Espie's weight is on my chest and Kev's warmth is at my back and the fairy lights are still on and the plants are breathing around us and all six of us are woven together into a scent that has no gaps in it. Six months ago I sat in a chair at the OHC and could not find a single reason to come back. Now I have everything to live for.
Espie rests against me. Her breathing evens out in under a minute. She is asleep. The gardenia coming off her has soaked into every blanket, every cushion, every breath in this nest. This is just what the air here smells like now. It always will.
The rest of the pack draws in. They settle around us. Kev's warmth at my back. Sera's scent at my shoulder. Lex and Ezra filling the spaces.
I pull Espie closer and close my eyes.
All of my bonds are in my chest, each one distinct, and all of them say the same thing.
Home.
Chapter Forty-Six
Kev
Pinnacle Therapeutics puts its public face on the upper floors. Glass and steel and a lobby that smells of recycled air and money, a receptionist who handed me a visitor badge without asking for ID because Adrian had already called ahead. The elevator took me down, not up. Sub-level two, keycard required, the kind of floor a building this size maintains for reasons itdoesn't put on the directory. The corridor down here is concrete and strip lighting and nothing else. No signage. No windows. Doors with numbers that mean nothing without context.
Adrian is outside the last one when I get there. Levi is beside him, arms crossed, shoulders set.
“How long has he been in there?” I say.
“Four hours,” Adrian says. He straightens his jacket. “I had coffee sent in at the two-hour mark. He drank all of it.”
A corner of his mouth turns up. It's not quite a smile. It's the look of a man who set a trap and just heard it spring.
“You're an evil genius,” I say.
He does smile then. A real one, wide enough that he has to press his lips together and look at the floor to get rid of it. He clears his throat. Straightens his jacket again.
Adrian opens the door and we go in together.
Wallace is sitting at the table.
The smell hits before I've cleared the doorway. A week without a proper shower is bad enough. A week without being able to wipe himself is something else, and the room has been closed for four hours. I breathe through it and keep moving.
I haven't seen him in person since Ashcroft. That was dark and chaotic and while I enjoyed my omega's heat, I didn't give him another thought.
His hair is unwashed and sits flat against his skull. There's a dark line at his collar where sweat has dried. Both hands are bandaged stumps. Palms minus the fingers.
He sits at the table, spine straight, chin up, like the bruise and the bandages and the smell belong to somebody else.
I pull out the chair directly opposite him and sit, pretending I don't want to wrap my hands around his throat and strangle him.
His pale eyes move across my face. “Mr. Dawson,” he says. Funny how polite he is now that he has no fingers.
Adrian takes the chair to my left without looking up from his phone. He sets it face-down on the table and crosses his leg. “Dr. Wallace,” he says. Warm enough to be pleasant. Nothing underneath it at all.
He's acting like this is some sort of business meeting. He's completely delusional.
Wallace shifts, crossing one leg over the other, then puts his leg down again. This is the effect of four hours on a hard chair and a coffee he shouldn't have accepted. My mouth quirks knowing how bad this is about to get for him. I have zero qualms.
“I understand there are things you want to know,” Wallace says. He rests both bandaged wrists on the table in front of him. “I'm prepared to discuss that. On certain terms.”
“Tell me about the terms,” Adrian says, sounding as though he's actually listening.
“I want to be clear first.” Wallace glances at me again. “I'm aware of who you are, Mr. Dawson. You led the civil filing against the Haven network. Primary counsel on three of the six counts.” He licks his lips. “Good work, actually. Poorly funded, but the framing was sound.”
I have spent twelve years filing omega rights cases on budgets that wouldn't cover Wallace's dry-cleaning bill. I have paid filing fees out of my own pocket. I have worked weekends for clients who couldn't afford a retainer and called it a privilege. And this man, sitting in a room that smells of his own body because he cannot wipe himself without fingers, is grading my framing.
