Page 46 of Their Alpha

“Are you a fan of Tristan Freehold?” the young woman who seemed to be in charge of the bookshop section of the store asked, approaching us with a smile.

“We’re his biggest fans,” I smiled in return.

Fletcher smirked at me.

“You know he’s gone missing, right?” the woman said.

All three of us tensed.

“What do you mean, missing?” Fletcher asked.

“He’s usually really active on social media, even though he doesn’t do appearances or book signings,” the woman rushed to spill everything, “but he hasn’t been online for almost five days now. He’s never been offline for more than three days at a time.”

“Maybe he had personal business to take care of?” I suggested as casually as I could.

“That’s what I thought at first,” the woman said, her eyes going large, like she was indulging in her favorite conspiracy theory. “I’m on Team Omega.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Those are the people who think Tristan Freehold is an omega,” Gideon answered in a breathless voice. He glanced up at me with a cautious look.

“A lot of people think he’s a beta,” the woman went on, “and a tiny handful think he’s an alpha, but I seriously doubt that.”

“And you say he’s missing?” Fletcher asked seriously.

“Yeah,” the woman said. “Someone from the chat server I’m part of says they contacted his agent, and the agent doesn’t know where he is either.”

“Five days isn’t long enough for someone who people only see online to be considered missing,” I argued. “He’s probably just busy with life stuff.”

“Maybe,” the woman said. “But the entire fanbase is in a tizzy at the moment. There’s even some guy offering a ten thousand dollar cash prize to anyone who can give him information about where Tristan has gone.”

“Ten thousand dollars?” Gideon squeaked, backing slightly into me.

“Yep,” the woman said. “Because of that, everyone and their brother is out looking for Tristan now.”

I got a distinct feeling of “Oh, shit” from Fletcher. I felt exactly the same way. It was horribly brilliant, really. If Goode wasn’t able to find us on his own, he could mobilize a million or so people to be on the lookout for anything that would even hint about Gideon’s whereabouts.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Fletcher

How was I supposed to protect my husband now? That thought rang through my head as the woman in the bookshop went on about the efforts of Gideon’s fans to find out what had happened to him. I could keep Gid hidden from Goode, but with millions of people potentially mobilized and searching, I wasn’t sure even a remote house on a cliff would be enough.

“Don’t worry,” Artemis said once the woman had gone back to work and the two of us were able to whisk Gideon away to one of the tables in the middle of the travel center’s mostly empty dining area. “Gideon writes under a pen name. His fans don’t know who he really is, right?”

He addressed that last question to Gideon directly. I felt more than a little worry in him.

“No one knows my real name,” Gideon said, like he was trying to talk himself into being calm. “Well, a few peopleknow my real identity, mostly for legal and financial reasons. But only a very, very few.”

It had always seemed safe enough before. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

Artemis felt the same way. I could feel it from him, but it was also painted vividly in his expression and in the way he reached across the table to take one of Gideon’s hands and one of mine. “It’s going to be okay,” he said.

The frustrating thing was, I believed him. I wasn’t frustrated because Gideon would be okay. That was all I wanted, all I’d ever wanted. I was frustrated because I trusted Artemis as my alpha. That visceral feeling of confidence in him and certainty that life would be better if I just gave everything over to my alpha was as foreign to me as the other side of the world.

It should have settled me, but Artemis’s waves of affection and sympathy and reassurance, and the way Gideon glanced between us, just seemed to make everything harder. I was fighting my growing, instinctual love for one man because of my deep, longstanding love for another.

“Nothing is going to be solved right now,” Gideon said quietly, as if he wasn’t sure he should interrupt whatever silent communication was going on between me and Artemis. Or as if he didn’t have a right to speak up in the first place. “We should probably finish our shopping and just go home.”

---