Page 29 of Fight or Fly

I thought about that for a few minutes.

“Okay. But what does you denying yourself have to do with that?” I asked. “Because watching you be miserable and alone isn’t exactly convincing me and Jax not to go after those two while we have the chance.”

Another pause.

“I—” Alex began, only to cut herself off. “I don’t wish to discuss this now.”

I snorted. “Yeah, I kind of got that part already.”

“It’s a distraction, and we can’t afford distractions.” Alex turned her head away, looking out the window. “Beckett’s disappearance feels like an endgame scenario. For us, at least. Maybe even for the underground as a whole.”

Personally, I would have been more than happy to focus on that distraction until we reached Montreal. Idly, I wondered if Jax was getting in some gooddistractions, alone in the remote safehouse with a pair of tempting omegas all to himself.

Lucky bastard.

Still, Alex had a point. Bravado aside, I understood that there was a good chance we weren’t going to come out of this unscathed.

“You’ve really got no idea who Beckett’s mate is, huh?” I asked. That was the part I kept coming back to—how much damage might be done if the wrong person managed to get their hands on that information.

“I really don’t,” Alex replied with a sigh. “And right now, I almost wish I did, just so I’d know how badly to panic.”

We lapsed into silence as the outskirts of Montreal came into view.

* * *

After some discussion, we’d decided to approach Beckett’s contacts in the same order he’d intended to meet with them. He’d had three meetings planned, and we figured that if he hadn’t made the first meeting, it was pretty much a given that he wouldn’t have made it to the other two, either.

If he’d disappeared between one meeting and the next, it might at least give us some kind of a starting point in order to trace him. There’d been nothing in the newspapers so far indicating he’d been arrested. That could be good, or it could be bad. On the one hand, if he’d been scooped up and dumped into the legal system that would ultimately funnel him to the Committee’s brutal parody of ‘justice,’ he was out of our reach and as good as dead. The underground didn’t have the resources to go up against the Committee head-to-head—not even close. They’d crush us like bugs the moment we tried to crawl out of the woodwork.

On the other hand, it could be just as bad if Enoch Sloane had snatched Beckett in secret and was keeping him off the books for some reason—most likely so he and his lackeys would have time to extract every last bit of information from him without the pressures of having to give him a sham trial. We also had the Beta Liberation Front assholes to consider. They might or might not be secretly working with the Committee. They also might or might not have their own reasons for wanting to take out the guy who’d singlehandedly busted up their operation in Romania.

Fuck, what a mess.

Beckett’s first scheduled meeting had been with the go-between for another cell that was adjacent to ours. The guy was a beta, and he owned, of all things, a hair salon. We arrived to find the place empty and boarded up, the faded sign hanging off-kilter from a single chain above the locked door. That was our first hint that things might be even more serious than we’d thought.

“Keep driving,” Alex said tightly. “Don’t slow down.”

I did, well aware that if the authorities had shut the shop down because of its ties with the underground, they might have surveillance in place to identify anyone who came poking around in search of the proprietor.

I continued for several miles before pulling into the parking lot of a run-down diner.

“It could be a coincidence,” I said, though it almost certainly wasn’t.

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Alex replied. “But we don’t have any way of knowing if the place was raided before or after Beckett showed up. Or evenifhe showed up.”

“On to the next one?” I asked.

“On to the next one,” she agreed.

The next meeting Beckett had scheduled was a step up the food chain, and as such, neither Alex nor I had contact details for a specific person. All we had was a location and a code phrase that would only be good for another day or two before it changed. The location was a large, well-known casino. Alex sent me in alone, since I was less conspicuous than a six-foot-tall butch female alpha would have been.

I double-checked my fake ID, tugged my suit jacket straight, and went inside. Once I got to the gaming floor, I searched out the pit boss and flagged her down. She was a beta woman with really big hair and a plastic smile.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Yeah, can you recommend a restaurant around here that does Ukranian food?” I asked.

She blinked at me. “Uh, that’s... oddly specific. I think there’s one downtown run by a family of Bulgarians. That’s about the closest thing I know of.” With that, she gave me another vacant smile and walked off.

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