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“We’re ready,” Stacy said, though if she were brutally honest, she was a lot more ready for a nap.
Get through your day, dummy. You can crash later.
It was the story of her life, of late.
She and Karen were both dressed in the standard issue of FMB agents: charcoal suits and sunglasses, hair in neat, ponytails. With the exception of a few notable differences—Karen’s ass was wider, the woman slightly taller, while Stacy’s figure was generally shapelier, and certainly more blessed in the boob department—the two of them could have been mistaken for sisters.
They were armed, but FMB policy was that any agent pressed into a situation where they actually needed to use lethal force was an agent who was a liability. Few agents ever remained with the Bureau long after having to shoot someone.
The FMB’s entire mission was to preserve life,nottake it.
Even though a few of the women whose lives they ended up “preserving,” might have considered death a tempting alternative in their darkest of hours.
That wasn’t Stacy’s concern though. She was just doing her job, and the fate of omegas was, to her mind, something quite a ways above her pay grade.
So, as other veteran agents had told her almost from day one, she’d learned to keep their quarry at arm’s length. To be courteous, firm, and matter-of-fact, was kinder to all involved—including the FMB agents charged with bringing these unfortunate omegas in.
While she’d learned to be, if not callous, then resigned to the more troubling emotional and ethical considerations revolving around her job, she knew for a fact that other agents absolutely enjoyed what they did. Jim McCardle, for instance—the agent partnered with Miranda on Two, Cover—regularly stated for public consumption that he didn’t care either way what happened to the omegas.
But Stacy knew the truth. He took obvious, and consistentpleasurein the pick-up procedure, and especially the processing reports—copies of which he would request for every single woman he had personally brought in on a pick-up.
She imagined Jim was the sort who’d be jerking off obsessively to the rather graphic and exhaustive details often included in those processing reports.
The processing reports were a part of the Treaty of Cooperation between UNAC and the Wolf Nation, and while ostensibly they were provided to ensure the omegas being handed off were being treated well, everyone familiar with the process knew those processing reports didn’t guarantee any such thing at all.
In fact, once omegas became Wolf Nation property (which was what they legally were following a successful auction) they were essentially swallowed up, most of the time never to be heard from again. What happened to those omegas was shrouded in rumor, innuendo, speculation—and not a small amount of dread—but there was precious little actualdatato go on. Those few omegas who were subsequently handed back into UNAC custody were, to a woman, disappeared into the Witness Protection program, thus making the prospect of interviewing them or making any sort of post-captivity documentation of their treatment difficult to impossible.
The dean of the college, Hamilton Westlin, waited for them at the entrance to the dorm hall. He was a tall, gaunt man, his close-cropped reddish hair receding so far it was little more than a ginger ring stretching around the back of his head from temple to temple. He wore a medium brown suit, ill-fitting, his arms just a bit too long for it, exposing the pale flesh of his wrists.
“Dean Westlin,” Karen extended a hand, slipping the bottom button of her suitcoat to let it open in the breeze. “I’m Agent Thurmond.” She tipped her head toward Stacy. “This is my partner, Deputy Agent Masterson.”
He shook Karen’s hand, giving them both a tight smile. “Agents, nice to meet you.” He wiped a hand across his bald pate, a gesture belying nervousness. Stacy wondered how much he knew about what was about to happen.
Karen pointed up toward the building. “Is the subject in her room? Our records show 616, sixth floor. Is that correct?”
“That’s her room, yes.” He looked back at the glass doors of the building entrance. “Her family—her sister, actually—is in there with her. I tried to ask them to, you know, before you…” He blushed, his gaze sliding away.
“It’s quite all right,” Karen said softly. “We handle this all the time. We’ll be in and out before you know it. If you’ll excuse us?”
“Of course,” Westlin said, standing aside. “Go on up.”
Let’s get this over with.
She and Karen stepped inside the dorm building.
CHAPTER2
Dmitri
The faint sound of feminine distress floated into Dmitri’s office from the hallway. He rolled his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose, his head pounding.
The financials for the hotel and restaurant were usually a refuge of sorts for him, pure numbers, black and white. No politics. No conflict. No complex and fiendishly unpredictable interactions between competing factions.
Just money, and time, and resources.
If only everything about being the leader of the Cold Ridge pack wasnearlyso cut-and-dried.
A long moan rang out then, along with the muted rumbling of male voices. Then the crisp note of a slap.
