Page 47 of Hide or Die

Alex met my gaze frankly. “We both managed to get leave for the week around her heat cycle. She’d taken black market contraceptives, so we thought we were safe. Hell, we thought we were invincible—out in the world with our fake freedom and our stupid adolescent belief in our own invincibility. She begged for my mating bite and I gave it to her. Fucking knot-brain that I was.”

She took a deep breath and let it flow out.

“Anyway, the contraceptives were either phony or a bad batch. She was pupped after the heat. Since she was at least aligned, we figured she could pass it off as a beta pregnancy and get a discharge from the army, even if it was a dishonorable one.”

I winced, having a fair idea of where this was going.

“I never learned the details of what happened, but she was exposed and arrested,” Alex said dully. “I never saw her again. They must have extradited her to the Committee, because two weeks later, I woke up in the middle of the night to the agony of the mating bond breaking. They killed her, and they killed our unborn pups.”

The bottomless ache in my chest that always came in response to hearing stories like this was way too familiar, and I hated that familiarity with a passion.

“They callusanimals,” I said. “But it’s them. They’re perverted, sadistic brutes, and we have to stop them.”

She nodded. “Yes. That’s all that matters—stopping them. But you need to understand. I don’t want Jax or Flynn waking up in the night to that kind of horror. That feeling—the sense of the bond stretching and twisting until it’s torn out by the roots—I want to make sure theyneverfind out what it’s like.”

My eyes burned in response to the desolation in Alex’s tone. I blinked, and two tears spilled over. Moving slowly enough that she’d have plenty of time to pull away, I lifted my hand and stretched forward, cupping her jaw.

“I understand,” I said, and her fingers came up to tangle with mine.

She closed her eyes, and nodded. We stayed that way for a handful of heartbeats before she let her hand drop and straightened away from the touch.

“It’s in the past,” she said. “Let’s just try to make sure there’s not a repeat in the future.”

I hadn’t been wrong about her being an ally—but I hadn’t understood how determined she was to keep our packs separate. It wasn’t only about protecting Kam and me. It was about protecting her own pack as well.

“Agreed,” I told her wholeheartedly.

* * *

Three days later, thespecialist at the clinic decreed that Jax was stable enough for air transport back to Montreal. Beckett had spent a good part of that time drilling a coherent story into all three of us, in anticipation of the inevitable debriefing we were about to face. As it turned out, that was a very good thing indeed.

Stepping off the charter plane at Montréal-Mirabel International Airport felt deeply surreal. Jax was still being wheeled off the plane on his medical gurney when Kam and I were whisked away by government security officials dressed in dark suits. I crushed the flutter of irrational panic that threatened to grab me by the throat when we lost sight of Beckett and the alphas.

Two of the security operatives retrieved our luggage for us. We both refused the offer of medical attention. Given a choice, I would have scurried home to my converted loft and hidden under a blanket for a week. Unfortunately, our escorts had other ideas. A black limo delivered us directly to the Foreign Service building, where we spent the next four hours putting Beckett’s creatively edited story of the kidnapping to the test in separate interview rooms.

Not for the first time, I wondered if Beckett had actually gotten any kind of official sanction for his rescue operation. On the one hand, if he hadn’t, I was at a loss as to how he could have gained access to the kind of intelligence that had allowed him to find us. On the other hand, that simply wasn’t how the military chain of command worked. Government security wasn’t evenpart ofthat chain of command.

Whatever the case, I dutifully parroted the story I’d been fed, no matter how many different ways the interviewer framed the questions. At the end, I walked out with an appointment for mandatory trauma counseling and two weeks of leave—both of which I was dreading. The limo dropped Kam at his modest apartment in Little Burgundy, and me a bit farther south in my considerably less modest apartment in Saint-Henri, next to the Lachine Canal. The driver helped me take my luggage up and gave me a polite nod before leaving me alone.

Just like that, it was over.

The silence inside the renovated warehouse loft echoed. There was nothing and no one here to greet me. No roommates, no pets, not so much as a goldfish. I would need to get groceries. I would need to call the cleaning service and let them know I was back.

Instead of doing either of those things, I stood in the entryway with my luggage at my feet and stared into the middle distance for a very long time indeed.

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