Page 239 of Ruined Beta

Her warm, fuzzy feelings for me are back.

That’s what I want to make her feel.

It’s what she makes me feel.

“I love me, too,” she jokes.

I laugh and hug her close.

“Well, anyone would.”

Chapter One Hundred Twenty

Leanne

Nine Months Later

I wave a folded-up newspaper in front of my face, because it’s later summer and the city feels like it’s on fire. On the bright side, I’m close to dropping so I’ll stop being the size of a house at some point, and we’ll have the Spencer pack’s first baby to marvel over.

Spencer walks into the main office, a smile on his face. “That’s it. The last of those fuckers have gone down.”

He puts the paper in front of me and I read the headline.

“They finally got Trent Quinn. That took forever.”

“Well, he was hiding in the Cayman Islands, but he came back for some kind of legal custody battle.”

“Ugh. That creep had kids?”

“Nah. It was over a car, I think. His wife took most of his shit in the divorce.”

A bunch of Harlan’s clients went down that way.

Spouses left them, kids and parents disowned them.

Plus, they all went to jail. Most of them had at least a couple murders on their charge sheets in the end. Some had more than that. Most of them buried the bodies in their own basements or yards, so the FBI didn’t have too hard a time finding that evidence.

Harlan West did go to jail, but someone related to one of the missing girls who died shived him to death in the prison shower block a few months after he was locked up.

I can’t say I’m sad about it. Neither can any of my guys.

Aldhard Shultz went to prison for his part in E.A.’s mother’s death. We don’t talk about him. He wasn’t E.A.’s real father, and he wasn’t a good person.

About half of the victims we extracted had family they could go back to when they recovered from their ordeals. Some of the others had friends. There are twenty women still living and recovering at the academy. It’s not going to be easy for those women, but at least now they have a fighting chance.

“Where have you been, anyway?” I ask Spencer. “We’ve got like ten minutes to get to the courthouse.”

“It’s only a five-minute walk away,” he reminds me.

“Yeah, sure. How many minutes waddle is it? Because that’s what I’ll be doing. I’m part-penguin now.” I get up, and thankfully I don’t need to pee.

“You’re not part-penguin,” he tells me. “Even if you were, penguins are cute.”

“You didn’t answer me,” I remind him.

“No time, we need to go. The guys are waiting.”

I let him hustle me out of the agency, and I walk with my hand on his arm.

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