Page 41 of Truth or Lie

“There you are, alef,” he said softly.

“We missed you.” Jax sounded deeply gratified.

A great, warm wave of relief washed over me.The hard part was over.

Hours later, with my lips swollen and my throat raspy from the others’ use... with Alex riding me hard from behind and my capricious orgasm dancing just at the edge of my awareness, it was almost anticlimactic when Alex bit down over the silver marks left by three other sets of teeth.

Of coursethe five of us were always going to end up here. How could we not? It was meant to be. Pain flared as the skin broke, my blood mixing with her saliva. My body clenched, my mind whiting out with pleasure as I reached my release—and when my scattering thoughts reformed, there she was.

So damaged. So unsure. Her scars were every bit as bad as mine were—they were just hidden on the inside. I wished, as I always did, to be that last little bit closer to them in the psychic bond. But I was close enough. Love echoed through the shared connection, flowing back and forth, through and around—weaving us into a cohesive whole, no matter our individual broken parts and sharp edges.

Pack, at last.

EIGHTEEN

Flynn

THE PALAIS DE LA Courde Justice in the Kirchberg quarter of Luxembourg City was one hell of a swanky venue. The building was the site of the Euro-Soviet judicial court, and evidently the Confederacy had thrown a fair amount of money at it.

The place was all polished wood, glass, and dark steel, with a weird fucking art installation in the center that looked like a floating yellow jellyfish and took up two entire stories in the main atrium. The summit was taking place in an audience hall that took up most of the second floor. It had the feel of a courtroom, but on a massive scale. A huge, raised area took up the front third of the space, and the rest was filled with long, pew-like benches for the onlookers.

The courtroom of the gods, I thought with a touch of sarcasm.

This was my first time in Luxembourg. Before prepping for this mission, the sum total of my knowledge about it was that it was tiny, and the language was some kind of bastard lovechild between German and French.

Well, that, and the fact that there was a politician here who secretly had the hots for Leona—but I wasn’t allowed to corner him and put the fear of alphas in him because he was useful to us, or some shit like that. Didn’t mean I wasn’t keeping an eye on Secretary Luca Fouchet, though. One wrong move, and he’d learn the hard way that you didn’t flirt with a mated omega. Just because he’d apparently been the one to talk Prime Minister Fairbanks from the UFNA into attending the summit wouldn’t change that.

Aspects of this whole situation were kind of surreal. I mean, the whole point of going public with the fight against Sloane and his hard-liners in the Committee had been to get the struggle for alphomic rights onto the world stage. But it was still weird seeing alphas and omegas openly mingling with the beta elite, however cautiously.

There were officials here from parts of the world where the Committee held less power—an alpha prince regent from some tiny African nation I’d never heard of; an omega Maori MP from New Zealand; a mixed delegation of human rights advocates from Iceland. Additionally, there were dozens of alphas and omegas from different walks of life who’d been invited here to testify about the atrocities they’d suffered at the hands of the Committee’s brutal laws.

Kam was one of those people. He was currently seated at a long table that had been set up on the massive stage in the audience hall, along with nineteen others who were scheduled to speak this afternoon.

Leo and Nikolayev were in the crowd of onlookers, which included delegations from over a hundred countries. Jax and Alex were watching Leo’s back, and Beckett had Nikolayev covered.

I was on Kam duty with Irina, which was another bit of weirdness adding to the general sense of unreality surrounding the summit. If someone had told me a year ago that Irina Pasternak was not only still alive, but was also working for Kostya Nikolayev—and that I’d be sharing guard duty with her at an international conference—I’d have laughed in their face.

---