I tried to focus on his reassurance. If he was lying about them both being safe, I’d be able to tell. Wouldn’t I?
A nurse bustled in, tutting when she saw the dangling wires. I resisted the urge to yell at her until she left the room. Grasping the shreds of my self-control, I covered the phone mic with one hand and dredged up my best tone of contrition.
I was sadly out of practice at it.
“Sorry, nurse,” I said. “I was trying to get more comfortable when the wires came loose. Could I just finish up my phone conversation real quick? Won’t be a minute.”
The nurse made a disapproving humming noise, which I chose to interpret as a yes.
“Look, Gage,” I said. “You already know I’m not happy about this. But before we hang up, are your sister’s kids doing okay?”
It was a not-very-subtle code for the group of omegas who’d been staying at the house when I’d been taken out of commission.
“Oh, yeah,” Gage said. “They’re safely off to camp, as planned. You focus on getting better so you can come home, okay? We need you here.”
“I’ll do my best,” wondering if I was ever going to be able to sleep again after this conversation. “Gotta go.”
A heavy thud sounded from his end, followed by feral growling.
“Yeah, me too,” he said, which was perhaps the least reassuring sign-off in the history of phone calls.
Two days later, an orderly wheeled me out of the hospital in a wheelchair, my wrist aching from the number of release forms that had needed to be signed, dated, and initialed.
Tony was waiting for me under the portico with a battered white Volvo station wagon from the previous century. He’d been my only visitor except for a steady trickle of police detectives and lifestyle reporters. The former had received the same—completely truthful—story that I had no memory of the attack itself. The latter were barred at the door, except for one chirpy alpha woman fromThe Daily Gab,who’d managed to force her way in and demand to know if the rumors about the attack being a revenge-for-hire plot by a jilted former mate were true.
Since I didn’t have any former mates, jilted or otherwise, that angle seemed like a bit of a non-starter. It would probably sell tabloid copies, though.
Every time he’d stopped by, Tony had acted as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I’d eventually decided that if both he and Gage thought it was a bad idea to discuss things in a place where it might be overheard or recorded, they must have a reason.
Tony looked as anxious out here as he had during his visits. So, I waited until I was safely in the passenger seat, and the nurse had disappeared back into the hospital, before I spoke.
“Okay. Spill it,” I said, no-nonsense.
Tony gave an audible gulp. “Let me find a parking spot first. I don’t think I should be driving for this.”
I set my jaw and looked straight ahead. “You know, you and Gage could both use some work on acting reassuring.”
Tony pulled out of the pick-up area and into one of the large visitors’ lots. “Pretty sure no one offers classes on dealing with shit like this,” he muttered.
“Still not helping,” I told him.
He found a spot at the back of the lot and parked the car, leaving it running. His chest rose and fell on a deep breath.
“Okay. So... when I first moved here, I had a friend named Jez who lived on the streets and busked with me sometimes,” he said in a rush. “When my abusive stepdad tracked me down in Chicago and cornered me in my apartment, Jez showed up and bashed him over the head with a table lamp. Killed him stone dead.”
I blinked. “And this is relevant because...?”
He shook his head almost angrily. “I’m getting to that. Afterward, she ran off. I’d been doing odd jobs for your pack, and I didn’t know who else to call to clean up the body, so I called Heath.”
My eyebrows shot up. I’d had no idea about any of this.
“I didn’t see Jez again, until just recently,” Tony went on. “Turns out, she liked the feeling of getting revenge on a predatorso much that she kept doing it. She got a reputation as the person you went to if you needed to deal with alpha vermin.”
“She became a vigilante?” I asked, getting a glimmer of where this might be going, and not liking it one bit.
“That’s... one word for it.” The words were delivered in a monotone. “Unfortunately, she’s also a fucking idiot. Because a few weeks ago, someone sold her a story aboutyou. And because that story played into the same things that had been done to her when she was young, she bought the lies hook, line, and sinker.”
The glimmer grew into a flashing neon sign.
