“I just got her back,” Nikolai said again, his voice hard. “You’re fucking this up for me.”
“You walked out willingly,” I pointed out, “and us fighting isn’t going to fix that shit. We’re not turning against each other.”
Nikolai swung his glare to me, but didn’t argue further. He knew I was fucking right.
“So, what are we doing right now?” I demanded. “Why are we here?”
“Someone found out where we were going,” Ronan said. “I’m not trying to bring any kind of danger to our omega and our fresh pack. We have a location a few hours away. Minutes from the safehouse we snagged when waiting for our meeting with Widow’s Peak. It’s a bit too close for comfort, we have to handle this. Now.”
“Noble cause. Poor execution.”
At my words, Ronan let out a low growl and slammed his own hand against the steering wheel.
“I’m doing the best I can.”
“Look, I get it,” I said. “At least I’m trying to. Either way, we need to get to the site and see what’s waiting for us there. I’m pulling over so I can switch to intel.”
I put on my blinker and navigated over, glad the roads were empty. Ronan swapped seats with me while Nik stewed in his anger.
“Two hours away from my fucking omega,” Nikolai growled again.
I couldn’t fucking blame him. I was feeling the same way. Every instinct in my body was telling me to turn around.
But if something was closing in on Widow’s Peak, we owed it to them to keep danger away. We’d promised. It wasn’t just about our omega anymore. It was all the omegas involved, because not one of them asked for their safety to be put in jeopardy.
This rested on our shoulders now.
“We will get back as soon as we can,” Nikolai said again, almost reassuring himself.
“I’m going to see what this intel is that they seem to have conveniently found,” I said, not trusting it for a second. Not if there was already a known mole somewhere in our ranks.
“Good plan,” Ronan offered.
He was grasping at straws, trying to keep us from losing our minds.
I ignored them now, focusing on my laptop and logging into the Crow security network. The one I’d created and someone was trying to use against me. Unlucky for them, I knew every back door, and I knew exactly where to look for Victor’s intel.
The earliest intel seemed to be entered manually, which shouldn’t be happening from anyone other than the security team. The signature attached was the same pattern as ours, but altered. Now that I was looking it stuck out.
I designed security tags for nearly everyone in the network, and someone had tried to spoof that. I always embedded failsafes for exactly this kind of situation.
“Victor was right,” I said with full confidence now. “There is a mole, and their signature is all over the assignments that ended in those ambushes.”
“What about the one we’re heading for?” Nikolai said carefully.
His voice was still full of gravel, anger coloring every syllable, but at least it wasn’t the hollow tone he’d always had before.
I hated that haunting tone.
“I’m looking into that now,” I promised, pulling up Victor’s correspondence and finding it easily.
“They didn’t send this directly to Victor,” I said as I followed the trail, “They slid it into the outgoing jobs. They just weren’t great at hiding their tracks. This absolutely reeks of newbie behavior.”
“So, they wanted Victor to find it? I don’t understand,” Ronan said.
“I feel like somebody was trying really fucking hard to get us here, right now,” I admitted. It was grim, but true.
“Wait. What does that mean for our omega? Or all of Widow’s Peak?” Nik demanded.
