Page 65 of Pretty When She Breaks
“Why did you pack up with me?” I asked, my voice no more than a whisper. “I never understood why, after everything, you’d want to take on my shame.”
I was a screwup. A mistake. The child of a gold pack omega, a criminal and rut fighter. Yet, when I’d found myself home, Finch and Ocean had stepped in to claim me. They’d stayed by me and cared for me and slowly worked to redeem us. Redeem me.
“You’re my responsibility,” Finch said after a pause. “If I had been better when you were younger… set a proper example, you wouldn’t have gotten so lost. When you vanished, I thought I’d lost my chance to make things right. I couldn’t lose it again when you came back.”
I swallowed, feeling like I wanted to shrink into the ground.
“I’ll fix this, Kaos. We save Ocean, and we get evidence that all of them are involved in human trafficking. Maybe more, once we get access to their computers. If we don’t manage to kill them, the police won’t be able to ignore that much hard evidence. They’ll face justice. We’ll have proof you were coerced into this.”
Right.
We were getting revenge for me.
Atoning for my shame.
It was all my fault, again, that we had to make this so complicated.
“If anything goes wrong with my plan, anything at all, we’ll fall back on the jailbreak,” Finch said. “We’ll have it ready to go at any time, so we can cut and run if we need to.”
I considered it, looking at the pain in my packmate’s eyes, feeling the guilt that he wasn’t entirely hiding in the bond.
“What if he wants outnow?” I asked.
“Ocean made his choice when he stepped into the casino.”
“He’s fighting in the Sink now, Finch! That changes everything. It changes people. He needs to make this call.”
“All right,” Finch said. “But let me think of a way to do this properly. Laurel is our only way to get him a message, and I don’t want to tell her more than we need to.”
“She might not be our only way,” I said, the rusty cogs of my mind kicking into gear as I started to think of a plan.
THIRTY-FOUR
LAUREL
I was in the basement of the casino, looking down one of the long, dimly lit corridors. Though the securement wing was nearby, I wasn’t ready to go in yet. The Crimson Palace was an old building, and renovations had left plenty of legacy architecture not officially on the floor plans. The underground tunnels were the biggest.
They’d been built during prohibition, designed to be confusing and maze-like. There were many false doors along the way. They were old, though, and without maintenance, a lot of them were dangerous. My father kept a couple of main routes in and out of the Blood Well safe and well-ventilated, but it would be foolish to stray too far off the path.
The fans that pumped air through this place hummed loudly, and occasionally, I’d catch the echoes of footsteps or voices passing by from far away.
I was thinking about the plan Finch had presented. It had taken me by surprise; it hadn’t just been about freeing Ocean but getting leverage on my father as well.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, really. The criminals who came to the Crimson Palace had goals, and most were a variation on the same thing—power.
This pack had claimed me, and if they gained my father’s approval, that would make them family. They’d probably been planning it all along, since Ocean scent-matched me. Why else would they have been at my villa so fast after the fight? How did they know Ocean had been caught? Why dark bond me at all?
And Finch hadn’t seemed concerned when I’d told him my father would want to kill them—because they were planning to make sure my father wanted me bonded to them.
Honestly, it would probably work.
Father respected alphas who were powerful, smart, and cunning. Who took what they wanted. They’d go to my father and present the facts.
Me, dark bonded.
Ocean, freed from chains.
Enough evidence on him to extort him into doing what they wanted.
