Page 134 of Pack Frenzy
Cassian lays a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t need to thank us for that, Jess.”
Her eyes glisten in the TV light. “I can take care of myself. You don’t have to keep protecting me.”
“Yeah,” I murmur. “We do.”
She almost argues, but the movie shifts—the hero facing the monster—and she lets it go.
An hour later, the credits roll, and she’s asleep against my chest. Cassian stretches but doesn’t move her. Eli collects the bowls and empty cans, and bottles, taking them to the kitchen.
Her breathing deepens into the easy rhythm of sleep. I slide my arm free and stand. Restraint has its own kind of bruise. I need motion, something to grind the edges off. The others can switch off. I can’t. Not when Blake’s name keeps crawling through the back of my skull.
Part of me wants to get back in the car and finish what Cassian and I started the night Meredith died. I never got to pay him back for that. His daddy’s lawyers made sure of it.
But if he comes for Jess? There won’t be any lawyers. Just us.
And I’ll make fucking sure he never walks again.
I grab Eli’s laptop from the coffee table and open a new search window.
Cold light spills across my hands. Blake Callighan. Even his name looks wrong in clean black font—too neat for the rot underneath.
Two years after Meredith’s death and the trial that let him walk, I’d tried to stop checking his name. My therapist called it an obsession, said closure wasn’t going to come from stalking him, either in person or online. So I stopped for almost ten damn years until today.
Most of the headlines are boring shit, parties with celebrities, and entrepreneurship at one of his dad’s companies, then a headline catches:
Billionaire Richard Callighan’s son was rescued after a shark incident aboard the Celestial Dawn.
The article says he fell overboard, bitten during rescue; a surgeon promises no lasting scars. Happened seven years ago.
I keep digging, but there’s no photos. Not a single fucking one. For a high-profile case with paparazzi circling, that’s impossible. Which means it’s deliberate.
The Callighans scrubbed everything—hospital logs, cruise-line press statements, even social posts from that week. The few surviving cached links all redirect to the same corporate statement: privacy of the victim respected.
Bullshit.
I motion Eli closer, careful not to wake Jess. “Pull every file you can—surgeon’s database, insurance claims, anything tied to that cruise. If the photos exist, they’re buried and I want to see them.”
“On it.” He moves like someone born for this. Before Nexus, he’d been a hacker in everything but name—taught himself code, cracked open what corporations tried to hide. He said he joined Nexus to help Omegas from the inside. Tonight, that impulse makes his fingers fly.
Carefully, I lift Jess and carry her upstairs. She doesn’t stir when I unzip the mermaid costume and ease it off, leaving her in her underwear. I tuck her under the covers, press a kiss to her forehead, and close the door behind me.
I want to stay. Instead, I grab a beer and head back down, the need to do something burning through the exhaustion. Cassian’s at the counter, shuffling cards. I sit opposite him, the weight of waiting settling in my shoulders, and we play poker even though my mind’s on everything else.
An hour later—second beer halfway gone—Eli walks in with the laptop.
“Got the photos from the surgeon’s database. Before and after.” He turns the screen.
Cassian leans in, squinting. “What the hell?” He drags a thumb along the edge of his old surf scar, the one a tiger shark left when he was nineteen. Three surgeries later, it still looks like someone dragged barbed wire across his thigh. “None of those match any shark bite I’ve ever seen. They look...more like claws or nails.”
I stare at the image until the pixels blur. The before shows torn flesh in parallel lines—too deliberate, too uniform. The after shows surgical neatness, edges closed with precision that speaks of money and silence. Not luck. Intent.
“Find out who else was on that cruise,” I tell Eli. “Crew, passengers, anyone connected to medical. And pull the passenger manifest—cross-reference it with any Omegas reported missing around that time.”
Eli’s fingers are already moving. “You think?—”
“I think Blake doesn’t get attacked by random sharks.” I lean back, rolling the tension from my neck. “And I think whoever did that had a reason.”
Cassian’s jaw tightens. “If someone fought him off, maybe they’re still out there.”
