Page 207 of My Unhinged Alphas
Marek says, “You all look terrible.”
“We need help tracking someone,” I say.
That gets his full attention. “Someone,” he repeats. “Who?”
A dozen answers move through my head at once. The girl who has come to mean so much to me, the one person I’ve let in for the first time in my life.
What I say is, “Someone important.”
Marek studies my face for a moment, and something in his own shifts. Not understanding, not yet. Just caution. “I didn’t know you were currently on an active mission.”
I glance at Vale. Then Havoc.
They both catch it. The smallest look. Enough.
The less Marek knows, the better.
Havoc answers for us, easy as ever. “You know how it is. Things get messy.”
Marek doesn’t look convinced. “That’s not an answer.”
“No,” Havoc says. “It’s the one you’re getting.”
Marek’s mouth goes flat. He doesn’t like being handled, but he dislikes uncertainty less than he dislikes the three of us showing up smoke-stained and desperate at his door.
Vale says, quieter, “We don’t need you in the whole thing. We just need eyes.”
Marek exhales through his nose and finally moves toward the desk. “I hate all of you.”
“That makes four of us,” Havoc mutters.
Marek shoots him a look, then pulls out the chair and flips open his laptop. The screen lights up his face in cold blue. “Start talking.”
I step up behind him with Vale and Havoc on either side, all three of us gathering around the desk close enough that the room feels smaller. Marek’s fingers hover over the keys.
“Address,” he says.
I give it to him.
He types it in, expression tightening slightly as the map resolves. “Residential.”
“CCTV footage,” I say. “Anything can help. Street cams, traffic cams, private systems on neighboring houses, delivery cameras, security feeds. We don’t care how small it is. We need movement in and out.”
He starts working. Windows open. A grid of maps, municipal feeds, private networks he definitely should not have access to. I stand behind his chair with both hands braced on the backrest so hard my knuckles ache. Havoc leans in on one side, Vale on the other, the three of us bent toward the screen like if we get close enough something useful will appear faster.
Marek is halfway through pulling up the first street feed when the laptop screen cuts to black.
One second there are maps and camera grids and system windows layered over each other, and the next there’s nothing but a dark screen reflecting the four of us in warped outline.
Marek stops typing. “What the hell?”
A shape begins to resolve out of the black.
Not a full face. More like a man seated somewhere with no light behind him, only enough illumination to catch the edge of a jaw, the line of a collar, the stillness of someone entirely unbothered by the fact that he has just taken over another man’s computer.
My whole body goes tight.
The voice that comes through the speakers is calm, male, and old enough to sound dangerous for it. “Marek.”
