Page 59 of Truth or Lie

“The sex furniture was pretty good, all right,” Flynn said.

Jax snorted. “Well, it’s nice to see that everyone’s got their priorities straight, anyway.”

“What about you, Jax?” I asked. “Does that house hold too many bad memories for you?”

“I’m not sure,” he said after a long moment. “I failed you there.”

“You didn’t,” Kam said firmly.

“I couldn’t protect you,” Jax insisted. “But in the end, Nikolayev capturing us was the only thing that saved us. And... to put things in perspective, absolutely nothing bad happened to us in Nikolayev’s guesthouse in Russia. The place was ridiculously huge and ridiculously posh—”

“Gaudy,” Alex muttered.

“—yet I feel more of a connection to the safehouse in New York than I do to that guesthouse.”

I nodded. “Same here. For what it’s worth, there will be plenty of time to think about it before we’ll be in a position to act.”

Alex shifted position, rolling onto her side. “It’s a good-sized property. Lots of land, natural surroundings.” She hesitated, swallowing. “A good place for pups.” The words were quiet and hoarse.

My gaze flew to her. She looked pale in the firelight, but she met my eyes and held them without looking away.

“Itwouldbe good place for pups,” I agreed, imagining a pack of littermates running around in the woods, laughing and climbing trees... playing hide and seek.

Flynn perked up, his smile like the sun coming out from behind gray clouds. “We’re gonna have pups soon?”

“Your pups will be beautiful, odama,” Kam said.

“Ourpups,” I corrected. “I’m not doing this alone.”

Jax had stayed very quiet throughout this part of the exchange. Now he looked up, his blue eyes troubled. “I already have pups. Probably a lot of them. I know it’s not explicitly part of the new laws, but... I want to try and find them, if I can. Assuming any of them want to be found, I mean. There should be records. The breeders were always very particular about pedigrees.”

The last sentence sounded bitter in a way that was unusual for my scarred Viking. I squirmed around until I could get my arms around him.

“Of course we’ll try. Oh, Jax...”

“Guess there might be a handful out there with my shitty genes, too,” Flynn said. “They used me to breed one time, when there was a gap in the rotation. I dunno if she got pregnant or not—they never told me.”

“Your genes are not shitty,” Kam said, sounding deeply offended. “And I say that as a hoity-toity purebred—so there.”

“In fact, your genes are in my ‘top three’ list of potential sperm donor candidates,” I added. “So, don’t you dare diss them, or else you’re basically saying that I have bad taste.”

“Hey—you want my genes; they’re yours,” Flynn said. “You want any part of me, it’s yours. Both of yours.”

“Good. In that case, we’ll take all of you,” I said firmly.

Kam nodded. “Seconded.”

Flynn shrugged. “Done.”

“Have you made a decision about hormone replacement therapy, once it becomes available?” Alex asked Kam, neatly changing the subject.

The new law meant that as of today, omega-specific drugs were no longer contraband items. Of course, some companies had continued to produce them for the black market even after they’d become illegal—that was how I’d managed to obtain blockers for so many years. But they’d always been scarce, expensive, and of widely varying quality.

Flynn had approached Beckett and Nikolayev a few months ago about finding hormone replacement injections for Kam, but omega hormones weren’t readily available on the black market like blockers and suppressors were. With tens of thousands of sterilized omegas gaining full rights and medical compensation for what had been done to them, the drug companies would doubtless smell the potential profits and move to fill that gap in the market sooner rather than later. There was shortly going to be a huge demand for alphomic medical specialists in North America, I was betting.

“Yes,” Kam said. “I want to try it. Just so you all realize that it will mean saying goodbye to this carefully cultivated and rather amazing beard, though.”

“Baby face,” I teased in an obnoxious, sing-songy voice.

---