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I shake my head. “Not Lawrence.”
“But someone you knew?” she asks.
If Everleigh hadn’t been fleeing an abusive alpha, I’d have said it fast, like whipping off a Band-Aid. If I told her like that, I’d send her into shock. “It was someone I had seen before. I didn’t have time to investigate because the guy with the suppressants was knocking on my window, and I had to get back to you. So I did.”
“But you went back?” Rune asks.
I was out all night, only returning early this morning to shower, grab breakfast, and tell Rune we all had to talk.
With my gaze fixed on Everleigh, I nod. “I went back. The Audi was still there. I parked farther away, so I could find out which of the businesses he’d gone into. Like I said, there were only two within walking distance. If he’d been there for suppressants, he’d have left by then.”
“You still haven’t told us who it was,” Everleigh reminds me.
“No,” I say. “I haven’t.”
And I don’t want to.
“Or what those two businesses were.” Kylian crosses his arms as his gaze sharpens. He’s worked out this is bad from my reluctance to say, and he’s bracing himself for it. So is Rune. Everleigh doesn’t know me well enough to read me as well, but there’s a definite tension on her shoulders that wasn’t there before.
“The first business was a bar,” I say. “Just your average run-down downtown bar that wouldn’t have much to attract a guy who drives a top-of-the-range Mercedes. I know because I went inside for a drink. A handful of beta patrons falling asleep at the bar, a pool table, a restroom that stank, and a pissed off bar manager who wanted to know why I was sticking my nose into rooms I had no business sticking it in. That’s it.”
“And the other business?” Everleigh’s voice is quiet and her breathing loud. She doesn’t know what I’m about to tell her, but she senses it’s bad. “What was the other business?”
There’s no easy way to say it. None at all, so I just say it.
“A free heat clinic.”
Everyone stares at me, and then Kylian flashes me a grin. “So? What’s the problem with—”
I don’t take my eyes off Everleigh. “This wasn’t an omega looking to ride out his heat. Even if it was, he wouldn’t have left out the back door.”
Silence.
Rune clears his throat. “You still haven’t said who it was.”
Outside, the wind blows, whipping the trees in our back gardens.
“An alpha. I don’t know his name, but he was talking with Lawrence at his party,” I say.
Everleigh frowns, shaking her head. “Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe he only looked like—”
I lean toward her in my chair, smiling sadly. “I remember what I saw, and I saw him talking to Lawrence at his party.”
Everleigh stares at me.
“You’re saying you saw analphago into a free heat clinic, a place where only omegas and the beta staff who work there have a right to be?” Kylian’s voice is flat.
Now I’ve gotten to the part that I really hoped not to get to. “I watched him slip out the back door. He hadn’t done up his pants properly, his eyes were glazed over, and he stank of omega pheromones.”
Everleigh sits back in her seat, releasing her feet to the floor.
Not to get away from me, but as a reaction to the betrayal I’ve just exposed. I hope. An omega is never more vulnerable than when she is in heat. It’s why unbonded omegas go to free clinics, a place that no one can take advantage of them when they’re at their most needy. They can make use of the toys there, and the beta staff will ensure no one can just walk in off the street.
Asafeplace.
Everleigh shakes her head, disbelieving. “Maybe he was just lost. Maybe…”
I smile faintly, and she falls silent. “I knocked on the same back door after the alpha had left.”
