“This is not aboutdoing it right,” she added. “It is about understanding your own comfort, your own limits, and your ability to choose, even in moments where your body responds to arousal.”
Her gaze softened, just slightly.
“You are in control the entire time, Lena.”
My fingers slowly uncurled, relief threading through me at the realization that, for once, I would be in charge.Completely.
Chapter 19: Knox
Our original plan had been simple.
Slip in, extract each omega, and get out clean, leaving nothing behind that Marco could trace back to Arca. It was controlled and most importantly, deniable.
That plan was no longer viable.
I stood at the conference table, flipping through the briefing packets Silas had assembled for Director Mallory and General Green. He’d left them half-finished, notes scribbled in the margins, locations circled but not fully documented. Typical. He always got the structure down, then expected me to refine it.
I didn’t mind.
It gave me time to think.
There were too many confirmed locations now. Too many moving parts. What Marco had built wasn’t random. It was organized in a way that made it difficult to dismantle without tipping him off. Taking one omega at a time wouldn’t break anything. It would just make him tighten his grip.
I rested my hand on the map, studying the spread of pins and notes, tracing the pattern they formed.
Lena had seen it before we had.
Even without all the pieces, her mind assembled something bigger. Filling in gaps, connecting things that shouldn’t have made sense yet somehow did.
The way she worked was… fascinating.
It started with quiet observations, small details, and then suddenly, a pattern.
Marco had built an entire system using the omegas.
Which meant we weren’t just his routine.
We were breaking a complex and intricate network he relied on.
If we wanted to cripple him, we had to hit everything at once.
A coordinated strike across every identified location would overwhelm whatever control he thought he had. We’d recover as many omegas as possible in a single sweep, a substantial portion if executed correctly, and more importantly, we’d force him to react.
Marco wouldn’t sit still while we dismantled his operation. He’d move the rest of them, quickly and without the same level of precision.
And when he did that, he’d make mistakes.
That was when we’d find the rest.
I exhaled, tapping my pen against the table as I mentally walked through the sequence again, tightening the plan, adjusting the order of operations, already anticipating the objections Directory Mallory was going to raise.
We’d seize over half of his omegas in one swift move, ifwe were able to pull this off. Lena told us there were some locations which contained multiple omegas, so when the operation was complete, we'd recover roughly fifteen women.
That alone would cripple him.
A quiet shift of movement pulled my attention.
I glanced up.
