Page 49 of Hide or Die

Sloane was a plain-faced man with exceptionally pale blond hair. He had the air of an Alabama fundamentalist preacher, with his drawling Southern accent, his forehead shiny with sweat, and the light of fanaticism in his whiskey-brown eyes. All he needed was a Bible to thump.

I exchanged a glance with Kam, who looked vaguely ill as the man droned on about gender impurity and the importance of rooting out the alphomic cancer at its source.

“They would have been smarter to let the Mad Russian go in front of the cameras,” he murmured, too low to reach any ears but mine.

He wasn’t wrong. Nikolayev might disdain designer suits and the fancy trappings of elegance, but he had the power of charisma in a way that Sloane decidedly did not. I was already making a mental list of the ways Sloane’s lackluster public speaking performance could work in our favor.

He rambled on for a bit longer, ending with a story about an immigration official who’d been exposed as an unregistered alpha, and who’d been secretly facilitating the transfer of alphomic refugees to South America. A familiar scare tactic piece, but I had no doubt that it would play gangbusters with the hard-line conspiracy theory crowd.

I took a moment to mourn the loss of yet another link in the fragile chain of the alphomic underground—that shadowy association of alphas, betas, and omegas who made it possible for some of us to escape what would otherwise be our fate. Members of the underground had helped Kam escape slavery and forge a new identity in a new country. They provided my heat blockers and pheromone suppressors. Their ranks included doctors willing to forge misleading medical reports, and midwives willing to whelp pups from non-aligned omegas in secret.

Without them, we couldn’t survive. And yet, the underground always felt like such a tenuous web... one that might unravel the moment the wrong thread was pulled.

The summit inched forward with agenda-setting and last minute scheduling changes, before eventually settling into the real work. The first day consisted of low-level negotiations and workshopping. The second day moved into the nuts and bolts of hammering out changes to existing agreements and feeling out where the sticking points lay.

It was a grind. There were a lot of sticking points.

The third day was make or break. Throughout the meetings, I’d felt the imagined weight of Sloane and Nikolayev’s gazes on me, making my skin clammy and the fine hairs on my neck prickle. Beneath the fragile facade of civility, they were predators, while Kam and I were prey. If they sniffed us out, we’d be crushed between their jaws in an instant.

They say Nikolayev can smell an omega at twenty paces, even with suppressors.

That ridiculous piece of fearmongering floated through my mind as the man in question approached the table where I was attempting to discuss the finer points of omega sterilization laws with a Committee aide.

“Ambassador McCready,” Nikolayev said, sending the aide scurrying away with an abrupt gesture of one hand. “A word in private, if I may.”

Kam looked up sharply.

I steeled myself not to react beyond a raised eyebrow, despite the chill that shivered through me at the idea of being alone with a man who’d murdered his own omega sibling in cold blood.

“Chairman Nikolayev.” My tone was admirably cool. “Are you sure you wouldn’t care to invite Chairman Sloane into this discussion as well?”

It was a dig, and he probably knew it. His lip curled in distaste, but he only said, “Definitely not. I require clarity and brevity. Not saber-rattling.”

I ignored the rigid tension in Kam’s shoulders, because inadvertently drawing Nikolayev’s attention to it wouldn’t be good for either of us. This was the path I’d chosen. If it meant a private tête-à-tête with a monster, then so be it.

“Certainly,” I replied, as though my skin weren’t crawling at the prospect.

They say his sister’s body had been almost unrecognizable after he’d finished with her. They say as a young man, he hunted captured omegas for sport, like animals.

I rose, not daring to meet Kam’s eyes for what I might see there. Nikolayev ushered me to a private salon adjacent to the event space with old world courtesy that was bitterly incongruous in a murderer.

He closed the doors behind us, and I willed my heart not to start thundering like a cornered rabbit’s. When he turned, it was to regard me with a slight frown furrowing his brow.

“You appear to have recovered well from your tribulations outside Târgoviste,” he observed.

Ice rolled through my veins. “Yes, thank you,” I replied, willing my voice to remain calm. “You mentioned something about brevity and clarity, Chairman?”

Steel-gray eyes bored into me, and the silence stretched for a painful moment.

“The Committee will not bend when it comes to the renegotiation of the alphomic extradition treaty,” he said.

“That’s not acceptable,” I told him without hesitation, a different kind of tension creeping into my spine. “The Fairbanks administration is determined to gain at least some concessions on the matter, especially relating to extenuating circumstances in individual cases.”

“That will not happen,” he replied. “And if the UFNA attempts to withdraw from the existing extradition agreement unilaterally, the Committee will ensure that your current Parliamentary coalition falls apart, forcing a new election.”

I stared at him, my stomach sinking. “That’s blatant manipulation of a foreign power’s internal governance.”

“Yes,” he agreed. One shoulder lifted in a barely perceptible shrug.

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