“Oh man, did you get ribs?”
I jump again at the sound of his voice. Liam catches that and watches me, not Beckett as he comes into the kitchen.
His hair is all messed up, and he squints at the brighter lights of the kitchen. He looks adorable. His sweatpants are hanging low on his hips, showing a stripe of skin across his stomach. I focus on the food containers. Am I sweating?
He circles the island, eyes scanning the spread, and as he passes behind me, his hand brushes my waist as he leans in to kiss my temple. I shiver. He does almost the same thing to Liam, a quick, casual touch at the small of his back as he reaches for plates.
My chest gets tight. It would be so easy to imagine this is real. But I can’t get attached to that idea. Or them. This will never be my future.
“Shoot.”
“What?” Both Liam and I say at the same time. We exchange a look.
“Red Velvet.” Beckett tilts the take-out container towards us so we can see.
“What? You like Red Velvet. Wait. Did the team decide that dessert has bad vibes again? We did that with pudding, and I don’t want to go through that again.”
“Pudding does have bad vibes,” I offer.
“See! Even the pretty little omega gets it.” Beckett beams at me, and the temperature in the kitchen jumps a hundred degrees. “Nah, Red Velvet is fine. But it means I still owe you cake.”
“Oh.” I blush like a stupid little omega.
“I might have to resort to baking one for you.”
Laughter erupts from Liam until he has to wipe a tear from his eye. “I would pay cash money to see that.”
Beckett is smiling as he piles a plate with ribs, brisket, mac and cheese, something green, and a biscuit. He takes the plate and wiggles his fingers for me, then leads me to the table by the huge windows.
“If you can’t guess,” Liam says as he sits with his plate, “Beckett can’t cook. When we moved in with him, he would just put frozen burgers in the microwave.”
“Protein is protein, man,” Beckett says as he moves a rib off of his plate to mine, like the mountain of food in front of me wasn’t enough.
Chapter twenty
LIAM
Mydeskchairsqueaksas I rock side to side. Every attempt I have made to make my office feel “right” has failed. Three years ago, I painted it dark green, bought a couch, an L-shaped executive desk. And I hated it instantly. I’m back to one bookshelf crammed with junk, oatmeal-colored walls, a standing desk and a gamer chair that fucking squeaks.
The spoon clatters in the cereal bowl as I reach for the computer mouse. I’m not going to sleep anyway so I’ll do one more search.
Beckett had left his phone on the counter as he walked Ash to the door. Memorizing her number took me seconds, but I had to wait until Beckett went to bed to run a reverse lookup. I ran it through every site I could think of, the free ones, the sketchy ones, even the data broker tool I pay for. All I got was that it was a Mint Mobile phone, one step up from a burner you buy at a gas station.Which isn’t unusual, necessarily. Maybe it’s under someone else’s name. Maybe it means nothing.
I take another bite of cereal, breaking my own rules. When we moved into this house, it was the first real home Pierce and I had ever had. We always lived like bottom-feeding, cave-dwelling dude bro alphas. Dinner was eaten on our laps in front of the TV, or standing over the sink. But now, we had a house, a home. We should respect it. A little sugar high should make me feel better.
My center monitor shows an image I ripped from the security camera. Quality of the photo isn’t the issue. It’s 4k, streamed right to my own servers. The footage is always crystal clear, even at midnight or when it’s foggy.
Ash is certainly pretty, gorgeous actually. But she has that look. When you grow up poor and you never know where your next meal is going to come from, or when the next smack upside the head is going to hit, you look a particular way. She’s jumpy too, at the smallest things; somebody speaking too loud, a sound she’s not expecting. Pierce does that. He masks it better than she does.
I know why Pierce does it.
Why does she?
I sigh and scroll through the results again. The Google image search turned up nothing. Not even an Instagram account. TinEye is a little more helpful. She has a few dating profiles on super sketchy sites, but they’re odd. Omegas looking for heat partners isn’t unusual if you’re single. Heat is heat. An inescapable biological function that you need help to get through. So, no shame if she’s blatantly looking for heat partners.
But her profiles are weird. First, her age is listed as eighteen. That’s a lie. She’s young, sure, younger than Beckett, but everybody knows that no woman on the internet is eighteen. Eighteen means she’s a minor trying to pass, or she’s lying about her age, looking for an alpha who wants to believe she’s underage. I’d put her at twenty. Maybe twenty-two.
And the profile itself doesn’t feel like her. Not that I’m an expert on Ash. It’s written like a caricature. I can hear a fake, high-pitched voice narrating it. “I’m just a lonely omega, single with no pack, looking for the right alpha to help me through my next heat.” That’s what an alpha would write if he was catfishing. If she was gold-digging or looking for a sugar daddy, it would allude to being spoiled or taken care of. This is like every alpha’s wet dream of a no-strings-attached heat hookup.
