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The omega stared at him blankly.
“Our souls are inextricably bound,” Bertram elaborated. “Our love is fated to last a lifetime. We have children together, and are co-founders of the Vanguard. Even if I did not have something important to say to him, this is not the kind of relationship you can simply walk away from.”
“Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back it up, bestie. Let’s stop you right there.” Sparrow held up his index finger. “Number one, any kind of relationship can be walked away from. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been together for a decade and have a whole soccer team’s worth of kids or if you’ve been together a week and are only really in it for the dick.”
“A decade? We’ve been together for five hundred years.”
Sparrow shrugged. “That’s like, a decade for a dragon, right? Whatever. The point stands. You could tell me you were with him a thousand years and I’d still say the same thing. Which leads me to point number two.” He put up a second finger. “Look, I’m not going to pretend I know shit about what it means to be mates, but this whole ‘souls tethered together forever’ thing…” He made a sour face. “It seems pretty farfetched to me. Who told you that? Was it the same dragons who told you that unmated omegas who lay eggs get shipped off to live lavish lives of luxury where—coincidentally—no dragon will see them ever again?”
Bertram prickled.
The answer was yes.
Sparrow didn’t seem to mind Bertram’s silence. He powered on regardless. “What dragons know about omegas is so fundamentally wrong that it’s laughable, so why am I supposed to believe that what you tell me about mates is any different? The argument doesn’t hold water. The truth is, Raven doesn’t want to see you right now, and whether you share an eternal bond or—I don’t know—a Netflix account or something doesn’t change that. The only thing that might make me change my mind is if you have a valid reason to want to talk to him. So… what the hell is so important you need to say it to his face?”
“I need him to hold off on whatever he’s planning—I know he’s up to something, and I’m afraid of what the consequences might be if he rushes into it too soon.”
Sparrow rolled his eyes. “See, he already knows that. He gets all your letters. He cries about them, sometimes, you know. I’ve heard it through the walls. You’re not making this easy on him.”
Bertram was simultaneously flabbergasted and heartbroken.
What was he supposed to say to that?
“Look, the takeaway of all this is that I’m not gonna rat him out, okay?” Sparrow sighed. “If you want to be the kind of dramatic asshole who shows up on his doorstep when he leaves you on read, you’re going to have to put in the legwork yourself. You’re a spy, aren’t you? Go do some spy shit. Some like, not-torturing-me-for-information spy shit. Because I guarantee I will annoy the fuck out of you long before you ever get a single word out of me.” He stopped his verbal reign of terror to half-throw himself off the couch, reaching for his empty glass. It took him a couple clumsy attempts to grab it, but once he had it in hand, he sat up and presented it expectantly to Bertram. “But uh, before you go ahead and do that, do you think you could make me another drink for the road?”
The gall of him.
Bertram grimaced.
The Jameson went down just as quickly the second time.
6
Bertram
Despite indications to the contrary during his conversation with Sparrow, Bertram was quite talented at “spy shit,” so off he went to do some.
He began by pulling up accounts owned by the Vanguard, hoping to glean whatever information he could from them about Sorin’s whereabouts, but found himself unable to access any of them. Their passwords had been changed. He tried to brute force his way through a couple of accounts, but to no avail. Reynard would be able to access them, he was sure, but like all Drakes, if Reynard had reason to believe he was hiding something, he’d stick his nose where it didn’t belong, and Bertram couldn’t afford the risk. No one could find out about his secret double life—not even his own brother—so he wrote off the accounts as a lost cause and moved on to something he was sure he could still access: his email.
Every high-ranking member of the Vanguard had their own encrypted email address through which official correspondence was sent and received. Bertram never used his account out of an abundance of caution—keyloggers were a valid concern in this day and age—but he was still part of several email chains and was CC’d automatically on all important updates and findings, just like Sorin.
While he didn’t have much of a head for technology, it seemed reasonable to him that an inactive email account would have been overlooked during the lockout, so, breath held, he input his information and attempted to log in.
To his great relief, his inbox loaded.
He hadn’t received a new email for months—they must have remembered to remove him from the mailing list—but there were a few emails he’d gotten before that. Emails dated after the experiment had been discovered, when Bertram was still doing his best to convince his father to cancel the whole thing.
According to those emails, the Vanguard suspected there was foul play happening in some of the California cloisters, and plans were being put together to investigate. It seemed likely to Bertram that if this was the case, Sorin would have gone with the field team to their Californian safe house in preparation for a rescue mission, and might have bunkered down there after that mission was derailed by Bertram’s failure to shut the experiment down.
It seemed as good a place as any to start, so off to California Bertram went.
* * *
A few omegas—transplants from European cloisters who needed the serenity of the seaside to help them along in their recovery—glanced up at Bertram upon his arrival. They’d been relaxing in the safe house’s common room, two of them sharing a couch, reading, while the third was spread out on the floor in front of them, engaging with some handheld gaming console with bright red bumpers Bertram didn’t have a name for.
When the omega on the floor spotted Bertram, he popped up onto his feet in a panic, no doubt recognizing Bertram as a dragon by his dark hair and purple eyes. As he did, one of the omegas on the couch glanced up from her book, and in a flash, she leapt to her feet, too.
The last omega, a shy boy of maybe eighteen, froze out of fear. His wide eyes took Bertram in, but he didn’t move a muscle. If it weren’t for his friend, who dragged him off the couch and rushed him out of the room, Bertram wagered he’d still be lying there, too terrified to save himself, sure that the end had come.
