Page 52 of Betrayed Auctioned Mate

By the time I emerged from my room to eat, she’d already brewed a pot of coffee in the kitchen. She’s sitting near the window with one leg drawn up on the chair against her chest, hair soft and loose over her shoulders for once, a thick, wavy cloud of honey.

She slides a mug across the table to me.

“This is it,” she greets. “Just over twelve hours until the plan moves into action.”

“And we stay alive,” I agree, sipping from my coffee.

Keira nods soberly. “We stay alive.”

I considered asking her whether she was in my room last night. Maybe she’d take it the wrong way. Hell, if I were here, I certainly would.

Not today, I decide. Today, we hold the mission together. Today, we aren’t blood-bonded mates. We’re teammates.

***

At seven in the evening that night, the first signs of trouble in our airtight plan arise.

“The hideout on Attlefolk has been sacked,” Bigby says grimly into his earpiece, his voice crackling out into the kitchen. Keira freezes, standing over the sink.

“It’s empty?” I ask.

“Worse than empty. They tore the place apart. They’re clearly done with using it, which tells us they probably know we logged the site.”

Keira swears quietly under her breath. She sits beside me at the receiver, hands cupped around a mug of tea. Her favorite.

“You two need to get out of there,” she instructs urgently. “They probably left traps.”

“Yeah,” Bigby grunts, “We’re headed back to the boat.” I hear movement in the background, the crunching of footsteps, and the rustling of foliage.

“Once you and Aris are back on dry land, report back,” Keira confirms.

I cross the room to the window to look out over to the other side of the lake. If I squint, I can just barely make out the moving shapes of Aris and Bigby’s figures moving in the darkness, emerging from the treeline on the other side toward their boat, which has been pulled up onto the flats.

“I see them,” I tell Keira.

“Say cheese—Ado can see you,” Keira instructs wryly.

Both figures wave their arms, standing among the reeds. The figure I think is Bigby looks significantly more enthusiastic.

After days of cryptic, shorthand texting, I’m relieved to see them in person.

This does mean that the next seven steps of the mission have been screwed up, though.

As Aris and Bigby motor back across the water to the Rosecreek Bottoms, ready to meet back up with the others, Keira and I reshuffle the whole plan.

The B-Team will now include Aris and Bigby as well as Percy, Rafael, and Byron—all five will have to make the drop on the Border Ridge together, and they’ll need to move in earlier, close to midnight, in order to catch a perimeter guard shift-change.

They will have lost the advantage of surprise and stealth. But with Olivia back at the pack center hacking the security cameras in the building, Keira and I on overview here, and Maisie and Veronica stationed a few miles out from Border Ridge for medical assistance, they’ll hopefully be able to hold their own until charges are laid and they can take the advantage.

We can’t postpone to another night. If the people behind this suspect a raid, as they almost certainly do now, any more hours or days lost are exponentially catastrophic for our chances.

This has to happen tonight.

It reaches ten, then eleven. Keira and I drink mugs and mugs of coffee to stay alert, watching the boys speed out of Rosecreek to the mountain, the tiny red tracking dots of their vehicles blinking in and out on the screen. Occasionally, one or two of them check in. Keira relays to them what she can see on the internal cameras.

“No movement since you last asked,” she keeps saying.

Each time they ask, the question is voiced with more frustration than the last. At one point, Rafael almost snaps at her, and then seems to think better of it.

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