Heated Manipulations

by Aiden Bates

  There was a firmness in his gaze that told me this was goodbye for him. And just like that, every anxiety I’d had about us—about what this was becoming, about how little time together we had left—came crashing down around me all at once.

  In the wreckage that was left in my heart when it was done, it wasn’t fear that took hold of me, though.

  Out of the rubble, rage took its place.

  “No,” I said with the same finality that Harper had just leveled at me.

  “What?” Harper blinked, rocking back on his heels. “No? You can’t just say no, Nick. You’re not allowed to say—”

  “I’m allowed to say whatever I damn well like.” I crossed my arms over my chest, shaking his touch away. “Allowed to make my own decisions, too.”

  “I’m not saying you aren’t,” Harper backpedaled. “I know you’re your own man. You make your own choices. But this thing—”

  “This thing is important,” I finished for him, stealing the words from straight out of his mouth. “This thing—it’s dangerous, and it’s not a game, but it’s important, and it’s real.”

  “And it only keeps getting more dangerous. More real. That’s the problem, Nick—it’s real, and you could really get hurt. Nothing’s more important than keeping you safe.”

  “Josh thought this was more important than his safety,” I argued. “Joshua didn’t care that it might get him hurt. Probably even knew that it would get him killed, but that didn’t stop him.”

  “No, it didn’t—and it did get him killed! My brother lost his fucking life over this thing, Nick. Do you really want to do the same?”

  “It’s important,” I insisted, a pang shooting through me as I saw the pain in Harper’s eyes. “Josh wouldn’t have lost his life over it if it wasn’t. And yeah—I probably am in danger. Have been from the moment I first started helping Josh with the case.”

  Harper growled, throwing his arms wide. “That’s why I want to leave! To protect you, Nick. What about that don’t you understand?”

  “I was in on this thing long before you came along blowing up my phone and knocking on my door, Harper King,” I said, chin out and head held high. “If I’m in danger, then it’s not your fault. It’s my own.”

  “Then let me keep you safe, dammit! Let me leave—lead them away from you, take the heat with me when I go.”

  I scoffed, a sneer curling my upper lip. “Like that’s going to work. They know who I am now. Where I live.”

  “My fault,” Harper muttered beneath his breath. “All my damn fault.”

  “Not your fault. Mine. Mine, and only mine. You’re not responsible for my actions on this, Harper! Believe it or not, you don’t get to take credit for every bad decision in the world, every fuck-up that anyone’s ever made!”

  “I led them here!” Harper thumped his chest, raising his voice enough to make my ears ring. “Me! Not you, not Josh—me. So you looked at some fucking hashtags. So you gave Josh some leads. No one came sniffing around your place until I showed up, and now—”

  “Now we’re both on their radar. Now we’re both too tied up in this to back out now.” I widened my stance, holding firm. “What do you think happens when you leave, huh? I go to the store for groceries one day—or to one of my check-ups at Arlington General—and—”

  “And someone puts a knife between your ribs,” Harper finished grimly. “Or a bullet to your head.”

  “And there won’t be any big, strong, capable Alpha hanging around to stop them.” I let the silence fall over us for a few seconds so the reality of that statement could sink in. Harper needed to know that I knew what was at stake here—and he needed to know how important he was to me. How badly I needed him—now more than ever. “Before you came around, I was terrified for my life. The moment you moved in here, it was the first time I felt like I could breathe in a week. You make me feel like death isn’t just waiting for me around every corner, you—you fucking idiot! You and your fucking gun and your stupid detective work and your dumb, broad shoulders—you make me feel safe!”

  “When all I was really doing was putting a target on your back and looping the noose around your neck.” Harper shook his head. “Who’s the idiot then, huh?”

  “Doesn’t matter anymore.” I took a step forward, invading his space. Harper loomed over me, but my mind was already made up. “The only way out of this is through it. And whether you like it or not, idiot, you need me.”

  Harper stared me down for a moment, then a dark laugh left his lips. “I need you now, huh? What’re you gonna do? Go buy a gun? Take out all the bad guys yourself while I sit here on your couch, twiddling my thumbs?”

  “No. You’re going to keep doing your Sherlock Holmes-meets-Rambo bullshit, and I’m going to stay right where I am. Help you crack this thing. Help you solve this case.” I reached out to touch his arm, softening my gaze. “The only way we can fix this is to finish what Josh started. Reveal these bastards for what they really are. Put them behind bars so we can live our lives again. Without looking over our shoulders all the time. Without fear.”

  “Dammit.” Harper turned to pace my floor, stopping only to kick the side of the box he’d brought in from Wells’ place. “You don’t have any idea what my life is like, Nick. You don’t get to go around digging up things that big, powerful people want to keep buried without having to keep an eye on your back to make sure that no one’s trying to stick a knife in it.”

  “You can’t keep an eye on your own back,” I pointed out, feeling smug all of a sudden. “You need a partner for that.”

  “Maybe so—but you’re pregnant, Nick! You’ve got a baby to think about. A future to make for him or her. Me…” His shoulders lowered in a sigh. “I’m not worth that. I’ve been selfish to even pretend that I am. Selfish and stupid and—”

  I grabbed his wrists up in my hands, pulling his lips down to meet mine. It was a hard kiss. Just as firm and strong as the lips that I was kissing. The only kind that could have shut him up.

  He didn’t pull away from me, but he didn’t kiss me back, either. When I finally pulled away, there was remorse in his eyes.

  “I fucked up, Nick. Please, let me make this right.”

  “That’s not true. You didn’t fuck up—and you are worth it. You’re a fucking hero, Harper. Who else would’ve stuck around the way you have? Who else would have tried to get Josh justice instead of just letting this case go cold, get tossed into some file cabinet in a police station basement? Who else would’ve kept these fuckers from getting away with killing him?”

  “Josh is dead, Nick. There’s no justice for the dead.”

  “Maybe so,” I countered. “But I’m not. If you can’t get justice for Josh, let’s get it for me, then. For me and all the other Omegas whose lives got thrown to the sharks when that bad batch of pills hit the market.”

  “I…” That one seemed to have hit Harper even harder than I expected. He took a moment, closing his eyes and turning away from me. “I want to make this right, Nick. Course I do. But I’m…I’m worried that it won’t matter in the end.”

  I took his jaw in my hands, turning his face toward me so I could kiss him again.

  “It will always matter. To me. To the others. To this baby.” I moved his hand down to my stomach, folding my palm over his knuckles. “It’s never going to stop mattering. No one else is batting for us, Harper. Only you. And…and, well, and me. If you’ll stay. If you’ll keep fighting.”

  Harper stared down at me, looking half dazed. “If I let you help.”

  “Exactly.” A small grin tugged at one corner of my mouth. “So say it, then.”

  “Say what?”

  “Say that you’ll stay.”

  Harper’s chest rose and fell. Finally, he nodded. “I’ll stay.”

  “Say you’ll keep fighting the good fight.”

  He cocked his head to the side. “It’s not a good fight. It was ugly from the get-go. If anything, it’s only going to get uglier.”

  “
Say you’ll have me.”

  He smirked. I watched him try to fight it. Watched him fail to. “In what way?”

  His grin was infectious. The smile on my own lips started to bloom beneath his gaze. “As a partner in this, for now. After…we’ll talk, I guess.”

  Harper took another deep breath, then nodded. “Yeah…okay. Okay. We’re in this together. Like it or not.”

  “Good.” I wrapped a hand around the back of his head and pressed a final kiss against his cheek. “Then let’s get to work. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover on this.”

  I felt Harper melt against me. “A lot less, now that I’m not doing this alone.”

  I eyed the box at our feet, wondering what kind of secrets it would reveal to us. What kind of leads it would siphon up out of the mud and muck and confusion. If it would take us to the top of this whole thing…or if, god forbid, it would only be another mystery. Or worse, a dead end.

  No matter what…

  There was only one way to find out.

  “Let’s open this bad boy up, then,” I said, giving the box a nod.

  Harper’s fingers curled against my stomach for a moment before he pulled his hand away, kneeling next to the box and lifting the lid. “No way out but through it.”

  21

  Harper

  Nick’s living room looked like a warzone for paper soldiers by the time we hit the bottom of the box. File folders, newspaper clippings, expense reports and copies of contracts were strewn across every available surface, making the room look more like Adrian Wells’ office than I was comfortable with. As I thumbed through the contents of the box’s final manila envelope—a bunch of printed-out blog posts all launched over the same month on how Omegas could raise an unexpected baby without an Alpha in their lives, I wondered how Wells had gotten caught up in this in the first place. He had obviously been one of Josh’s primary sources—but how he’d gotten hold of all these documents to begin with had yet to be seen.

  “This is weird, Harper.” Nick looked up from the armchair he was perched in, a series of cut-outs from small eastern US newspapers spread across his lap. “There are thirty of these articles from the northeast six months ago talking about a sudden outbreak of overactive Omega heat, but only three of them even mention the birth control pills as a cause—and two of them only talk about it in passing. Like it’s some kind of conspiracy theory that they had to mention, but didn’t have any actual proof of.”

  “Whereas we know that the pills were definitely to blame.”

  Nick nodded vigorously. “Definitely. Everyone I’ve talked to—plus, obviously, my own experience—is more than enough proof to point to the pills. So why wasn’t there a recall? Why isn’t it being reported on?”

  “No idea,” I grunted honestly, picking my way across the room to have a look at the articles for myself.

  Only a tiny local newspaper from a former mining town in Pennsylvania had accurately reported on the pills. The reporter, Peter Preston, had obviously done his homework. The two others—one from Boston, one from Philly—only talked about the pills like they were some kind of joke.

  With a little digging in another pile of clippings, we managed to uncover two more stories that talked about the pills with a little more seriousness. Unfortunately, the back side of one revealed a story about an alien abduction that had resulted in the birth of ambidextrous triplets. The other was from a gossip rag that seemed more interest in the pregnancy of an Omega Broadway star who cited the pills as the cause of his heat. Not exactly the kind of thing you could take into court as evidence—and certainly not the kind of thing Josh could’ve used in his article on the case without more hard evidence to back it up.

  “Don’t know what to make of this,” I grumbled, handing the additional clippings over to Nick. “Maybe these other papers just…didn’t bother to dig enough for the full story or something?”

  “I don’t think so.” Nick shook his head grimly. “These Boston papers are staffed with former Harvard grads. The New York and DC ones would’ve been penned by the same people who normally cover election scandals and terrorist attacks. And, I mean—come on. The pill story was huge here in the south. No one was quiet about it here.”

  “Maybe people were more vocal about it down here? Southern pride and all that.”

  “Maybe…” Nick scoffed. “You should’ve heard the Omegas talking about it when I went to the pharmacy to get rid of the rest of the pills in that pack. People were furious. Extremely vocal. And if southern politeness wasn’t enough to keep people from talking about it down here, can you imagine the buzz that must’ve been going around in those big Omega communities in New York?”

  “So if the New York papers failed to mention it…”

  “It’s because they didn’t want to.”

  I moved a stack of files off the couch and onto the coffee table so I could sit down and think. “That is…unusual. To say the least.”

  “More than unusual. It’s bad journalism.” Nick made two piles of his news clippings—one for the clippings that didn’t mention the pills at all, one for the others. He reached over to hand me the former. “Maybe we ought to get into contact with these journalists who stayed quiet on the subject. And this Preston guy who actually bothered—he’s worth hitting up as well.”

  “What about the Broadway Omega from that gossip mag? He must be high profile enough in the theater community up there, he’s probably at least got a bit of an online following.”

  Nick fanned his stack of news clippings out between his fingers like a royal flush. “At this point, I’m even willing to talk to the conspiracy magazine author. See if they’ve written about it anywhere else.”

  “Or if…” I bit my tongue, feeling that old inclination to keep Nick out of the worst possibilities of this case rise up inside me again. I swallowed it back down, though. If we were going to be partners in this, then I couldn’t keep Nick in the dark. “If they’re even still alive.”

  “If Josh had access to this stuff through Wells, then he probably already reached out to them himself.” Nick gulped, a flicker of fear flashing across his eyes. “Or at least, he probably tried.”

  “Worth a shot.” I placed my stack of newspaper clippings down on the coffee table with the rest of the papers. “Right now, I’m a little more concerned with the police chief being up our asses, to tell you the truth.”

  “You don’t seem like the kind of man who enjoys having anyone up your ass at all.” The fear in Nick’s eyes was replaced briefly by a glimmer of wickedness.

  I laughed. “I mean, I’ll try anything once. But the local PD…” I grunted. “Don’t like the idea of them sniffing around us while we’re following up on all this. Could cause some friction that we don’t exactly need right now.”

  “So we do it carefully,” Nick agreed. “If you wanted, you know…I could run with this digitally. I don’t know if you’re aware or not, but I’m, ah…kind of a master of social media, so to speak.”

  “Yeah? You gonna, like, DM and retweet us to solving this thing?”

  Nick shrugged, looking smug. “Something like that. Newspapers operate just as much online as they do in print these days, and journalists all have to do upkeep on their social media accounts to keep their jobs. No one wants to hire someone who can’t pimp their own stories to the masses now that clicks and views are just as important as selling physical copies.”

  “And you think you can track these reporters down? Get them to talk to you?”

  Nick’s blue eyes glimmered with devious cleverness. “Nothing a journalist hates more than some idiot with a Twitter account suggesting they haven’t done their job right. Trust me—their egos won’t allow them to dodge my questions. And we won’t even have to leave the house to get to them this way, either.”

  I ran my thumbnail up and down the length of my index finger, mulling over what Nick had just proposed. On one hand, he was right. Flying all over the northeast to follow up on these leads would cost a lot of money.
Take up a lot of time. And it would put me out in the open—leave Nick unprotected back here in Fort Greene. On the other hand, it wasn’t normally how I did things. Any change to my normal mode of operations always left me a little twitchy. Uncertain. Uneasy.

  Back on the first hand, though—the Fort Greene police couldn’t track our movements if we were only making them from here inside the house.

  Back on the other hand, if this went as high up the totem pole as Wells’ three proxies suggested, there was a good chance that we weren’t just being watched physically. There could be digital surveillance going on as well.

  “I’m not going to be able to talk you out of this, am I?” I finally asked, coming to the most important conclusion of all: I’d told Nick that I’d let him help, and he was just as stubborn as I was. If not even more so.

  Nick grinned as he moved from his armchair onto the couch next to me, pressing a triumphant little kiss to my cheek. “Not a fucking chance.”

  I groaned. “Okay. But only from here inside the house. Not on your phone, not from the library. Nowhere that you could be seen. Nowhere where you can be stopped.”

  “Naturally.” Nick chuckled. “I’d have to change out of my sweatpants if I went anywhere else.”

  “Incognito mode on your browser. I’ll set you up with a VPN. No tweeting or emailing from your personal account either—this all needs to fly completely under the radar. None of this can be tracked back to you.”

  “You got it, hotshot.”

  “And, Nick…”

  “Yes, darling?”

  I turned my body towards his, feeling a warmth wash over me as I saw the hopefulness on his face. This was our chance at a real, proper break in this case. Someone had convinced all these journalists to stay quiet about the botched pills—and whoever they were, they were powerful enough to succeed at it, too. Either through money, through blackmail, or through outright threats. If Nick could get at them, figure out where this all led…