by Aiden Bates
Hearing all of this felt like a little peek into the life that my youngest brother had carved out for himself before Bicroft or Carver Media or American Families First—or maybe all three—had put an end to him.
It also made me proud. Proud of Josh for the mark he’d made, not just on a journalistic level, but on the lives of others.
Proud that we were continuing his work—and this time, we’d see it through to the end.
“He was, ah, always reading books, back when we were kids. Total nerd.”
Derek smiled. “Guess some things never change. The week before he headed back here for the last time… He, ah, left me a copy of the last thing he’d been reading. Wild and Free. You heard of it?”
I shrugged. “Not much of a reader, actually. Teachers reckoned I had mild dyslexia. Not debilitating or anything, but the words sometimes get mixed around on the page when I try. Haven’t picked up a book since I became an officer, honestly.”
“Sometimes that gets better with age, though. You want to borrow it? It’s a memoir of an Omega who lived for six years all alone up in the Alps. Josh said it changed his life.”
“Huh. You liked it?”
Derek rubbed the back of his neck. “Never got around to finishing it. Guess I’m not much of a reader either. You can have it, if you like. Little… memento of Josh’s, or whatever.”
“Maybe when we head back to Harper and Nick’s.” I didn’t much like the idea of wrestling with words again, but if it had really meant that much to Josh…maybe it’d be worth a try. “Just to borrow, though. He intended it for you. You should keep it.”
“Maybe if you like it too, I’ll read it after.”
“The Joshua King book club,” I joked. “He’d love that.”
We fell silent, digging into the rest of our meals and letting the enjoyment of filling our stomachs fill the rest of the space, too. But as I finished my last bite, a sad question popped into my head.
Sad, but if anyone knew the answer to it…
“Josh…did he seem happy?”
Derek set down his fork, then glanced around the diner. It was emptying out now, and the few people who were still eating seemed more focused on their food than on us. Carefully, he removed his sunglasses to look me in the eyes.
“He did, yeah,” Derek said with a smile. “Happier than I would’ve been in his situation. I think journalism is always a stressful career, but Josh…he took it all in stride. Really seemed to know what he was supposed to be doing in life. I think he loved it. Even the bad parts.”
“That’s a rare thing.”
“Rare, but…admirable, huh? I’ve been trying to figure out how to be that happy for going on thirty years now. Don’t know how he managed it.”
“Me either,” I admitted. “Guess we should both learn how to take a page out of Josh’s book, huh?”
Derek laughed. “We can start with Wild and Free. Go from there. Maybe the Omega of the Alps knows something we don’t.”
7
Derek
We hung around Harper and Nick’s for the rest of the day while we waited to head back to the lab. Kaleb and Harper disappeared for a little while to pick up the mattresses that Harper had promised. Despite several offers on my part—and on Nick’s—they refused all help carrying them in.
“Alphas,” Nick said with an eye roll. “Give ‘em something big and heavy to move around, and you could keep them busy all day like that.”
After Nick and I had made up the beds, the living room was left feeling a little full. But if Nick seemed to mind, he didn’t let on. If anything, it felt like he was excited to have the house so completely occupied.
“What’s that?” he asked as I took the copy of Josh’s book out of my bag.
It was a little beaten up—Josh had obviously read it cover to cover more times than were worth counting—but still holding together okay.
“Book of Josh’s.” I passed it to him, careful not to trip over the mattresses. “I thought maybe Kaleb would like to read it. Josh left a bunch of notes in the margins. It’s kind of…sweet, right?”
Nick smiled softly as he thumbed through the pages. “God, and Harper calls me a nerd. It’s like Josh was preparing to write a book report on this or something.”
“Maybe he was,” I said with a laugh.
When darkness finally fell, Kaleb came into the living room from the backyard with a stiffness in his shoulders and a serious look in his eyes. “Derek? You ready to head back in to the lab?”
I took a deep breath and nodded. “Just let me get my shoes.”
We parked in the lot behind Arlington General. Justin was there by the back door, ready and waiting for us. The dark circles that were starting to appear beneath his eyes told me that he’d already had a long day. Dealing with his ex and a mysterious stranger’s lab experiment on top of it?
The man was a saint.
“Nice to see you without sunglasses on,” Justin told me, shaking my hand. He turned to Kaleb, looking him up and down for a moment. “Kaleb. Ah…nice to see you.”
“You never were a very good liar, you know,” Kaleb clapped Justin on the shoulder as he moved past him toward the door. “Glad to see that nothing’s changed.”
We didn’t see anyone as we entered the labs. In the rest of the hospital, I knew there must have been people around, but as far as I could tell, the other technicians must have all gone home for the night.
“I told everyone that I’m going to be working late catching up on some stuff,” Justin explained as he caught me looking around on high alert. “Anyone comes in, you can hide in the office—but it won’t look suspicious if I’m here running tests, at least. We’ve got about six hours before the first techs show up for the early shift. Will it be enough?”
“It’ll have to be.” I turned my attentions away from the possibility of discovery and onto the lab’s equipment. From the looks of things, they had everything I needed. “Thanks. I mean, for all of this. It means a lot.”
“I’m doing it for Josh,” Justin said, sending a sharp glare in Kaleb’s direction as well. “And for all the Omegas who could still be affected by this stuff if it turns out that you’re right.”
“Well…let’s get to work then,” I said.
With six hours and an empty lab at our disposal, I supposed there was no time like the present.
I took the vial from my pocket, helping myself to a test tube and diluting Bicroft’s chemical down with a nonreactive agent. Placing it in a centrifuge, my fingers hovered over the controls—but before I could send the machine spinning away, Justin grabbed my elbow.
“Want to walk me through what we’re doing here? It’s my lab, after all,” he reminded me.
“Ah…right. I want to separate out the base chemical from the carriers, figure out exactly what’s in these things. We’ll want to test for hormone content—how much, and of what—as well as anything that seems completely out of place. If my hunch is wrong, this should just contain reasonable levels of estrogen and progesterone. But if I’m right—”
Justin blinked, looking between Kaleb and I. Once again, his wheels were turning—and as his eyes fell on me once more, something lit up in them that sent everything crashing to a halt.
“Your name isn’t really Chase Connor, is it?” He crossed his arms over his chest, blue eyes steely and unamused.
I glanced over to Kaleb, then let my shoulders slump forward with a sigh. “No. No, it’s not.”
“You’re Derek Stillwell. I thought maybe I knew you earlier, and now…” He shook his head. “You should have kept your sunglasses on, man. I know exactly who you are.”
“No, you don’t.” Kaleb stepped between us, drawing himself up to his full height. “He’s been framed, Justin. He grabbed that vial from Bicroft’s labs, and now they’re trying to push all the blame for this over on him now—before any more heat comes down on them for what they’ve done.”
“Or before any more heat frenzies crop up.” Justin gave me a
nother suspicion-filled look, then drew a little closer to Kaleb, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Kaleb…do you really trust this guy? If he’s working with Bicroft and they’re the ones behind this—having one of their chemists suddenly show up with a mystery vial, it’s—”
“I’m not a chemist,” I corrected. “Just studied chemistry during my undergrad. Technically, I’m one of Bicroft’s suits. Or, at least, I was.”
“And sometime in between then and now, he was working with Josh,” Kaleb added. “He’s not an inside man, Justin. He was a pawn in Bicroft’s games, and now he’s trying to set things right. I trust him. Isn’t that enough?”
Justin’s eyes narrowed. “I dunno, Kaleb. That means that I have to trust you—not exactly something I feel terribly comfortable with right now.”
I groaned. If we only had six hours in the lab, we didn’t have time for this shit.
“Look—I get it. You’re on edge,” I told Justin. “You should be. But if I was one of Bicroft’s men, why the hell would I be wasting my time trying to process one of their chemical samples in your lab? You’ve heard the news reports. You know that they’ve burned me. And even if that was just a big, elaborate cover story to get me an in with Josh King’s older brothers, don’t you think a Bicroft super-spy would have better things to do with their time?”
Justin looked between Kaleb and me one more time, then held his hands up in surrender. “Okay. Okay. Good point. Let’s get to work, then.”
“Thank you,” I grumbled, turning back to the centrifuge as it made its final rotations.
Justin and I worked in tandem from then on out, with Kaleb lurking over our shoulders and asking too many questions for either of us to take the time to fully answer. As annoying as this whole relationship drama between Kaleb and Justin was, I quickly found myself feeling grateful that Justin was there to shoulder some of the scientific load. Basic chemistry wasn’t a stretch for me, but especially when it came to using the sequencing machines and operating some of the more complex equipment, Justin quickly became integral to the process.
Still, as we stepped back from the final machine, waiting for it to isolate and identify the chemicals in Bicroft’s concoction, I also couldn’t help but wonder exactly how deep Justin and Kaleb’s relationship went. The way they moved around each other—Kaleb instinctively backing away a half-second before Justin reached for an empty test tube, Justin inherently knowing exactly where Kaleb was going to be and planning his path around him without even having to think about it—coupled with Justin’s overall saltiness toward Kaleb made me feel like there was something a lot more serious between them than what Kaleb had initially let on.
Or, at least, there had been. And working alongside each other like this…maybe those feelings might bubble to the surface again.
As I mulled over that possibility, I found myself feeling a little flushed. It was embarrassing, worrying about whether bringing Kaleb’s ex in on this was going to lead to a second coming of their relationship or not. I couldn’t pretend that I hadn’t kind of enjoyed the idea of spending a night processing samples with the tall, muscled Alpha who’d sworn to protect me from Bicroft and everyone else who might want to put me behind bars, but I also couldn’t pretend that I had any claim to Kaleb myself.
After all, he was bad with relationships. I was bad with relationships. And if ever there was a time for two fuck-ups at love to start falling for each other…this certainly wasn’t it.
To my surprise, Justin’s mind seemed to be traveling down the same path of thoughts—only about Kaleb and I instead.
“So you two are staying at Harper and Nick’s place while you’re in town, I take it,” Justin said, the forced casualness of his comment apparent in his voice. “Those must be…pretty close quarters.”
I glanced over my shoulder, finding Kaleb asleep in a chair over in the corner of the lab. Far away enough to be out of earshot—not that it mattered.
“If you’re trying to figure out whether I’m fucking your ex-boyfriend or not, dig as much as you want.” I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand, feeling my own exhaustion settling in. The watch on my wrist told me it was well past two in the morning. I was too tired to mince words with Justin right now. “The first time I saw him, he was pointing his gun at me. Aside from that, he’s been a gentleman ever since.”
“Oh, Kaleb’s always a gentleman,” Justin assured me. “But gentlemen can fall into bed with handsome, mysterious Omegas just the same as anyone else.”
I laughed. “You think I’m handsome?”
“I think you’re Kaleb’s type.” Justin gestured up and down his own body. “Obviously. I don’t care if you two are an item, you know. I’m still willing to help. I just…you don’t need to feel like you hide it from me. Trust that I’m adult enough to be able to handle my ex-boyfriend moving on.”
“That’s sweet of you, Justin.” I forced a tired smile. “But no one’s trying to pull one over on you.”
“He’s a good man. A little focused sometimes, but—”
I laughed again. “Now it sounds like you’re trying to get me to fuck your ex.”
Justin rolled his eyes. “I just want to see him happy. I couldn’t give him that, and…like I said. He’s a good man. All the King men are.”
“I’ve gathered as much,” I admitted. “Doesn’t stop you from glaring at him every time he so much as opens his mouth, though.”
“Yeah, well…” Justin sighed. “It didn’t end in the best of ways. No relationship does, I guess. If I’d been a different type of person, maybe it would have worked out. Needy, some might call me. I want someone that I’m going to come first for, and with Kaleb…”
“Work comes first.” I nodded, leaning back against the counter behind us and crossing my arms over my chest. “Yeah, I’ve gathered as much. Sorry for prying. Kaleb said your break-up was mutual. If I’d known that there was so much baggage between the two of you…”
“You would’ve found someone else with access to a full medical lab to process your sample instead?”
Justin and I both laughed at that. He had a point. I didn’t know Fort Greene as well as Kaleb did, but I couldn’t imagine any other way we could have gotten access to the kind of tech that Justin could offer.
“Sometimes Alphas only see half the picture, huh?”
Justin smiled. “To be fair, technically the break-up was mutual. I was just…hurt, I think. Kaleb wants to save the world. Settles for saving the people in it on whatever level he can get. When he moved to DC and started aiming for making detective, I understood that we were on different paths. Just didn’t stop me from feeling like he’d left me behind.”
“If this is all still too…tender for you, you can head home, you know.” I could still see the hurt lingering in the blues of Justin’s eyes. “Kaleb and I can finish up here, lock back up before the early morning shift comes in.”
“Nah. Maybe it all still stings a little, but I’m not angry anymore.” Justin’s gaze lingered on Kaleb’s sleeping form for a moment. “How can you stay angry at a man who only wants to help people? It’s like hating Superman. He’s too good to hold a grudge against for long. But…”
“Here we go again,” I mumbled, sensing where this was heading.
“If you two do start to…develop something between you,” Justin continued. “Just keep it in mind. I’m not saying you’re interested or anything, but situations like the one you’re in…it’s hard not to develop a bond, I think. Kaleb’s a sweetheart down to his core, but his priorities can be hard to track sometimes.”
“Thanks, Dr. Phil.”
“Please. I’m Oprah, if I’m anyone. Just—”
Justin’s words were cut off by the sound of the sequencing machine spitting out data. We both dove on it like hungry wolves. Some of it was immediately useful—no narcotics in the sample. No immediately mysterious compounds that we had to puzzle out. But the bulk of the chemicals in Bicroft’s secret recipe were taking a little longer to proces
s—which meant all we had left to do was wait.
“I’m not chasing after your ex,” I said softly as we left the first round of results on the counter by the machine. “You really don’t need to give me this…whatever it is you’re giving me. Talking-to, or whatever.”
Justin snorted. “Yeah, okay.”
“What’s so funny about that?”
“He’s brave and charming, kind as anyone I’ve ever met and, well…”
Our eyes both fell on Kaleb again. The heavy line of his eyebrows, the way the muscles bulged in his arms beneath the cuffs of his t-shirt sleeves. The softness of his lips as he basked in the quiet peacefulness of sleep.
“He’s hot,” Justin finished. “I’d be surprised if you haven’t noticed yet.”
I didn’t have anything clever to say back to that. Not just because Kaleb was everything that Justin had said he was, but also because…
Well, he was hot. Hot as hell, in fact. Hadn’t I noticed yet?
Please. Obviously, I already had.
8
Kaleb
In my dreams, I was afloat out on the ocean, surrounded by life rafts that were all just out of reach. I stretched for one, my fingers grasping so close to its edge—
Only to be smacked away.
What?
I blinked my eyes open, drawing back and grimacing at the bright lights of Arlington General’s labs. The lights were eclipsed by two figures—and both of them were smirking at me.
“Having a nice nap, Detective King?” Derek asked, crossing his arms over his chest and looking smug.
“I wasn’t napping,” I grumbled. “And I told you—it’s Kaleb.”
“Well, Kaleb, while you were not asleep, we’ve finished processing the data and cleaning up here.” Justin looked smug, glancing over at Derek with a little glimmer of amusement in his eyes.
Great. All I had to do was drift off for a few minutes, and suddenly my ex and Derek Stillwell were BFFs.
