Page 78 of Knot Playing Fair 2

A terrible, cold feeling trickled down the back of my neck. “The leader of Luca’s old gang wants him back,” I whispered.

Zalen’s handsome face drew into harsh, grim lines. Beside me, Emiel growled, low and menacing.

Zalen took a breath and let it out slowly. “And SSG is after your restaurant. Nat might be a target, as one of the owners. I don’t know of anyone who’d be after Byron.”

“Dunno,” Emiel said. “He does manage to piss off a lot of people.”

This was all too much.

“What do I do?” I asked plaintively. “We have to find them, but I don’t know where to—” I broke off, shaking my head sharply.

Zalen squeezed my knee. “You driving around the city randomly looking for them isn’t going to get them home any faster,” he said.

Emiel looked down at me seriously. “I’ve talked some to Nat... at the gym, and we get coffee sometimes, afterward. He’s so proud of you and that restaurant he could burst with it. I think he’d want you to keep it going until he gets back.”

The weight of that settled across my shoulders, pressing me down.

“Yeah,” I said hoarsely. “He would.”

It would gut Nat to find out that his disappearance had put the final nail in the Elderflower Inn’s coffin, right after things had taken a turn for the better with the successful reopening.

Could I do it, though? I felt like I was about to buckle under the strain, just sitting here on the damned couch.

Zalen nodded. “We need the police to do their fucking jobs. Mia, will you trust me to take point on finding the others? Emiel, I’d like you to stay with Mia at all times, whether it’s at home or at the restaurant. Just in case—because if someone was after Nat, they might come after her, too.”

“Yeah, I can do that,” Emiel said. “What about the Hope Project?”

Zalen’s expression hardened. “I think we’ll have to close it for a few days. I’ll focus my efforts on lighting a fire under the police department’s collective asses. But there’s one other avenue I want to check out, as well.”

I frowned at him quizzically. “What other avenue?”

He sighed. “I’m listed as both Luca and Emiel’s emergency contact and next of kin,” he said. “But I’m not Byron’s, and I want to talk to the person who is.”

Emiel’s brows drew together. “He’s still got family? I didn’t know that.”

“A grandmother,” Zalen confirmed. “By all accounts, she’s, uh,formidable. I’d like to see if she knows anything about other contacts Byron might have. Less savory ones, specifically.”

THIRTY-THREE

Nat

IT HAD BEEN YEARS SINCEI’d been punched in the kidney, but the sharp, radiating pain in my lower back was still familiar. It swept me away to places that I’d rather not revisit—my adoptive father pacing back and forth in the next room, random items clattering noisily to the floor as he swept them off the nearest horizontal surface to expend his rage; my adoptive mother’s lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line.

There were no abusive parents here to rain down disapproval on my head. Instead, I was locked in a dusty old office inside a disused building, trapped with a terrified omega and the alpha I’d let fuck me three times in a motel room.

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