Page 32 of Curvy Dirty Omega

Frankie and I still weren’t speaking after that incident in the parking garage. It was stressing me out because I was starting to feel like I was overreacting. I knew she wasn’t the kind of person to pass judgment so flippantly, but I thought I’d known people before.

A pattern of nearly fifteen years of her behavior might seem like enough to trust someone, to a normal person, but not to me. I thought I’d known my father, and I’d been so very wrong about him.

Had Frankie considered me defective this whole time and I’d just been oblivious?

Was I living a lie all over again?

“You should take a break.” Liam sat on the edge of the desk—his desk, and set a cup of coffee in front of me. “I’m pretty sure you haven’t blinked once in the last thirty minutes.”

Has it really been that long?

Checking the time up in the corner of the monitor, I saw it had and tried not to panic.

When the fuck was I going to find something that would give us a real lead? Frankie was relying on me to find the pattern and here I was…failing at that too.

“You definitely need some water at the very least,” Liam told me, setting a bottle of water down beside the coffee. “I’ll cut the power to the building if you don’t.”

Why was he always so intense?

Sliding my gaze from the footage to the massive alpha beside me, I tried not to let him see how fucking freaked out I was just under the surface.

If my failure to find a single lead hadn’t been bad enough, this legacy alpha and his psycho assistant constantly hovering in my peripheral would have been more than enough to send me into a spiral.

They were way too fucking interested in me, and I felt like I was slowly losing my mind.

Liam had insisted I do my computer work in his office, but not just in it – at his fucking desk. He’d given me all his passwords and logins as well as access to any server owned by Valor. Cassius had been quietly working at his desk to my left, that heavy presence and dark gaze making it difficult to sit still.

Frankie was out questioning the list of potential suspects and witnesses, leaving me alone in here with these two for the last six hours.

Normally, I wouldn’t be bothered working so closely with alphas, but these two exuded just enough pheromones it was all up in my fucking nose, and even their expensive filters couldn’t keep up with the smell of sharp, green apples and oranges mixed with sandalwood and vanilla.

Whatever Cassius had done to those alphas had his scent lingering on his clothes and now I couldn’t stop smelling it. Even Frankie had seemed shaken by his pheromones and I wondered for the thousandth time if I should ask her what had happened or not.

Why I hadn’t already, I didn’t know, and I didn’t really want to think about it.

“Do you think I won’t?” Liam asked, cracking open the water bottle when I didn’t answer.

God, I was way too exhausted to deal with him right now.

Pretending like I was fine was starting to wear on me, and I didn’t know how much longer I could keep going, especially when I’d reached the point in my day when I really didn’t feel like talking.

I took the water bottle from Liam, knowing he wasn’t bluffing. He was definitely the kind of alpha to force me into doing what he wanted with something as flashy and ridiculous as flexing his power – the kind that had nothing to do with his pheromones.

Water would help, but it wouldn’t get rid of the dry mouth no matter how much I hydrated. I could drink a thousand bottles of water and still be thirsty, because that wasn’t what my body needed.

My first heat had come a few weeks after I’d perfumed. Since then, I’d only had four, and they never came at the same time. There was no pattern to predict when the next one would come, and no warning signs at all, but this dehydration I felt in my mouth, my skin…

Was it because of these two and their subtle pheromones, or would it have happened on its own?

I could be losing my mind, or…

Or I really was reacting to an alpha’s pheromones for the first time in my fucking life.

Draining the bottle of water, I set it down and pushed the heavy plastic away before pillowing my head on my arms once more, watching the empty halls and floors speed through the hours.

Technically, I could have one of the rookie detectives do this grunt work, but it was bothering me that I hadn’t found anything other than a rough time frame and a missing wedding ring. There wasn’t a single piece of evidence to justify this feeling I had that Cassius was hiding something either.

Maybe he really wasn’t the murderer, but he was fucking suspicious, and I couldn’t find a single piece of evidence to make myself feel less like a crazy person. His phone records were clean, as were all his computers and tablets. Even the GPS on the cars matched their story.

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