Omega's Run (14 page)

As for how the wound looked now? There wasn’t shit I could do about it, so I shrugged it off and wedged myself into the tiny shower. It was barely wide enough for my shoulders. I carefully cleaned off, hot water pouring down my skin. I wanted to just stand there for a while, but I wanted to get some information out of Ava even more, so I cleaned up quicker than I wanted to. I shut off the water and climbed out, hanging onto towel rods and the sink cabinets so I wouldn’t face plant. It was already rough enough that Ava’d had to help me in here.

I couldn’t find any bandages in the medicine cabinet so I patted the area around the wound dry with a towel and redressed in the Sweats I had been wearing before. I left off the shirt though; it was too hot after the shower and the constant motion. Besides, I was about to get back into that bed and its layers of blankets, so I had no worries about being cold.

Ava was waiting for me when I stepped out with a couple of steaming plates, and I couldn’t help but arch an eyebrow at her again.

“I wasn’t in there that long,” I said. “I’m surprised you’re done already.”

She shrugged unapologetically. “I picked up a couple plates of lasagna from a little place in town that I like. They were still in the car so I just warmed them up.”

I nodded and limped my way over to the bed and climbed in. “I don’t know how you fucking people do it,” I grumbled, irritably and she frowned at me.

“What ‘fucking people’?” she snapped and I winced and held up a hand in her direction.

“Sorry, no offense, I meant humans. I don’t get how humans deal with healing so slowly. This is the longest I’ve ever been injured in my life and its absolute torture, I’m telling you!” I sighed in exasperation and slumped back on the bed, the blankets pulled down to my waist. There was a weird sound suddenly in the room and for a moment I looked around trying to locate the source.

It wasn’t until I glanced in her direction that I realized where the sound was coming from and what it was in the same instant. Ava was laughing, and not laughing in a snide or condescending way. I’d heard that. She was really
laughing
. Honest, amused, laughter. Slumped in a chair next to the bed with her head thrown back, deep belly laughs pouring out of her slender throat, and I felt an itching in my palms as the desire to stroke the soft flesh of her throat came over me. Not to choke, or kill her, but to pull her toward me–

I squashed down that thought as hard as I could and reached for one of the plates while I waited for her to calm down.

“If you’re quite done?” I finally spoke up after several moments of unabated laughter had passed. She looked at me for a moment, before going off into more hysterical peals of laughter. I sighed and shoved a forkful of food into my mouth. I had to admit it was good lasagna, and she had an even better laugh. The carefree sound of it made me feel a little better, and I gave myself a mental slap.

She was the
enemy
, dammit! Her entire life had been dedicated to killing my kind! There was no part of her that I should find endearing or attractive. I should be trying to get information out of her and then ditch her, or kill her. One or the other. Fucking hell, she wasn’t laughing anymore.

I glanced up as the silence in the room suddenly registered and found her leaning forward in her chair, elbows on her knees with her chin cupped in her upturned palms. She’d taken off the jacket at some point, and was dressed just in her boots, pants and black shirt and the way the shirt clung to the curves of her body I found distressingly distracting.

“What?” I blurted out, surprised to find her staring at me so intently. It made me feel like a bug under a microscope.

“You’re thinking.”

I blinked, surprised by the odd statement, and beginning to feel that I would never be on an even keel with her. She had a way about her of making me feel off balance in all of our dealings and it really irritated the hell out of me.

“What?”

“You’re thinking,” she said again. “I can almost see the wheels turning inside that handsome head of yours. So why don’t you go ahead and tell me what it was you were thinking about?”

I shook my head and shoved another forkful of lasagna into my mouth. I chewed quickly and swallowed down the still steaming chunk of food.

“Nothing doing,” I said and she frowned.

“That wasn’t entirely the deal, now was it? You give me information and I give you information.”

“Except my thoughts had nothing to do with Mathias and whatever other information you might be looking for in regards to wolf-kind
or
the Hunters. So therefore, it doesn’t fall under the conditions of our agreement. That being said, I’ll kindly keep my private thoughts to myself, if you don’t mind.”

She continued to watch me, as if trying to catch me in a lie or something. Finally, she shrugged her slender shoulders and picked up her plate, leaning back in her chair and settling it in her lap. She took the fork in one hand but didn’t start eating right away.

“So what
can
we tell each other?” she asked. “What more information is there that you need, and what more can you provide for me?”

I thought about that for a moment. To be honest it was difficult to tell exactly what we might have that the other could use. Information that would be useful, but at the same time, not endanger those we wished to protect. That was the trick. If I brought back information about the hunters to William, it had to be information that would be
useful
. Otherwise it was just a curiosity, but didn’t help us to survive as a species any more than not knowing whatever it was in the first place had. So how could I get her to reveal secrets that would help us without her betraying her own kind?

“Well, how much are you willing to give me?” I asked and she frowned.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, you’re a Hunter. That’s obvious enough. I’m fairly certain you wouldn’t be willing to give me information that would help my people wipe out sections of yours. That’s self-defeating isn’t it?”

“Not entirely.” That got my attention. She would be willing to betray her own people?

“Wanna explain that?”

She was still frowning and started tapping the fork against the edge of her plate. It made an irritating sound, but I didn’t call her on it, not wanting to interrupt her thought process.

“It depends on who’s getting wiped out, I suppose. There are a few people back there that I
do
still like and trust. That I think might be able to see the truth behind what Mathias is doing. It might be possible to convince them that we’ve been lied to all along. But otherwise, the Templar chapter of the hunters appears to be rotten through and through. Helen certainly isn’t any kind of saint, and Mathias needs to be dealt with more than anything else.”

“Why are you so willing to kill Mathias?” I asked, curious. “He’s been your leader for a long time, hasn’t he? He’s trained and taught you; mentored you…”

“And like I said, he also sent my brother to his death and told me that
your
brother is the one that killed him. Although, I’m not sure if he was lying about that, too… come to think of it.”

“William?” I blinked. “William’s never actually killed a Hunter. He’s killed in defense of course, but never one we were positive was a hunter.”

“Not William,” she said, quietly, and the confusion I felt melted away. Romulus. She thought Romulus had killed her brother. I looked around us at the small cabin and thought of the neat and orderly arrangement. The attention to detail throughout the building and the dust that had still covered several surfaces downstairs.

“You said we were going to an apartment in Wisconsin.” She nodded. “This isn’t an apartment though.” She nodded again, tears welling at the corners of her eyes that she didn’t let fall. “This was your brother’s cabin, wasn’t it?” She didn’t nod this time but her head lowered and I sat back and let her gather herself.

I could understand her hatred for me now. I still didn’t agree with it, but I could understand it. If she had thought that Romulus killed her brother, a man that looked exactly like me, killed her only family... I could understand. How quickly she’d turned it around though... how she helped me. She must
really
hate Mathias Young.

“My brother is not part of the information you need to know. So I’d kindly appreciate it if we kept my private life, private,” she said in a quiet mutter. I nodded, even though she still hadn’t raised her head.

“We can do that,” I said. “I didn’t mean to pry but it does tell me a lot.” I gave her another minute before I spoke up again. “What did you want to know?” I asked and she finally looked up and took up her fork again.

“What was the arrangement between Mathias, you, and your brother?”

I winced. “Not my finest moment, I’ll admit. Declan had been running the pack into the ground. We knew that the pack was getting weaker and the internal politics were getting out of hand. We needed to do something, and Declan couldn’t remain the Alpha. Something needed to happen, and neither of us could bring ourselves to directly challenge our father for the seat. It’s frowned upon for a child to challenge his father for Alpha. It’s seen as being power hungry. So, we thought we needed to find a more underhanded way, a sneakier way to remove him from Alpha. The only way to do that though, was through his death.”

“So you arranged for Mathias to kill him?”

“We didn’t know what we were gonna do. We couldn’t think of any way to go about it that wouldn’t directly come back to us. We couldn’t think of a way to get around it. But then, one day, Romulus came to me and said that he had an idea, a possible way to remove Declan and the blame would fall on someone other than us.

“If a hunter killed Declan, then the blame would be directed elsewhere and we could take up leadership of the pack without looking like we were being power hungry brats trying to take over. We needed to be saviors, rescuing our pack from the chaos. We needed to
rescue
the pack, not steal it.”

“So, how did Romulus get in touch with Mathias? I mean, how would a blood born contact
the
Hunter of Hunters in the first place?”

“I don’t think he did,” I said. “I got the impression that it was
Mathias
who contacted
him
. That was what I gathered from the discussion with Mathias before you came to the rescue.” I shrugged helplessly, unable to really specify any further than that. I had always been known as the more level headed of the two of us. Between me and my brother, everyone had always commented that I had gotten all of the brains and control. It was uncomfortable for me to admit out loud that Rom had been the one to engineer just about everything. That I had been so much in the dark. No one, not even me, considered that Rom was smarter than we’d all given him credit for.

“So Mathias got in touch with the most insane Blood Born out there for... what? On a whim? Out of spite?”

“No. We’ve already established that he has plans for wolf-kind beyond killing them, like the Hunters have been doing for generations. Hunters have done nothing but hunt and kill us for a very long time now. So why would he suddenly change directions like that?”

She frowned and started working on her lasagna. We ate in silence for a few minutes while we mulled over our individual thoughts. I didn’t know for sure about her, but my mind was spinning out of control and as hungry as I was, the fantastic food suddenly tasted like so much bitter ash in my mouth.

“The real twist,” I said suddenly, “Is how he went about it.” She shot me a confused look, urging me silently to continue so I set down my fork and organized my thoughts for a moment.

“Mathias was supposed to kill Declan. That was the agreement. Kill him and just make it obvious that it was a Hunter. Instead he killed Declan and left his weapon behind. He left the garrote.” Her eyes widened at that and I bobbed my head in a nod. “Yeah, I know. He left The Hangman’s signature behind like a big neon sign telling everyone that he did it.”

“But why would he do that?” she asked. “It doesn’t make any sense to advertise like that. It just puts him and his family in danger.”

“Except he doesn’t have any family except for Chloe. And he doesn’t feel anything more for her than he does for anyone else. She was always just another piece on his chess board.”

“How do you mean?”

“I figured out that he intentionally put her in danger. Whatever he’s doing with the wolf-kind. Whatever it is that he’s up to, or trying to figure out, or whatever, he doesn’t have the approval of the higher ups. He was planning on using her as his leverage against his bosses. He wanted William to kill her so that he could play her as the martyr, the victim, and play the sympathy card to get them to approve whatever it is he’s already been doing under their noses.”

Her eyes widened at that and then narrowed dangerously as her mind set on that new bit of information like a dog at a bone.

“Whatever he’s doing he’ll be in a ridiculous amount of trouble if the higher ups hear about it. So he’s trying to find a way to get approval for his dirty experiments.”

“That’s the impression that I had,” I said with another nod. “Mathias is dirty. We’ve gotta find out what it is that he’s doing and out him to his bosses.”

“I don’t even know who his bosses
are
,” she admitted. “I might be able to find out, but it won’t be easy and it won’t be quick either.”

I gestured at my leg stretched out under the blanket. “Not like I’m going anywhere anytime soon. Here’s the thing, Ava,” I said, carefully using her name. “Mathias has proven himself to be both patient and methodical. We have to be just as patient in dealing with him, or we’re going to screw everything up and tip our hand.”

She frowned and chewed on her lower lip, a truly distracting action, so I looked down at the empty plate in my lap and set it aside, shifting my weight to try to get more comfortable on the bed. A sharp pain in the back of my leg caused me to bite off a curse and her head snapped up in my direction. Instincts honed by years of training had her running through the recent information and she glared at me.