I glance at Jasper. Even rogues need to know they’re not alone.
Omar continues, his voice tired and catching, but he pushes through. “Eventually I found this group of rogues.”
“In Pittsburgh?” I ask. “Rogue City?”
“Yeah I guess. They all had this tattoo and I knew they were no good. Rough types mostly, the dregs of society. But they offered me a corner to sleep in and food if I hung out. I didn’t realize their kindness came at a cost.”
“Like what?”
“Small stuff at first. They gave me tasks, assignments. We’d rob some random gas station way out nowhere, scare campers away from their vehicles then take what we could. It was mostly food, small amounts of cash, just enough to get by. But things got more intense pretty quickly. The jobs got bigger. We’d terrorize towns on the outskirts of packs, raid their stores and homes. I didn’t want to do any of it. But after spending all that time alone I didn’t know where to go. And as long as we were only taking a little something, from wolves with too much anyway, it didn’t seem so bad.”
“Did you ever think of leaving?”
He puffs out some air. “Yeah, all the time. But where was I supposed to go? And besides, I saw what happened to wolves who tried to leave.”
“What?” I press closer to the glass.
“They were beaten, left for dead.”
“Right, of course you couldn’t leave.” I glance at Jasper once more. He seems unmoved, or maybe he’s just trying to process all this new information.
“Eventually, after a couple of wolves tried to escape they gathered all of us in this shed.” My mind goes back to the grain silo in Rogue City where Aisha was held—I wonder if that’s the same place Omar is talking about. “They gave us this big dumb speech about how we owe them and how if we’re ungrateful and try to leave they’ll straight-up kill us. That’s when they decided to mark each of us.”
He reaches up to his tattoo, wincing where some pack wolf has torn through his skin.
“Once we’d been branded we were told we could never escape.”
“So what about the attack at the packhouse? That seems like another escalation even for these guys.”
“I remember the day it happened, I was sitting out on these stairs with a bucket trying to get my one set of jeans clean when this fancy car showed up and a man from the city got out.”
Again I flash back to my time in Pittsburgh, that time we were there and we saw the car with the blackout windows. At the time I’d wrongly assumed Jericho was inside. Now the pieces start coming together.
“Mr. Peng,” I say. “He came to hire the rogues to abduct Aisha.”
“Huh?” Omar looks genuinely confused.
“You know, George? He was at the Sanc. He paid the rogues to kidnap Aisha when he thought she was Jasper’s mate, then he hired them to attack us in the Hamptons.”
“George never came to Rogue City.”
My head feels like it’s about to spin off my body. Jasper steps forward now, a perturbed look on his face.
“What do you mean George never came to Rogue City?” he asks, a deep rumble tumbling in his chest.
“We saw him,” I say. “Or at least we saw his car.”
Omar shakes his head.
“George may have been involved—I know he suggested we replace you Max, with his daughter. But he wasn’t the one in charge.”
“What do you mean?”
“You think a chauffeur could afford to pay off enough rogue mercenaries to infiltrate the alpha’s house?” Omar’s eyes dart from me to Jasper. “Don’t tell me you all are that dopey.”
Jasper and I are both dumbstruck. What is he talking about?
“George was just as much a pawn in this as me. The real wolf responsible is someone much more powerful.”
