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I had the urge to claim all of it, every bit. I wanted to be here, and I could feel the pull of hearth and home. It was nearly overwhelming, the need to mark him. There he was, with Graeme and Wade close, and he was an unclaimed omega carrying on like this was all so very normal. And I knew to him it was, because his mate, who was an idiot, had allowed it to go on.

I took off my coat, hung it on one of the hooks, then walked over and took a seat on the burlap couch, picking up a pillow and shoving it against my face and inhaling deeply.

“Put that down,” Sasha ordered me, sounding annoyed.

“Come take it,” I baited him.

He rolled his eyes and then looked at everyone else. “May I make you all some tea?”

“No, no,” Wade said quickly. “Sit down so we can talk.”

I wanted tea. More than that, I wanted Sasha to make it for me. There was also the nearly overwhelming desire to sit at the counter, on one of his barstools, and watch him as he did it. I craved his attention, longed to be taken care of, and I knew it was his first instinct as well. Omegas were caretakers, born that way. It was in their blood, and I’d taken that away from him, stripped him of his instinctively nurturing nature toward me. All of this distance was my fault, but I’d had a really good reason for putting us both through this. I needed to get him to listen to my rationalization and understand.

Of course he chose to take a seat as far away from me as possible, leaning forward and giving Wade all his attention.

I hated Wade.

“Tell Graeme and Avery what you found today, because I didn’t think I’d need to fill them in until tomorrow morning,” Wade ordered my mate.

I didn’t love that, him telling Sasha what to do. And even knowing I was being ridiculous, the bond that was pulsing between us roared at me to correct him.

But Sasha immediately responded to Wade and talked about finding a diary that proved River Wilkes and his family were not true members of the jarl. He also explained that Royce had said he was being paid by River to deliver the diary to him.

Wade then told Sasha that the night he found me in the street, Royce had betrayed me to Theo Rossellini, who’d shot me with a high-powered rifle that should have killed me, but even hurt, before that, I’d managed to save six omegas.

“What?” he murmured, and finally, his gaze, when it fell on me, was not cold or hard, but instead, questioning.

“Deacon has been out playing Batman,” Graeme explained. “Mostly by himself, but at times with people he paid to help him perform some highly illegal and decidedly dangerous activities. He’s saved many mid-level omegas of the jarl who otherwise would have been trafficked. He’s been working on it a lot longer than the FBI or the Chicago Police Department.”

Wade went into more depth about what I’d done, the number of omegas I’d saved, and why I’d been working alone without telling anyone—because I didn’t want to put people I cared about in danger.

I loved Wade.

I would probably need to buy him a car or something in thanks, because Sasha was no longer staring at me coldly, but instead like he was working things out in his head. Perhaps contrasting what both Graeme and Wade told him, with what he’d seen and heard with his own eyes. I’d been an ass to him, and as far as he knew, I hated omegas. But with what I’d done, that couldn’t be true.

“Well,” Avery said after a short silence, “I think with this questioning of Sasha, we have to look at River Wilkes as perhaps being one of our missing pieces.”

“One of?” I asked him. “I thought it was Royce and Theo trafficking the omegas.”

“No,” Avery shook his head. “Think about it. Royce set you up to collect a payday from Theo, and now he’s working for River. But if he was in on the selling of omegas, he would have killed you himself to keep that secret. And why would he be chasing money from others anyway, he’d have his own rolling in.”

I nodded. “Okay. That makes sense.”

“I don’t understand what you mean about missing pieces?” Sasha asked him.

“We removed Theo Rossellini from the board. He was the one in charge of auctioning off and transporting the omegas. It would make sense that it would be River telling Theo who to take and when, as he would know precisely which omegas of the jarl were about to be thrown out by their families. The third person, who we have no idea about, has to be someone who talks to the omegas, who they trust enough to go to sketchy places in the middle of the night with. They trust this person not to hurt them, and that’s the third piece of this puzzle.”

“I see, thank you for explaining that to me.”

“Of course,” Avery said with a smile.

“Okay,” Wade began, “so tomorrow, after Graeme and I go and confront River with the existence of the diary, then we put his life under a microscope and see what we find.”

“This is very exciting,” Sasha blurted out, his eyes glittering, face flushed.

Wade shook his head. “This is police work.”

“It’s thrilling.”