aside when we started looking for Shae.”
“Motherfucker.”
“What?”
“Run it again, please? Look specifically for links between Poppy Cabot and Gavin Rothchild? I think we were on to something, and that’s why they took Shae. I think Derek told the Jackals and they moved in on Shae to distract us.”
Her face paled and she whirled back to the closest machine to hunt for the needle in the haystack. There had to be something there. Something that made them want to up the stakes and scare us off.
It made sense that a socialite would have connections to resources and money to fund the shit that the Jackals were doing. But we still weren’t sure how she’d got tangled up with them. If they were a scent match then it stood to reason that she would have been tied to the whole pack, if not bonded, but the Alpha last night made it clear that he didn’t care about her. Turning my attention back to the board, my gaze snagged on the photo of Clint’s pack.
There were so many unanswered questions. I walked up to the wall where our board was and cleared some space so I could write on the dry erase area. I started by listing the things I needed to focus my searches on. How had Poppy become tied to the Jackals? How did Clint’s pack find the Jackals? How did they know what the formula could do? Clint said it was only him and his assistant who knew but how was that possible? He’d been using Foundation resources and... fuck.
I spun around and moved over to my computer. After I’d visited Clint, Cole and I were working on finding a link between the Foundation and the Jackals, but nothing had come up. Now that I knew Derek had been going through and scrubbing our searches that produced results, I was willing to bet a link existed. After an hour, the report had been populated but nothing in the Foundation’s record of donations matched the legal holdings from pack Jackal or Poppy’s family.
Even more frustrating was that the donations scheme Clint seemed so convinced was happening didn’t add up either. There were a lot of donations from happily matched packs after they found their Omegas, but the amounts were wildly varied and none more than ten thousand dollars. Certainly not enough to risk losing their reputation or potentially their business as a whole if it came out that they were, as Clint had said, selling Omegas.
Not trusting an algorithm this time, I resolved to sift through the information again. There had been a statement from Clint’s boss about my kidnapping, but I couldn’t remember the man’s name. A hand rested on my shoulder, making me jump until Shae’s blackberry floral scent made its way through my hyper-focused state.
I blinked at them a few times while my eyes adjusted from staring at the screen for so long without looking away. They were in their new Drake House EMT uniform and my mouth watered at the sight. I liked knowing that almost all of my pack was here each day. They smiled at me and ran their short fingernails through my hair, making my eyes close from the pleasure. There weren’t many things better than having someone run their fingers through your hair and scratch your scalp.
“I came to see if you were ready to go home but it looks like you are working hard?”
I nodded and blew out a frustrated breath.
“We’re looking back at places we thought would lead to links between all these dangling threads, in case Derek tampered with them, but I haven’t found any yet. Was just about to look into Clint’s boss because of something Clint said about donations.”
“Can I help?”
I twisted the sleeve on my hoodie between my hands. Going home and having everyone in my nest for the first time sounded heavenly, but there were too many loose ends here.
“You don’t mind?”
