37. Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Six

Owen

T he instant I caught the faint sound of movement inside her office, I picked Lana up and moved her away from the door she was about to open. An Alpha’s senses are stronger than most, and mine are finetuned to pick out details from a short distance.

Sounds, scents, shadows.

I’m hyperaware of everything that’s going on around me, at all times.

And right in this moment, I’m listening to the sound of someone snooping around in Lana’s office while I decide on the best way to protect my woman so I can deal with the threat lurking inside.

I use ASL to alert her to what’s going on.

She looks shocked, and that’s probably a good thing.

People who are shocked are easier to order around.

I gently lead her to the side of the door where she’ll be out of sight, and I sign for her to stay right there until I check if it’s safe.

She rolls her eyes, but she doesn’t move when I go back to the door.

She signs back at me, asking me to be careful, before she folds her arms tightly under her chest.

I smile back briefly, before I turn the door handle, careful to open it quietly.

The door itself makes a disturbing creaking sound as I ease it open.

I look inside to find a man standing behind Lana’s desk, with a vaguely guilty look on his face that he hides quickly under a frown when he sees I’m not who he’s expecting.

“Who are you, and what are you doing here?” he asks, with an air of authority.

He’s dressed like the guard who let me into the academy yesterday so I can guess his job title.

“Funny,” I reply. “I was about to ask you the same questions.”

“I’m head of the dayshift security team, and I want your name and reason for being here, and if you don’t give that information over right now, I’ll call back up to have you detained.”

Well, I guess it’s good to see he still knows how to do his job.

“I’m Owen Lennox, the new head of security at Goldcrest. And your name is?”

He glowers back at me, as he moves around the desk and picks a book up from the coffee table.

The guest book is bulky, and it takes dayshift guy a second to find my entry, despite the pen being wedged in the most recent spot.

“Huh,” he mutters, closing the book and setting it back down.

“Name,” I repeat, seriously tempted to use my Alpha command voice.

“Melvin Harcourt. Senior security officer. Ten years this month.”

“And what are you doing in Lana Cole’s office?”

His expression sours. “I don’t answer to you.”

Lana, who’s clearly been paying close attention to the entire conversation from her secure spot beside me, takes this moment to clear her throat, and to move into sight at my side.

I get to watch the color drain from Melvin’s face, as his actual boss throws him a questioning stare. She doesn’t even have to say the words. He knows he’s been caught doing something shady, and he’s eager to talk his way out of it.

“Ms. Cole! I was looking for you.” He gives me one last frowning glance before he goes back to Lana’s desk and picks up a file. He brings it toward us, and I move to let Lana step into the room and take it from him.

“You might want to rethink hiring Lennox Securities. One of their men has mislead you about his identity. Everything you need to know is in this file.”

She nods slowly, but she doesn’t open the file.

“I have a team member on standby to pick up and detain Peter Phillips. All you need to do is give the word,” Melvin states, throwing me a derisive sneer.

“That won’t be necessary,” Lana states, a tightness in her tone that I don’t expect. “Thank you for the information, but it’s not news to me and it’s irrelevant.”

She hasn’t even looked and she’s defending Pete.

My Beta must have made a good impression.

I take a few steps into the room and out of the doorway to let Melvin leave. He hesitates for a beat, clearly thinking about saying something more, since he didn’t get the reaction he wanted.

I stare at him until his gaze meets mine, and I let a growl rise in my throat that helps him to reconsider arguing his point with Lana further.

He gets the fuck out of the room.

I close the door and turn back to Lana.

She lets out a weary sigh as she drops the file on top of the guest book on the coffee table.

“He has a key to this office.”

It’s not completely unusual, but I don’t like it.

If he was only using it for emergencies, that would be one thing.

The fact that he used it to get in while Lana was out for no good reason …

Pete thought he was shady, and this behavior only confirms that observation.

“He’s head of security,” she says. “He has a skeleton key that unlocks any room in the building, just like the one I carry around with me.”

She gets into her chair and starts her PC.

“You’re not going to look at the shit he dug up on Pete?”

It’s unusual for someone not to care about that kind of information.

Yet, despite her constant refrain that she trusts her staff, she brushed it off as nothing.

That makes me curious.

Pete isn’t in the habit of telling people about that part of his past.

So, why doesn’t she want to know?

She looks up at me, her gaze steady. “I already know he used a fake name in the guest book, and it took all of thirty seconds to know he’d been in prison.”

Okay, my Beta definitely made an impression on her.

Her voice has a defensive edge to it, despite who she’s talking to.

I’m his Alpha. I know him, and I know the information in that file makes Pete sound like a petty criminal, when he was nothing more than a victim of circumstance.

She doesn’t know that, but she believes in him.

It’s a good sign for their fated bond.

“He uses a fake name because our clients don’t usually like to have an ex-con working for them, and it would be easy for them to find out about his background if he used his real name. He does it to protect my business. Because people make snap judgements when you’ve spent time in prison.”

“I get that,” she admits. “It’s easy to discriminate, but nothing’s ever as simple as it seems.”

“He got locked up for eighteen months for aggravated assault and battery.”

“So that’s what his file shows?” she asks, her tone curious.

I nod. “It’s what’s in there, but it’s complicated. It’ll show that he got out in nine months for good behavior, which is true. He ended up in prison because he saw three men, three Alphas, forcing an Omega into a car, and he stopped them. Knocked two of them out cold and slammed the other’s hand in a door so hard the guy lost a finger.”

Talking about it makes my blood boil, but she should know.

It’s a part of our pack’s history.

We never would have met Pete if it hadn’t been for that terrible incident.

“What? He went to prison for stopping a kidnapping?”

“He did. That’s how fucked up our justice system is. Being a working-class Beta who happens to be a good fighter, he saved Shadow from a horrific fate, but he went to prison for smacking three rich, well-connected Alphas around. They called it an “unprovoked and brutal attack”.”

She sits there, staring at me, wide-eyed. “But how … I don’t … How does that even happen?”

“We didn’t report the kidnapping attempt. Shadow was drugged and out of it when Pete got him away from those men. My Omega snuck out of our apartment window in the middle of the night because that’s the kind of thing he does. Pete took him to a hospital, and they contacted us once he was awake. Unfortunately, Pete lost his wallet during the fight, which is how those assholes were able to give the cops his name.”

“So, he saved Shadow’s life that night,” she says.

“And he was rewarded for that by being arrested the next night.”

“Wouldn’t the hospital’s medical records have shown Shadow was drugged by someone that night?” Lana asks.

“He asked for his records, but all they showed was that he had drugs in his system. The guys that took him were careful not to injure him. He hadn’t been hurt. So, it was our word against theirs, and when the cops involved are on the take, the rich guys always win.”

Too bad I hadn’t realized those fucking detectives were being paid to railroad Pete at the time.

It was a goddamned nightmare of a situation that brought our third mate into our lives, made all the worse by the extended stretch of time that we had to wait to claim him as ours.

Pete was tough. There was no question of that after seeing what he did to the men who tried to kidnap Shadow. He was strong enough to get through a stint in prison, and it felt like he needed some time to accept us as his pack, but that never should have happened.

He didn’t deserve it.

“That’s so fucking awful.” Lana shakes her head, her jaw clenching.

I can see how mad it’s made her to hear the full story. As someone who’s fighting against some powerful forces herself, she needs to know how dangerous rich men can be.

“The worse part is, Shadow didn’t learn his lesson.”

She raises an eyebrow at me. “ That’s the worst part?”

“All I do is worry about him,” I admit.

I ignore the wave of bitterness that washes over me at being back here, in the city where I was raised by obscenely rich parents who wouldn’t have hesitated for a second to pull the same shit on anyone they decided had wronged them.

“He brought Pete along this time, but Shadow doesn’t always sneak out with a partner in crime. It’s not safe out in this world for Omegas. If that attempted kidnapping didn’t make him see that, I’m not sure what will.”

“Well, if we want the world to be a safer place for Omegas, it’s up to us to start making it safer for them, in whatever ways we can.” Lana gives me a wry smile.

“That’s what you’re doing here,” I murmur.

She shrugs. “It’s not a bad place to start.”

Fucking hell.

She’s meant to be mated to us, and she’s basically admitted that she’s right where she needs to be. Here, in this messed up city, in this academy.

The world needs to change, that much is true.

She wants to be one of the people helping to make those changes happen.

That’s the most dangerous position to be in, and she’s chosen it.

No. It chose her.

She’s needed here.

That means … It means something I don’t even want to think about.

Her attention goes back to her computer when I’m silent for a while, pondering. I hear her softly click-clacking away at her keyboard. I try to imagine myself being here day after day, and the thought makes my whole body go tense.

“This place is why I left the city,” I confess, capturing her attention with that one sentence.

Her typing slows to a stop, and she lifts her gaze curiously.

“This place?” she asks.

“Goldcrest Academy. My parents were donors. They had my name added to the guest list for the first social the year I turned eighteen. When I refused to go, they gave me an ultimatum.”

Her eyes widen when I drop that last word.

She waits patiently for me to go on.

It takes me a minute to gather my thoughts, because every single time I think of that night, I get angry at my parents for turning into the monsters I always knew they were, underneath their polished exteriors.

Some small part of me hoped they were just bad at showing how they felt, and that part died when they revealed their true natures.

They never cared about me. Not one little bit.

I clear my throat. “If I came out here and went to that party, the expectation was that I was going to eventually choose an Omega to marry. That’s what would earn me access to my inheritance, in their words. If I didn’t want to do that, then as far as they were concerned, I wasn’t good enough to be their son.”

“Oh my God,” she murmurs. “I’m so sorry.”

“I walked out of the house that night, letting them think I was going to the academy, but I left the city instead, and I never once looked back.”

“That must have been hard.”

“It was the easiest decision I’ve ever made.”

They showed they didn’t care about me. I walked away.

It sounds that simple, because it was.

I’d already spent years mourning the loss of them as real parents.

They weren’t around much, never when I was hurt or sick.

I’d gone through the pain of that loss long before it was time to walk away.

“You really didn’t want to come out here, did you?” she asks, sounding concerned.

I shake my head slowly. “I hate this city. It’s full of awful people like my parents. People who think their wealth makes them better than everyone else. The kids I grew up with were entitled assholes, the way my cousins were starting to talk about women and girls was disgusting, and I just couldn’t stand any of it anymore.”

“Was it better, where you went?”

I laugh. “It was different. Kind of. I met Ezra. And I went wherever he needed to go, for a while. Moving around, it’s easier to pretend towns and cities are nice places to be. You don’t get as much time to find out about the awful stuff.”

“There’s good and bad wherever you are,” she says. “It’s just about finding ways to make the best of the good stuff and doing what you can about the bad. I know this place hasn’t been good for Omegas in the past, but I’ve already cut off the old donors, and I intend to make sure the Omegas here know I’m their guardian now and I’ll let them know what that means for their freedom of choice. I want to keep them safe from predatory Alphas and help them figure out what they really want out of life.”

“And you’ve been working with the Alpha Alliance, helping the women they rescued from that trafficking situation. I know that’s why Ezra’s out here, helping those Omegas recover from what they went through.”

“And that,” she says with a laugh. “It’s been pretty full on from day one, I’ll admit.”

She’s making a real difference here.

What she’s doing will change the lives of the Omegas in her care.

It’ll stop people like my parents from pushing their elitist bullshit onto future generations.

She’s breaking the system and putting it back together, discarding the rusted old parts in the process.

It’s admirable, and it’s impressive, but it also puts a large target on her back.

Powerful people don’t like to have the rug pulled out from under them.

They think the regular rules don’t apply.

Some of them will do anything to get their power back.

No matter how she feels about it, Lana needs to be protected at all times.

“The donors you talked about, those people who used to control who would be allowed to attend socials, I’d like the full list of them.”

She blinks at me. “Um, what?”

“I’ll need to check if any of them are likely to attempt a retaliation.”

She pales slightly. “You think that’s necessary?”

“These are people who think money can buy anything. You’ve changed the rules on them, virtually overnight. It’s completely necessary.”

“Okay,” she says, nodding. “I can do that. A few of them are in prison now because of those Alpha Alliance rescues.”

“I’ll take the full list. We can possibly rule out the guys who have bigger problems, but I’d rather know what I’m looking at to start with. Pete already has a list of your security guards, am I right?”

“Uh, yeah. He already started security checks with your company.”

“Good. I’ll need the full list of staff, too. Everything from the chefs to the cleaners.”

Her eyes widen. “You’re going to run checks on everyone?”

“It’s not usually necessary, but in this case, we can’t take any chances.”

She might not know she belongs to us yet, but she will soon, and maybe then she’ll understand why we need to be so careful. I’d want to be more cautious with anyone in her situation, and that goes double for my future true mate.

She looks anxious as she starts clicking and typing.

A few seconds later, the sound of the printer on her desk makes me groan inwardly.

Administrative work always has that effect on me.

It’s the least fun part of running my own business.

Lana gets up when the printer sounds stop.

She picks up the pile of paper and brings it over to where I’m standing by the side of the coffee table. Handing it over, she stands there and folds her arms under her chest.

“You know Melvin’s going to look even harder for more dirt now that he’s found some.”

I take the warning with a grain of salt. “He can look, but he won’t find shit.”

“These are the lists of staff and donors,” she tells me. “I’m not supposed to hand these out to just anyone, so you’ll have to fill out the form at the back before you start sending everything to your team to investigate. I need to scan it into our HR file before you’ve started working for us, and if anything’s off with the timings I could literally lose my job. Understand?”

She stares at me for a long moment while I consider how badly losing this job would affect her feelings for my pack. I’d do it, even if it meant she’d never speak to me again, if it was the only way to keep her safe.

I’d be lying to myself if I pretended it was.

As much as I hate being here, I can do whatever it takes to protect her while she does the good work she’s been doing since before my pack came into her life.

Sighing, I hold out my hand. “Do you have a pen?”

She picks one up from the coffee table and hands it to me.

I leaf through the pages until I get to the form.

Just looking at it makes me cringe.

But if this is what she needs, I’d better get it done.