Page 36 of Truth or Lie

Leona’s brows drew together. “But we don’t know what happens if an alpha completes the connection through me when I’m not in heat. I mean—I know it would still work for me, but we don’t know if it would make a difference for Kam.”

I tried to sort through it with a brain that still felt as thick and useless as porridge. “Then we should wait. This isn’t a high school science experiment. If making the connection while you’re in heat is what definitely works, then that’s what we should do.”

This was surreal. Where was the pain? Where was the deep sense of existential dread?

Don’t live in the past, Alex. You have a future waiting, too. You just have to reach out and take it.

That was what Irina had told me when I first discovered she was still alive. She’d tried to warn me not to cling to the trauma of our torn bond. I hadn’t listened then, but maybe now I was finally ready to hear the truth behind the words.

“That’s what we’ll do,” Leona said. “Kam?”

He nodded. “Agreed. Now, will you please move back here to the guesthouse, Alex? Because there’s no more reason for you to stay away from us. Honestly, there never was.”

Everything felt like it was crumbling around me—the collapse of a structurally unsound building finally succumbing to gravity. But... was there a possibility I could build something new on the rubble?

“Yes,” I said. “If you really want me there, I’ll come back.”

SIXTEEN

Jax

TO SAY I WAS relievedwas an understatement. Alex might still be a bundle of raw nerves, but she wasn’t actively imploding anymore. Perhaps more importantly, she washere, where we could help.

Twenty-six days after the near-disaster of the conference in Belarus, I still couldn’t quite get over the rightness of waking up in the morning as part of a messy, tangled pile of the people I cared about most in all the world.

I’d missed sparring with Alex, even though it usually meant getting my ass kicked. I’d missed the way Flynn’s tightly held tension loosened a bit when he knew he could rely on our pack leader to make the hard tactical and ethical decisions. Mostly, I’d missed the security of trusting that our pack structure was stable; that we weren’t going to shatter under the next unpredictable blow.

After the retrieval mission to get Beckett and the others out of Sloane’s hands, I’d had a taste of what could be our future, and I’d wanted it—badly. Three alphas. Two omegas. A merged pack, with everyone playing to their strengths and bolstering the others’ weaknesses.

We were so close—just a few more weeks. And yeah, I was impatient... but I understood and agreed with Alex’s reasons for wanting to wait until Leo’s heat to finalize the mating. Like her, I wasn’t willing to play roulette with Kam’s limited ability to bond. This was how it had successfully worked for him before, so this was how we would do it again.

For now, though, there was the next conference to address. This one was going to be bigger, and I wasn’t sure whether that made it more dangerous or less.

Nikolayev had been surprisingly successful in getting ahead of the story about the drinks spiked with the drug targeting alphas. He’d immediately put his pet doctor in front of the cameras, citing the test results from Alex’s blood. They’d spun it as a dangerous psychoactive chemical, and hadn’t mentioned the word ‘rut’ at all.

Other reports—originating from the BLF or, just possibly, from Enoch Sloane’s branch of the Committee—had tried to float a narrative about rabid, out-of-control alphas attacking betas without provocation, but they were too late. Nikolayev already had his version of the story in place, backed up by science and forensic evidence. That wasn’t to say that the fringe crazies weren’t buying the BLF’s account, but your average person in the street understood what had really happened—assuming they followed the news at all.

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