Page 32 of Fight or Fly

ELEVEN

Jax

FLYNN AND ALEX hadn’treturned, and the sense of watching a bad plan careening off the rails was becoming inescapable. There was still one more step to take before I transitioned into full-on panic mode. I’d need to check with Beckett’s guy and make sure there wasn’t a message waiting to explain why they were late. Then, if there wasn’t one, I’d have to ask myself if I was going to abandon my pack, or if I was going to abandon the two omegas I was duty bound to protect—because it wouldn’t be fair to drag Leona and Kam deeper into danger if I went after Alex and Flynn.

Kam and I were seated at the kitchen table. We had a clear line of sight to Leona, who was in the front room watching the driveway. This way, she could follow the conversation and keep an eye on things outside at the same time.

“Don’t make your decision based on us,” Kam was saying. “I know we’d be worse than useless in any kind of covert mission, especially with Leo’s face plastered all over the news. We can stay in hiding while you do what you need to do—and if worse comes to worst, we could still buy our way out of the country if we had to.”

He was trying to give me an out, and the scary part was, I might end up taking him up on it if there turned out to be no other option.

“What he said,” Leona called from the other room. “My parents are hiding out under assumed identities in Jamaica. They’ll help us, and if you and the others can make it there, I guarantee they’ll help you and your pack, too. We could regroup and figure out what to do from there, where it’s safer.”

“We’ll keep that option on the table,” I said.

I’d wondered about her parents—she’d mentioned previously that she’d convinced them to leave the country for their own safety. They’d concealed their throwback child instead of turning her over to the Committee as they’d been legally bound to do, when she’d presented as an omega. Once her rise through the diplomatic corps had become meteoric, the danger to them became too great.

Ironically, one of the last things Leona and Kam had achieved in the diplomatic corps before Leo’s arrest was the successful negotiation of a new treaty lessening the legal penalties for the so-called crime her parents had committed.

Whatever the case, I was glad to learn that they were well and evidently in a position to help her and Kam if things got really bad. I wasn’t at all sure that getting out of the country would be as straightforward as Leona seemed to think, though. I guess it would depend on what kind of contacts they had access to in the underground. No unregistered omega got as far as they had withoutsomekind of help, even if it was low-level stuff like acquiring pheromone suppressors.

Kam’s fingers tapped against the tabletop in a nervous rhythm. “She’s right that you should get out, too. And... the others.”

There was a slight hesitation in the final words. I looked closer, and saw the hidden fear behind Kam’s deep brown eyes. Like me, he expected the worst. He’d already written Beckett off, and he was bracing himself to do the same for the two alphas who hadn’t returned to us when they said they would.

“I’m sure they just got held up and left a message with Beckett’s contact,” Leona said from the window. “It doesn’t automatically mean something’s gone wrong—it could mean they’ve found a lead.”

There it was in a nutshell—her light to Kam’s darkness. Yang to his yin. I wasn’t sure if she really believed her own words, or if she was only trying to lighten the atmosphere of dread hanging over the room. To be fair, she might be absolutely right. Once upon a time, I probably would have assumed the best instead of the worst, too.

When thehellhad that changed, anyway?

“Hopefully you’re right,” I said. “Whatever the case, I think we should find a new place to hide out. We’ve been here too long. We can leave a message for the others at the same time we’re checking to see if they left one for us.”

Kam shot Leona a speculative look. “Hmm. How do you feel about dyeing your hair,odama?”

She shot him a sour look. “Probably about the same as you’ll feel about shaving off your beard, baby face.”

He ran a hand over his short, anchor-style fringe of dark facial hair. “Excuse me. Do you have any idea how hard it is for an omega to grow a beard?”

“Sure,” she called back. “I mean, I’ve heard you bitching about it often enough, right?”

They were trying to take my mind off things. Omega instinct, to comfort an upset alpha and defuse a tense situation. I wish I could say it was working.

God. Why could we not have met these two in a different world, where we could have courted them and mated them and had alife, instead of this constant barrage of slow-rolling crises?

“It’s not the worst idea,” I said, because honestly, that flaming red hair of herswaskind of hard to miss.

“So, we’ll leave in the morning to meet with this message guy in Montreal?” Kam asked. “And buy hair dye.”

“Right,” I said, having no better plan. “Assuming the car’s up to it, we can try for Burlington afterward and hide out there for a bit. It’s only a couple of hours’ drive from Montreal, and there’s a fair amount of anti-Committee sentiment brewing in Vermont. Might be safer.”

Kam nodded.

“Sounds good,” Leona agreed. “You know, as strange as it sounds, I’m going to miss this house.”

It didn’t sound strange at all. This was almost certainly the first place she’d ever stayed that had a proper omega nest, for one thing.

“If I were Flynn, I’d have some kind of crass joke at the ready regarding how memorable alpha dick is,” I said, trying hard not to picture Flynn captured or dead, somewhere far out of my reach.

---