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What’s done is done. It’s better to focus on something productive instead. I understand why Timothy did what he did, even if I don’t like it. It was his call and I’m sure he made the right call, even if it doesn’t make me happy right now.
“I might not know what causes the ‘blips’, but I do know that they’re monitoring that system. The blip might simply be a problem in their monitoring software that I’ve not found yet. There are...” He eyes me, stopping.
“I’m sure that they’re monitoring us. At this point, I’m also pretty sure it’s the Hearts. All they’ve seen for the past months is that we upped our patrols after Vera and Caleb came here —which they’ll have expected—, but that’s all, at least from the system they’re monitoring.”
“And that’s good news, why?” Because I’m not seeing it.
“It means we can show them fake footage. Even if they catch on that it’s fake footage, they’ll still not have access to the original footage, so won’t know what we did during that time. We can use that against them. And we can also see if they try to fake footage our way.”
I sit up, very alert. That sounds bad. “They can fake footage onto our feeds?!”
“They shouldn’t be able to. But I put in some redundancies so that even if they attempt to, we’ll catch it immediately.”
“I would hope so.” I give him a level look, my heart rate only slightly going down. “Because it’s not just my pack you’re putting on the line if things go wrong.”
“Hey! Don’t fucking threaten—” Derrick, who’s been keeping quiet the whole time, steps forward, towering over me, anger rolling off him.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.” I tap my knife to the inside of his thigh and he quickly takes a step back, out of danger. “I didn’t mean it as a threat, I’m sorry it sounded like that. I meant that we’ve got a lot of people under our protection, that’s a lot of responsibility, a lot of people who trust us. I don’t want to break that trust.”
“The system is safe. You know that I wouldn’t put our people needlessly in danger.” Timothy meets my gaze head-on, not flinching one moment.
“Good.” I try to go over everything that Timothy and Erika told me before she got off the call. She’s coming here to help us get the kids into safe situations, to help Luca’s family make a new start and she offered part of her security team to help us out for a while...
Which is how Timothy and I got into the whole conversation about our current security system ‘situation’.
I let out a deep sigh, exhausted.
“What are you thinking?” Derrick moves, leaning against the table, making sure to stay out of my reach, his eyes guarded.
“That you two have the right idea.” I motion in Timothy and Derrick’s direction. “I need to learn to delegate more, even when it comes to stuff about the organisation. You two run my technical and my physical sides of the security at home and are in charge of the missions. But when it comes to running the organisation itself, it still falls all on me. We’re dealing with multiple situations here, most of them are connected but not always overlapping, I really shouldn’t be doing all of that on my own.”
Timothy lets out a quiet laugh as he shakes his head.
“What?!”
He pulls a face. “I agree with you that you shouldn’t be doing everything on your own. And you’ve now got a pack to help you out, even though you’ve barely made use of them until now. But as your pregnancy progresses, things will become a lot trickier. Right now, we’re mainly dealing with the Hearts throwing a tantrum and putting bounties on everyone. We’ve dealt with that before.”
“Plenty of times.” The bounties actually worry me the least, of everything that’s happened in the last day. Bounties I know how to deal with. It requires tighter security, but we also know what to expect.
“Right. But what happens if your clients, or the wider world, find out that you’re pregnant? What will happen if you’re at the end of your pregnancy and can’t go waltzing all over the place, meet with people, because that has physically become much too hard on you?”
I snort. “That presumes that I’ll still have clients once people find out I’m an Omega. That presumes that people will still want to work with me. Who says that they’ll still want to do business with our organisation, even if someone else takes on the leading role? Even if I, a ‘weak’ Omega, would step back and someone else would be the face of the organisation. There’s no guarantee anyone will still want to work with us.”
Timothy gives me a look that tells me I’m being way too defeatist. “At some point in the not-too-far future, you won’t be able to go on missions, that will become physically not a good idea. Going out for client dinners will also become a bad idea. Not just for security reasons, but plain-old ‘physically being up to it’ reasons. Derrick and I can try to help you however much we can, but you’re not the same guy you were before, your life has changed and that means making changes to how you run things too.”
“I know. It’s not like I haven’t thought about that before. It’s just hard to...” I move my hands jerkily. “Hard to figure out.”
Timothy shrugs, looking back at the guys from the tech team. “You’ve got some time to figure it out, but not a lot. You don’t want to be forced to make choices with options you don’t like. Just make sure you stay ahead of things.”
He sighs deep. “Talking about staying ahead of things, I’ll tell Eli that we’ll have a lot more mouths to feed soon and that we need to get the spare houses ready for Erika’s people. Unless you need me here for something else?” He gives me a look, clearly wanting to get out of here, away from my grumpy mood.
I shake my head, letting out a long breath. “Thanks. I should have been the one to tell Eli earlier… So, thanks.”
“No problem.” Timothy jerks his head so his guys follow him out of the library.
When the door closes behind them, I look to Derrick. “Are we good?”
“We’re good.” He rubs between his legs, like the memory of the knife being there makes him feel it physically. Then he eyes the door Timothy just left through.
