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“As much as I want to continue this, and I really, really want to," I thrust my hard length into where her foot still pressed against it to emphasize my words. “Cole has been running down that theory he brought to me the morning after Theo woke up. We need to pass it by you before proceeding.”
“Later, then.”
Jade nipped my bottom lip and pushed on my chest so the chair rolled further back. She slipped her shoe back on and I stood to call Cole in. My moving also enabled her to sit in the chair behind the desk rather than one of those in front of it. Not that Cole was under any illusions about who ran the company, or that she led me around by my dick, but it just felt more respectful that way.
I opened the door to my office and saw that I was right. Cole was standing by the stations with a laptop and some papers in his hands, waiting to be called in. I waved him over and he hustled inside, closing the door behind him.
“Alright, gentlemen. Why am I here?”
I gestured to Cole to indicate that he had the floor and he began to explain.
“I—we believe that there is a mole of sorts in the BullPen.”
Jade’s entire demeanor shifted at his statement. Gone was the corporate facade of an amiable businesswoman. In her place, my cold-blooded Valkyrie leaned forward to brace her forearms on the desk and stare down the young Alpha. Cole swallowed thickly and fidgeted under her gaze.
“Explain.”
I understood the anxiety that tainted his scent at her tone. Cole shook himself, like he was shaking off the haze of her dominance and his own nerves. He steeled himself and continued.
“Right, so Ethan and I had been running around in circles the whole week we were looking for Shae. You remember, each time we thought we had a lead it turned into a false trail or something? We’d thought they just had someone like us on their side. It wasn’t until I came in the morning after you all got Shae that I started to suspect that person was in our own house.”
Jade straightened and her typically calming scent electrified, causing Cole and I to both shrink a bit, our instincts recognizing that a more dominant Alpha was nearby. Cole swallowed hard as he overcame that hindbrain response to bare his throat and hope the threat passed.
“I was supposed to go home but, after I took Ethan to the hospital, I couldn’t just go stop working. He’s my friend and you all are his pack, and I just—I needed to do something instead of just sitting at my house.”
“You’re a good friend, Cole, and a good man but you’re no good to anyone if you don’t take care of yourself.”
Jade was right. I took in the dark circles under his eyes, the more rumpled than usual appearance, and a kernel of guilt wormed into me. I’d been letting him work himself sick for too long now. He needed to rest, I caught his eyes and resisted the urge to lace my next words with command.
“After this meeting, you go to the barracks and stay in one of the rooms reserved for our pack. Clean up, put on some of the spare sweats we keep in there and rest. Understood?”
His jaw clenched at my order and his fingers flexed on the laptop he was holding but he nodded. He’d probably work from there too but maybe he’d get some rest first.
“So, when I came back into the BullPen, I wasn’t supposed to be on shift, right? I had been running a program to look for links between the Jackals and more influential packs. The way Ethan and I figured it, a gang doesn’t just have an Omega heiress fall into their laps and no one’s talking about it. They had to be connected somewhere.
“But when I got to my station, my screen was on, and the program had been aborted. It hadn’t finished running and the commands to kill the search were still up. Someone had been at my station and didn’t have time to cover their tracks.”
Jade growled low and both Cole and I sat up a little straighter.
“Who was in the BullPen?”
“That’s another problem. I didn’t have the access to the records, so I called in Trevor that next morning. I only saw four people in the BullPen when I was there but I knew someone could have gone out when I was at my station.”
I took over the story from that point on.
“The logs showed that seven people, including me, had been in the BullPen in the time between when Cole left with Ethan and when he came back.”
“You?” Jade’s brow wrinkled in confusion as she connected the dots we had. “You were with us in the hospital before Ethan and Cole came. You and Miles met us there when we arrived.”
“Exactly.”
“We ran another search of the times that my access card had been used and there were several times during that week when I was sleeping or just not in the BullPen when my card was being used.”
“I started to wonder about the break that we caught, finding the deliveries to that warehouse, and who wasn’t there that day. There were five people who weren’t there but did work with us throughout the search for Shae.”
“We need your permission to move forward with investigating our own people, Jade. Especially if we need to interrogate any of them.”
“Do it. Fuck the lawyers on this one. If someone in here helped those bastards keep and hurt my mates, I’ll claim pack retribution and handle them myself.”
