AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yeah…” I said. “Why?”
“Heart was at that charity signing event we did a few months back, right?” Rook asked, straightening in his seat, brows furrowed.
“Uh… I think so,” I said, unsure why he was asking.
I knew a little about Heart—people had a habit of pairing our pack with him because of Love’s name. He was a singer who’d skyrocketed to fame on social media alone. His latest album,Gilded, broke records for the first independent singer and gold pack to hit number one.
We hadn’t talked to him at the press event, though. We’d opted for a beta-only signing so we wouldn’t need heavy scent blocking drugs. We’d just returned from our last shoot in California. On set we had to take them a lot and our hormones—unstable as they already were—needed to balance. As an unbonded omega, Heart’s signing was set up far from ours.
“Wait…” Rook was scrolling on his phone, suddenly focused.
“What?” Love asked, peering over his shoulder.
“There was a forum post a while back, it blew up. An omega claiming she was our scent match, but I think she said it happened at a signing.”
It sounded familiar. Jas might have mentioned something about it in passing, but stories like that weren’t uncommon—and we never took them seriously.
“Here, got it…” He paused, reading down the page. He ran his fingers anxiously through his messy hair. “It… fuck. It could be her.” He turned his phone to the rest of us.
“This could have been tracked…” Ebony said.
Leighton’s eyes were scanning her laptop screen, having already pulled it up. “This post is four months old…” Leighton frowned. “She… posted online that she was your scent matchandshe was gold pack?”
My blood chilled. “What does it mean?” I asked.
Leighton turned to me, expression softening. “A post like this would have caught the wrong type of attention. If it was her, and I’ll go on the assumption it was until we know otherwise, there is a chance she was taken for it.”
“Taken… like… She was dark bonded because…” I swallowed, bile rising up my throat.
I knew the truth already. It had stared back at me from that letter, and I’d heard it in the video. But somehow, my brain hadn’t fully realised it, not until I made myself say it now. My voice cracked. “She’s in danger because she’s our mate?”
A long silence followed as my brothers heard it, too. And I knew I’d fully lost control of shutting the bond down.
“Why haven’t they asked for a ransom?” Rook finally demanded.
“If it was about money, we wouldn’t be here,” Leighton said. “That letter she left suggests it was personal. Do you have enemies?”
There was a tense silence, and I wasn’t the only one whose gaze slid to Ebony.
“You could say that,” he said quietly.
“Enough to narrow it down?”
“In this industry?” he asked. “People hold grudges. There’s a lot of money to be lost if we step on toes.”
Only, I knew there were people who hated our pack for more than just aggressive business decisions. Neither Rook nor Ebony were good at making friends, and when you were working closely with people for a long time… shit happened.
We were blacklisted by a lot of people—not just in the industry. I know Rook, Love, and Ebony were cutthroat back when they were a prospective elite pack at the academy.
By the looks on my brother’s faces, they felt the same. Love grimaced. “There’s… a lot. Goes back to our academy days.”
The academies that trained alphas for elite packs were savage, and there were only so many spots to enter the industry as a fully endorsed pack. For every spot claimed, a dozen others lost. A dozen packs of highly driven alphas with years of schooling to lose. That was a lot of alphas who resented the Crimson Fury pack before it even stepped a foot through the doors of fame.
The list was endless. Before I’d met them, there were alphas who had it out for Ebony and Love, trying to convince Rook to join them the night before the Crimson Fury pack was formed. They’d failed to qualify, and Rook had publicly dragged them for attempting to poach him. There were all of Ebony’s targets over the years, Rickson Dagger pack, Ice and Fire—and I wasn’t free of targets, I knew the Lightning pack hated me and Ebony. Then there were the problems brought on by fame itself. A few years ago, there was a scent matched omega who’d rejected a princess bond as a publicity stunt to get our attention. Those alphas started a hate group that the police had to shut down.
“This is one of the reasons why we didn’t plan on having an omega,” Love said quietly.
“I want the list,” Leighton said. “But I’m guessing, no, not enough to narrow it down?”
