Page 52 of Dodging Bullets

Henry’s eyes met mine, wild and fearful. “Paloma! Call them off.”

Something about his terror shook me from mine. I whined, and Rio’s head snapped toward me. I held out a hand, and I could see the indecision in his eyes. He wanted to eliminate the threat, but his Omega needed him.

“Llew, do something,” I hissed, and then the soothing scent of August’s pheromones spread through the room. The bartender looked like he was ready to call the cops; someone would have to go talk to him so we didn’t all end up in a jail cell.

As if he’d read my thoughts, August went over there. I could hear him saying it was just a misunderstanding, that it was all okay. His Omega presence would soothe the Beta bartender, even if he wasn’t quite as susceptible to the pheromones.

Llew stepped forward, grabbing the Alpha by the throat and lifting him straight up in the air. Sometimes I forgot how huge my Alpha was. “Speak. If I don’t like what you say, I’ll snap your neck and never lose a wink of sleep over it.”

Okay, that shouldn’t be so hot.

The girl with Toledo looked up at my Alpha. “He’s not going to tell you much if he can’t breathe.” I stared at the girl with the blue hair, and that little voice that was my Omega hissed at the way she was looking at my Alpha.

Oh, shit.She was an Omega too.

“Llew,” I said softly, and he put the guy down. I pressed myself into Llew’s spine, both for my comfort and for his.

The dark-eyed Alpha from the worst night of my life rubbed his throat. His eyebrow had been split open, and he was definitely going to have a black eye from the hits he took. “I deserved that, I know. But I promise it will all make sense in a moment. Come and sit down. I’ll sit right down at the other end.”

I looked over my shoulder. Would the other Alphas appear too?

As if he could read my mind, the dark-eyed Alpha—I guess his name was Kross—leaned forward in his seat. “They won’t be here. Anthony Smalls is behind bars, and the other Alpha… well, he’s somewhere a lot more permanent. You’ll never have to look at either of them again.” He sucked in a deep breath. “I’m just sorry that I caused you some kind of grief.”

Rio growled. “Some kind of grief? You’re sorry you caused hersome kind of grief?” Oh, he was about to lose it. “You sold her off, had her branded with a hot iron, rendered her mute with a bark that could only be undone once she was rescued,and you’resorry?” he hissed, his cheeks flushing with anger. His Alpha was rising so close to the surface, the dominance was suffocating.

I reached over and wrapped my fingers in his. My Omega preened that my Alpha was defending me against this threat, but the logical side of my mind knew that if I wanted to get to the bottom of what was happening, I had to let this person speak.

Kross, to his credit, cringed. “I tried to get them to skip the branding; I really did. But I also knew that if I protested too much, I’d blow my cover, and then dozens more lives would’ve been on the line.”

“Explain.” Max seemed like he’d calmed down, and when August appeared with a sandwich bag filled with ice for his knuckles, he even managed to smile thankfully at our Omega.

I pulled August closer to me. I could lean on Llew’s strength and August’s calm, and they’d prop me up until we sorted through this whole situation.

Kross licked his lips. “I was nine when my parents joined the Homestead in the nineties. They were a pair of Betas who’d become disillusioned with the world and their place in it. My dad had always been a little unhinged, but my mom was worse. My grandmother told me later that once she had me, she went a little crazy. She’d had miscarriage after miscarriage, and when I survived to term, her post-natal depression turned into neurosis. She was convinced that everything would harm me. Plastics in the food. Radio waves from cellphones. Television giving me subliminal messaging. Later, it became chemical weapons testing and mind-control agents in the milk.

“Then John Parris came along and convinced her that she was right, that there were chemicals controlling us all, and the only way to protect me—and her future children—was to join them in the middle of nowhere in Arkansas at an off-grid commune. I found out this all later; at the time, all I knew wasthat they made me leave everything behind, even my favorite teddy bear. I went to Arkansas with the clothes on my back and nothing else.” He sounded calm, like telling this story was no big deal, but I wanted to cry for the little boy who couldn’t keep his teddy bear.

“When we got to the Ozarks, there were dozens of people. Older people who no longer knew how to operate in the world, younger people who were disenfranchised. Mentally ill people, who definitely skewed more towards women than men. The first year or two was kind of idyllic, I guess. There were a bunch of us kids, and we just ran around the woods like wildlings.

“And then they put up the fence. They locked us in. There wasn’t even a gate to go out, even if we wanted to leave. They told everyone that there was a world war and that nuclear weapons had gone off. They played news programs that said there were viruses killing people, that nuclear fallout had finished off almost all of the world. That those who remained were forever altered and contagious. That it was best to stay safe inside, in small groups.”

He took a sip of his drink, and the blue-haired girl looked at him like she wanted to crawl across the table and hug him. His distress was obvious, even to me. But he was still a man who’d stolen me from my home. I’d thought he’d been in his late-twenties, but given his story, I aged him up a little in my mind. He’d have to be mid-thirties by now.

“Babies began to be born, the first wave of kids just before you and Henry. The Leaders decided that they wouldn’t tell the children of what had happened outside the walls. That we’d alter their history so they would never have to know the world’s evils. Leader Malakai went into a trance for days, and when he came out, he managed to convince everyone that he’d talked to some unknown gods and we were now their children. That they’dprotect us from the shit outside the walls.” His lips twisted. “What we needed protecting from was the evilinsidethe walls.”

I was clutching onto Rio’s hand for dear life, but I could hear the truth in these words. I lifted my chin, asking wordlessly for Kross to continue.

“People who were skeptical just… disappeared. The Leaders said that they were taken by the threat outside the walls, but I think they had them killed. Then my best friend, Alex, designated Alpha. The next night, he was gone. I found out later that he’d been shipped out in the night by the Leaders, and he was buried somewhere in the woods outside the walls. Unsurprisingly, when I designated as Alpha, that very night I was dragged from my bed and smuggled out of the compound through the tunnel in the ceremony room. Ian, the Homestead’s guy on the outside, picked me up from the older Betas, took me to Oklahoma City, and shot heroin straight into my veins. They overdosed me, and it was only by sheer luck that an off-duty paramedic with Narcan in her purse found me. She took me to the hospital, and I was shipped off into foster care.”

He wet his dry lips. “Eventually, they tracked down my grandmother, but no matter who they asked or how hard we searched, they couldn’t track down my parents. They weren’t missing persons; they hadn’t been abducted. They’d joined this cult of their own volition. The search was eventually given up, and my grandmother raised me. I joined the army, then when I was discharged, I had all thisrage. I was bigger, and uglier, and scarred, and when I remembered what they’d done, I couldn’t let it go.

“So I went back to Arkansas, and I watched. I researched. I got Jewel involved by chance. We chased down police reports and rumors and overdose cases. We chased down talk of preppers in the Ozarks, and messageboards on the dark web. I remembered Ian, so I tracked down every Ian in the Ozarksfor the right one. Eventually, I got lucky.Wegot lucky.” He looked over at Jewel, and there was something in his expression. Gratitude? Adoration? I wasn’t sure.

“I found the right Ian, and I put a tracker on his car. It’d been five years since I’d been dumped by then, and they were getting pretty lazy. When Pieter designated, they barely drove him over the Oklahoma border before ditching him in a gas station bathroom with a needle in his arm. Then they got even lazier of the next five years, throwing them from moving cars. That’s how we got Henry. He was thrown from a car on the side of Highway 49 just before crossing over into Missouri. He was in hospital for a month, healing his broken body.”

Henry gave him a sad smile. “It wasn’t the best time of my life, that’s for sure.”

Kross nodded. “I decided to up my game after that. I couldn’t let any more people die, waiting for them to be tossed out like garbage before I could rescue them. I moved to the town where Ian lived. Grew a beard just in case they recognized my face, but I should have known they wouldn’t; self-obsessed bastards didn’t see us as anything more than waste to be discarded. I looked nothing like the boy I’d been. I went to the bars he liked, the diner where he had breakfast. I became his friend and managed to bug his phone. When Jewel picked up a communication that they needed to ‘take out some trash,’ I disabled his car, then happened to be nearby when he realized, inviting him to a cookout. He was in a state of near-panic and had me drive him to this location in the middle of nowhere.

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