She wouldn’t take his demands well.
“You all need to fix this and find me this damn Omega so we can question her. Your jobs depend on it, Shan,” Knoxwell said, my brain tuning back in to listen. “And I want an explanation for why I wasn’t informed about the Omega situation.”
“We didn’t believe there was a connection, and wanted to respect her wishes of staying anonymous.”
Our team leader had a smooth response for everything, but Knoxwell was too smart to buy that one. He scoffed. “I’ll expect a better explanation than that on my desk. My team will handle the club. Your team will find the woman.”
“Her name is Freya,” Caspian muttered under his breath.
My fingers tightened on his and I pulled him tighter to me, releasing a breath when the Director didn’t hear the admonishment.
The area was quiet once he left, his heavy business loafers clomping against the ground until he was a street or two away. I’d had enough time to brace myself for Shan’s hands around my neck by the time I was pinned up against the wall. My boss was looked like an avenging angel as he choked me, wings out and glowing beneath the dim light of the moon. He’d dropped all pretense of civility, his expression unrestrained rage. My airway was restricted enough to trigger my body’s fight response, but I simply clenched my fists tight by my side and glared at him.
“Are you going to give me a chance to explain?” I asked, voice raspy.
“I don’t think I need to hear your explanation for why you let her be kidnapped right in front of you,” he hissed.
His wings flapped once, pushing him closer and increasing the pressure on my neck. Caspian’s jaw dropped, his hands grabbing one of Shan’s forearms in a feeble attempt to get him off me. “There’s more than meets the eye,” Caspian said, looking between the two of us. “What are you going to do, Shan? Kill him? Beat him? I won’t let you.”
The fire in Shan’s eyes diminished from a blazing inferno to a… well, only to a slightly less blazing inferno. But his grip dropped from my neck and I could suck in a full breath again, so I counted it as a win. “I don’t care that you love him, Cas. If his explanation is anything short of stellar, he’ll be dealing with the consequences of his actions,” Shan said darkly.
Caspian went bright pink, and I blinked a few times, looking at him. Apparently every one of Shan’s attempts to subtly push us together now didn’t matter, and he was going straight for the full shove. I was a little flushed as well, but this wasn’t the time. By my calculations, I had about thirty seconds to say something worthy of saving my poor face from a black eye.
I skipped the back story and got straight to the point.
“Freya is the killer we’ve been looking for. She’s also the one who wiped my memories.”
Shan’s eyebrows scrunched together before understanding dawned on his face and he cursed. His tightly controlled rage exploded as he kicked a dumpster across the alley, the metal screeching back against the pavement until it hit the brick wall with a resounding clang. Caspian’s eyes were wide, his lips parted, completely unbelieving. “There’s no way,” he said.
“No, it makes perfect sense,” Shan said. The string of cussing was creative, to say the least. “I was an idiot not to see it. She clammed up every time I asked about the killer, and I even thought that she wouldn’t let anyone protect her. Of course she was protecting herself. Every man killed was an Alpha, and I’m willing to bet they expressed unsavoury interest.”
“They did,” I agreed. “At least the one I caught her killing.”
“That’s why she wiped your memories?”
“Yeah. She was tending bar the night I went in, and left before the club closed. I was feeling protective and wandered around back to check on her, only to find her seconds away from being assaulted. Except, she saved herself from the situation.”
“And you saw her kill him?” Shan asked.
“Yes. She was upset I’d ruined her fun and she wouldn’t be able to torture him. Stabbed him right in the heart. He was a vampire Alpha, so it killed him instantly.”
“I should have fucking known.”
I shrugged. Would I have figured it out if I’d been in the field, if the entire memory loss ordeal hadn’t happened? I had no idea. However, I wouldn’t deny Shan was off his game with the witchy Omega woman.
“Remember how I told you that you should trust her?” Caspian accused. “If you’d trusted her, she would have told you.”
Shan turned his glare on Cas, and the incubus reared back. I caught him in my arms, glaring at our leader. He might have known about Caspian’s feelings for me before I did, but he was oblivious in his own way. Cas loved him no matter how much his stoic ass tried to pretend he didn’t love him back. Them being mad at each other wasn’t natural.
“She’s a killer,” Shan said. “I had good reason not to trust her.”
I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t see Caspian anymore, but I could imagine his look of disbelief. “We’rekillers!” he said. “We’re glorified assassins. The Next Life Company tells us to jump and we ask whose turn it is to die. If we’d told her the objective of our mission, she would have told us everything.”
The way Shan’s jaw twitched told me he was gritting his teeth, trying to hold back the denial on the tip of his tongue. I had to agree with Caspian, but I knew why Shan hadn’t been on board before this information came to light. He wasn’t the type to throw caution to the wind. At least, he hadn’t been for the last two hundred years since his Angel of Chaos moniker went out of favour, until Freya had entered the picture.
In order to put a hold on the lover’s quarrel, I shifted the topic.
“She went willingly with the man who took her, by the way. There was no fight or struggle at all. When she saw me outside the club she recognized me, and I think she put the pieces together on who I must be in the grand scheme of things. Before I could move after the shock of regaining my memories, she spelled me to be immobile.”
