“So, she came at me,” I said. “And nearly succeeded.”
Tony nodded. “Except she had no clue she was your pack’s scent match. Not that knowing would have necessarily stopped her.” He took another centering breath. “Gage and Heath captured her in your hotel suite. Gage brought her back to the pack house while Heath got help for you, because he couldn’t bear the thought of turning your scent match over to the cops for attempted murder.”
“Gage is also a fucking idiot,” I said, without much rancor. This was old news, and fortunately for all of us, he had plenty of attributes that made up for it.
“Yeah,” Tony agreed heavily. “Anyway, Jez assumed she’d been captured by omega child sex traffickers, just like the people who abused her when she was a kid. And Gage and Heath assumed they were holding a murderer. Which, um... they were.”
“Fuck,” I said, because this was a lot to take in when you’d been in a coma seventy-two hours ago.
“Definitely.” Tony shot me a concerned glance. “And here’s where it gets worse. Your heart’s okay now, right?”
“I really wish people would stop asking me that,” I told him.
“Sorry.” Pink flooded his cheeks, and he looked away again. “From what I gather, Heath went looking for the omega who toldJez this story about you. Then Jez managed to get free and sneak away with Gage’s phone, and she did exactly the same thing. I guess she was pretty desperate to figure out who was lying to her, and who was telling the truth.”
“Understandable,” I said carefully.
“As best as Gage and I can figure out, they both confronted this omega who hired her, and they both got captured for their trouble. Gage and I tracked his stolen phone to the old abandoned grain silos near McKinley, where someone was holding a bunch of underage omegas and using them to film kiddie porn.”
I tensed. “Do we know who it was?”
Tony shook his head. “Gage thinks it’s the Vozzinas, but he doesn’t have proof. Whoever it was, they were holding Heath and Jez there, too, and we were more concerned with getting them out than anything else.”
“Are they all right?” I asked sharply. Surely, he and Gage couldn’t have been lying to me this whole time about Heath being safe. But Heath hadn’t called or texted me—
“They injected Heath with a rut-stim and Jez with a heat-stim before we got there,” Tony said. “They must have smelled each other, because they killed the guards and got free of their cells. By the time we showed up, they were already... um...you know.”
I could guess.
Immediately, my porridge brain jumped to the practicalities. Birth control... sexually transmitted diseases... not to mention the psychological fallout—
Tony hunched lower in the driver’s seat, like he was trying to make himself small. “And... uh... he’d already mated her before we got there.”
He sounded like the words had been pulled from him one at a time with needle-nose pliers. My thoughts crashed to a standstill as the sense of what he’d said penetrated.
“He... what?” I asked.
“Gage is staying with them until the heat wears off,” Tony added miserably. “But once that happens... well. I actually have no idea. I can’t imagine it’s going to be good, though.”
I slumped back in my seat. “No,” I said. “I can’t imagine it will.”
TWENTY-SIX
Knox
