13. Blaine

Chapter 13

Blaine

I t's approaching dinner time as I finish up my work in the kitchen.

We all have spaces we like to work. Garrison will almost always set himself up in our office/meeting room. Vaughn is anywhere and everywhere.

I've lost count of the times I've tripped over him sprawled in the hallway, flipping through a file or sharpening one of his knives. I ask him why he can't sit at a desk like a normal person. He says, "Blaine, what's the fun in that?"

So I step around him and remember to pay attention to my packmate who likes to make himself into a tripping hazard.

When my cell phone vibrates across the dining table, I stop typing and glance at caller ID. I immediately end the call.

Two seconds later, it vibrates again.

I turn it off, check the calendar on my laptop and muffle a curse.

Why is it the thing you spend the most time wishing away is the thing you're forced to confront over and over?

Things like hospital checkups and memories you can never forget.

Things like loss.

"We stay in the car," I tell Violet when she reaches for the handle of my tinted Jeep Cherokee. "This is a stake-out. That means no getting out to stretch your legs."

Her blue-green eyes wrinkle with annoyance. "It's been three hours."

"Just relax. We watch and snap the occasional picture. Then I take you back to headquarters and end a nice, easy first assignment."

We sit still, watching the house.

"I don't know why Vaughn was so against me coming." Violet huffs, blowing blonde bangs out of her eyes. "Hours watching mansion curtains. There has to have been a more interesting assignment than this."

There was.

Stakeouts are boring. It's why we all agreed this would be Violet's perfect first on the field assignment after she'd been pushing and pushing for months.

Two minutes later, she's shifting around, playing with the radio button, itching to get out.

That's Violet. I thought Vaughn was restless. Violet is something else.

As I slap a fly off my bare arm, my glasses slide down the bridge of my nose. I push them back up and make sure there are no mosquitos in the car. The only thing worse than surveillance is doing it while being attacked with no option to leave.

It's a muggy, humid summer afternoon, and even though we're out here in T-shirts and shorts, it still feels like too many layers.

Violet continues to squirm around in her seat. She unbuckles her seat belt, buckles it, then unbuckles it again, muttering she's bored as she knocks it aside.

I snort a laugh at her failure to keep still for five minutes. "I told you this was a boring assignment, Vee. That you would get bored. This requires patience."

"I have patience in spades," Violet snaps.

I raise my brow.

She's mid-denial when she twists around in her seat. "Someone is coming."

This is a quiet road. Just wealthy alphas with corporate secrets live here.

She's tried this trick before as an excuse to get out, saying a car was coming and the driver was acting suspicious. I peered around her, clocked an old lady taking out her trash, and looked at Violet. Violet suddenly had a pressing need to play with her phone.

"No one is—" I swallow the rest of my words because that does sound like a car engine, and the driver is speeding.

Crunch.

I slam into the side of the car as something crashes into us.

We're on the hills with mansions up ahead, quiet streets behind us, and no barriers between the road and the steep hill down.

We teeter on the edge as I grab for the wheel, yelling at Violet to get out.

Too late.

The car tips. My head slams into the windshield. Liquid runs down my face. Violet is screaming and I'm grabbing and grabbing for the wheel, the door, anything to save her.

Then the car flips. Over and over, each bang more violent than the next. Something ignites, the scent of gas and fire overpowering.

Our car comes to a stop after a series of never-ending tumbles.

"Violet?" I croak out.

Can't move. Smoke is filling the car, and lost glasses mean I can't see a damn thing.

"Violet?" I dissolve into a burst of coughing that burns my lungs. "VIOLET!"

Nothing.

Nothing but pain and fire and burning.

"Oh." A soft female voice yanks me out of nightmares and back to the present.

Resa is standing in the doorway, gripping a thin gray folder in both hands. "I'm just leaving this for Garrison."

But she makes no move to enter the room as her long, slender fingers tighten around it.

The NDA.

After Sadie's suggestion we show her what Lucas Security does, I hadn't thought Garrison would ask her so soon or Resa would say yes.

Our work doesn't lend itself well to getting to know clients after we've done what they pay us to do. They leave and we never see them again.

We check over their security systems, investigate corporate espionage (or we did until that last job with Violet), and we find answers to questions the police don't have the time or the resources to dedicate.

We rarely do fieldwork now. Frost or Roman do that. I haven't since Violet, and Vaughn is too much of a live wire to go out for long without someone with him. Field work or remote surveillance never interested Garrison. He likes to consult, person to person, at home.

Resa is more curious than I thought she would be. One day after Vaughn rescued her in an alley and, according to Lex, she's breaking into our computer room. He'd volunteered that information. I'd nodded, focused on my research and pretended I wasn't interested.

She is… surprising. Beautiful in jeans, bare feet and an oversized blouse as she hovers outside the kitchen, gripping that thin file hard enough to crease it.

"You can leave the file on the table. I'll make sure he gets it." Can she see my right cheek from the doorway or do I need to angle my head so she doesn't as she enters?

When she doesn't move, I focus harder on the background research I need to finish up on a prospective client. Can't with her walking toward the dining table, closing the distance between us.

Is she staring at the scar on my cheek or the one on the back of my right hand?

I dart a rapid glance her way.

Her gaze is on my hand. My right one.

A wave of searing anger flares up. Sudden, unexpected, and overwhelming.

The case Garrison picked out for her to work on is supposed to give her something to focus on, and give us—or Garrison—an opportunity to prove we're not like the alphas who hurt her.

The more she's around, the more I'm aware of my failings. Of my scars. Of how ugly they are, and how I don't want her to see them.

Yet here she is, staring at my ugly burns. And here I am, getting increasingly angry that she is.

What is she thinking?

They disgust her? That she can't wait to get away from the kitchen so she can laugh or mutter how she's glad not to be looking at them anymore? Is that why she waited until I was pretending to type on my laptop before she walked into the kitchen?

Resa deposits the file on the edge of the kitchen table, as far away from me as she can, and turns to leave. It's clear she can't wait to get away from me.

The turtlenecks hide the worst of them, but not all.

She's my scent match. Even if she doesn't want to be. She is my scent match and scars shouldn't bother someone I was meant to be with.

I snap my laptop lid down. "Do they bother you?"

She spins around and backs up, dark brown eyes with thick black lashes widening. "Does what bother me?"

"My scars. Do they disgust you?" I do nothing to hide my bitterness.

Her back stiffens and, try as I might, I can't read her expression. She's beautiful with an expressive face and a stubborn, pointed chin, but when she doesn't want someone to read her, that expressive face snaps shut.

"No. Your scars do not bother me," she says slowly.

"I don't believe you," I say as she turns to leave. "You were looking at my hand and you were thinking?—"

She looks me dead in the eye, face white, her fingers curling into tight fists. "You think I give a shit about your scars when I know what you alphas are capable of? What I was thinking was how I forgot my knife and how little I wanted to be alone with an alpha without the means to defend myself."

She spins around and stalks out.

" Wait !"

"I don't answer to alphas," she says, not slowing. "Find another omega who does."

I don't hear her cross the entryway, but there's no missing when she reaches the staircase. Vaughn picked fragments of glass out of her feet last night, yet she's stomping up those stairs as if determined to make each step hurt.

I sit down. Then I stand up. And sit down again, muttering a curse under my breath as I rake a hand through my hair.

Should I?—

Are you seriously considering following her up to apologize now? Now, after you scared her?

She won't want anything to do with me now. Furious at myself for lashing out, I tell myself to leave her alone. I've done enough damage.

Garrison walks in, looking poised to say something. After eyeing me for a beat, he seems to change his mind about what he was about to say. "Everything all right?"

"Fine." I flip my laptop open. "I'll have that background report for you later. This case looks straightforward."

Not messy like the case that killed Violet.

It wasn't the case that did that. You did. Remember?

Garrison's steps are silent as he walks over to the table and picks up the file. He flips through it and then nods. "Resa looked upset."

I slam my laptop lid down. "Go ahead, you can blame me."

His expression is inscrutable. "That wasn't blame. You like to blame yourself for a lot. Even for the things you're not responsible for."

We've had so many versions of this same argument before, we both know how it ends. I usually stalk out and spend even more time being a recluse, blaming myself.

So he doesn't push anymore. Neither does Vaughn.

It's not a surprise when he turns to leave, giving me the space he thinks I need to get over a past I never will.

"I made a mistake," I call after him.

Garrison stops in the doorway, angling his head to face me.

I nudge my glasses up my nose. That's another appointment I've been pushing back, and these glasses are sliding down my nose more than they ever have before.

"Resa was looking at my hands and I thought…" Garrison doesn't fill my pause, though he must know exactly what I thought. It's what I always think. "She wasn't staring."

"What was she doing?"

"Remembering that she'd forgotten her knife and wasn't sure she wanted to come so close to an alpha without one. I think she thought I would try to grab her." Meeting Garrison's eyes, I continue in a lower tone, "I wasn't expecting that. Because I wasn't, I scared her."

All I see when I look at myself are my scars. It's hard to believe anyone can look at me and not see them.

"Now we know." There's no sign Garrison blames me for something that was my fault. "We give her more space. She'll learn to trust us."

"She hasn't seen the worst of my scars."

"But she's seen the worst of alphas. She's seen the worst of us ." Garrison's gaze turns distant. "I imagine that's a thousand times worse than your scars."

He walks out, leaving me alone with my thoughts. And my guilt.

I look at my phone. It's off now, but I can't keep it that way. My annual checkup is now, and I can only dodge it for so long.

I pick up the cell phone. Power it up. Take in the voicemail symbol, a reminder I have to make an appointment to go to the clinic.

I turn my cell phone off, set it on the dining table and get back to a nice, uncomplicated case unlikely to blow up in all our faces and kill someone else we love.

It's boring, but it's safe.