Carter knew Trey was implying that Hadley could be The One for him, aka his soul mate. The idea of there being one person in the world who could accept a werewolf for who and what he or she was used to be a folktale. But then Gage had met his wife, giving all of them hope. Since then, one pack mate after the other had found their soul mate.
While Carter had found himself imagining a few times over the past week that Hadley might be The One for him, there was also this overwhelming fear that she wasn’t. That the spinning wheel of fate which had been handing out soul mates like Halloween candy would decide to simply stop now, leaving him hanging. Carter wasn’t in the habit of feeling sorry for himself, but he was a realist, and at the end of the day, he was an omega, the most screwed-up kind of werewolf out there. If anyone in the Pack would be left without a mate, wouldn’t it be him?
Another ping from Trey’s phone reminded Carter that his buddies were standing in the close confines of the elevator waiting for him to say something. Trey glanced at his phone, then looked expectantly at Carter.
“Okay, there might be something there,” he admitted when the elevator doors opened on their floor, figuring they wouldn’t stop badgering him until he said something. “But even if there is, I can’t let myself get involved with Hadley. Besides the fact that I’m depending on her to get my head straight so I can stay on the force, there’s also the ethical issue of getting involved with my therapist. I’m pretty messed up, but even I know that’s not healthy. And I can’t imagine how much trouble it would get her into.”
“Trey’s not saying you need to make a move on Hadley in the middle of a therapy session,” Hale said as Knox led them down the carpeted hallway. “But there’s nothing wrong with being open to the idea of a future with her. Who knows? Maybe once you’re done with therapy, you could start seeing each other outside of her office.”
While the idea of seeing Hadley in a non-professional setting—like today at lunch—sounded awesome, it also felt a little odd.
“Don’t you think it’d be difficult to have a relationship with a woman after you’ve dumped all your dirty laundry on her?” he asked.
Hale chuckled. “No way. I don’t get it, but according to Karissa, oversharing is the cornerstone of a deep and meaningful relationship. Apparently, not only do women like to know about all of our inner demons, they also prefer when we’re a little broken because it gives them something to fix.”
Carter let out a snort. “Hadley should be thrilled with me then because there’s a lot to fix.”
“I think what Trey and Hale are trying to tell you is that if Hadley is the amazing woman you believe her to be, she isn’t going to care about anything that came out in your sessions because she’s already seen the real you,” Knox said, stopping in front of a door at the end of the hall.
“The real me?” Carter muttered. “I’m not sure what the hell that even means.”
Knox knocked on the door a few times before using a key card to unlock and open just enough to poke his head in and ask if anyone was there. He didn’t get a response. Not that Carter expected one. Even his less-than-stellar omega nose told him the room was empty.
“I didn’t actually expect them back yet,” Knox said, pushing the door open the rest of the way and motioning them inside. “Lydia and Kamden are expecting us so we’ll just wait in here.”
The suite was as nice as Carter expected, with a bedroom, kitchenette, and a spacious living room boasting a floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the city’s historic downtown area.
“Speaking of Lydia and Kamden,” Carter said, pausing as Trey’s phone pinged again. This time his pack mate responded, the man’s thumbs moving at a hundred miles an hour. “If someone is looking to do them harm, is it a good idea for them to be out and about in Dallas on their own?”
“Same words came out of my mouth, but Lydia insisted they were meeting with someone who wouldn’t have a problem keeping them safe, and at the end of the day, the client is always right,” Knox said. “Still, I’ll feel better when they walk through that door.”
Carter shrugged and joined Trey and Hale in the living room, taking the stuffed chair while they sat on either side of the matching couch just as Trey’s phone pinged yet again.
“Are you going to tell us what’s going on?” Hale asked. “And don’t even try and say everything is fine because your phone has been blowing up like that for the past ten minutes.”
Trey finished responding to the most recent text before tossing his phone on the coffee table with a sigh. “Samantha is freaking out.”
Carter frowned. Samantha Mills was Trey’s soul mate. She was also a medical examiner for the county. Freaking out were the last two words Carter would ever associate with the woman.
“About what?” Hale said, looking as concerned as Carter felt.
“I’m not sure.” Trey shrugged. “It’s probably nothing.”
Carter stared at his pack mate, as did Hale. In the kitchenette, Knox stopped poking around in the refrigerator to look at Trey. Obviously, this didn’t sound like nothing to any of them.
Trey let out a heavy sigh. “Remember back in the summer when Samantha and I first started seeing each other and she swiped a sample of my blood to get it tested in her sister’s bio-research lab?”
“Yeah,” Carter said slowly, remembering how Samantha had suspected there was something different about Trey and had been determined to discover what it was. Everyone in the Pack had been freaked as hell when they learned her sister had done a complete DNA workup of Trey’s blood, going so far as to isolate the segment of genetic material that made them werewolves. “But didn’t you tell us that you and Samantha had broken into the lab and destroyed all the sample material and the lab reports?”
Trey winced at that.
Carter cursed silently, worry surging through him, which did some interesting things to his inner wolf, putting it more on edge than it normally was. That was saying something.
“We shredded the reports but couldn’t destroy the samples because someone would have noticed,” Trey said. “Instead, we slipped my genetic samples in with all the other stuff the lab was sending out for incineration. There was a lot of crap, so we figured no one would notice the additional tubes. Everything seemed to go off without a hitch and Samantha’s sister got confirmation from the disposal facility the next day that they’d incinerated the entire shipment.”
“Okay,” Hale said hesitantly. “Unless I’m missing something, everything sounds good. What’s got Samantha so upset?”
“Her sister just called and told her that the disposal company her lab uses is under investigation by the Texas State EPA. It turns out the company has been falsifying the disposal documents. They’ve been taking payments, but not destroying anything. Instead, it’s been piling up in an unsecured warehouse that someone recently broke into. Whoever it was, they stole a crap load of stuff.”
