Page 8 of Vallaverse: Noir
I could draw it out, try to make her nervous. I can play word games with the best of them, but there's really no point. “The Scarlet Selection is in about a week.”
“And?”
“I just thought it might not be a terrible idea to see what my odds are, that's all.”
Her eyes narrow. “Odds are of what?”
“I need a certain type of Omega. I thought this might be the sort of place I could ask about something like that.”
Her mouth flattens into a little line and she crosses her well-muscled arms across her chest. “This is a bakery, Detective. What would we know about certain types of Omegas?”
“Word on the street is that you'd know plenty.” I offer a conspiratory smile. “I might be a Detective on Fridays, but onWednesdays I'm just your average Alpha looking for love. I've put off coming here for a long time. I didn't want to be a bother and, more importantly, I didn't want to embarrass myself. I was just hoping to get a hint or a leg up. That's all.”
She holds my gaze for a long minute before pushing out a sigh. “Tell me the truth about what happened to your leg.”
My mouth drops open. I can't help it. There was no way in the world for me to anticipate or expect that question. “A trade?”
It isn't so much that it's a big secret, but it isn't smart to go around announcing your weaknesses. Especially to other Alphas. Especially in the bakery.
She nods. I can't believe she's curious enough about my injury that she'd trade secrets to find out about it.
“I tell you about how I got hurt and you'll tell me if the type of Omega I need will be at the Selection?”
She looks back over her shoulder at the Beta who is busily applying butter to whatever is in the pan in front of him then back at me. “Do you want to know or not?”
“I do.”
“Then tell me how your leg got hurt and I'll tell you whether or not your Omega will be at the Selection.”
I don't know if it's a fair trade, but I'll make it. “When I came of age, the first thing I did was sign up for the military. I was in for four years. My team was sent somewhere we had no business being and I caught the mean end of a bullet in my thigh. It hit my femur and did some nerve damage. And then there's the other thing.”
“Other thing?”
“Eleven years ago, I was in love. I was young and stupid and I thought he loved me back. He was a client. I should have known better, but like I said, young and stupid.”
“Omega?” she interrupts.
I shake my head. “Beta. I changed my whole world for him. I lost my partner because of it. Anyway, one night he didn't show back up at my office. My partner had left by then and I was letting my client stay there to keep him safe. He didn't show the next night, either. Or the next. It took me two weeks to find out he wasn't coming back. Turns out, he already had an Alpha. Two, actually. They shared him and an Omega. They would have been a picture perfect pack if it wasn't for the bets and the drugs.”
“You didn't know he was bonded? You didn't see a mark?” Her expression and her tone both say loud and clear how deep her doubts about it run.
I shake my head again. “I never saw a mark. It was somewhere it could be hidden by clothes. I never slept with him. I just wanted to save him. I wanted to love him. I was under the impression I was hired to keep him safe from an Alpha who was obsessed with him and get him and his assets out of town.”
“Why were you really hired?”
I sigh. “I'm good at finding things out. He wanted me to help him find a shipment of illegal opiates but I didn't know it. I thought the obsessed Alpha was behind the opiates, and if we kept track of where the drugs were, we'd keep track of where the Alpha was so we could avoid him and get the Beta out. I was very naive.” I smile and take the last cold sip of coffee in the cup. “Young and very, very stupid.”
“I can't disagree with you, but love is love. What can you do?”
“You can get picked up by a very jealous and deranged Omega and her equally jealous and deranged Alphas and taken to their basement to be interrogated about their missing Beta. You can take a baseball bat to the hip about five times because you really, really don't know what happened to him. Then you can get dumped off the wharf in the middle of the night in the dead of winter and left to drown.”
“Damn.”
I nod. “Damn.”
“So, where was he?”
My answer is dry. “If I had let myself drown, I would have landed next to him at the bottom of the ocean.”
