Page 57 of Curvy Nerdy Omega

I eyed her as I spun the chair back around to face my monitor. “It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s genetic. Nathan basically said the same thing.”

“You’re not mad?”

I went back to sorting through the data the interns had collected and shrugged a shoulder. “No. If anything I’m grateful. He did it for me, but never made it my problem. I appreciate that.”

“Pretty sure he’d faint if you ever said that to his face.”

Hating Francisco was hard when he was so good at being an alpha. I just wished he would trust Frankie enough to name her his heir without worrying about what might happen. She could handle it. She’d survived this long even when living as a switch was damn near impossible in a legacy pack.

But Francisco was incapable of ignoring the overprotective instincts of a legacy alpha. It was his only flaw really when compared to all the other alphas in the world.

Frankie has been an alpha for fifteen years now, but she didn’t get the red eyes. Despite all the money he’s thrown into researching the outlier designations, Francisco still hasn’t found anything that will tell us if she’ll ever switch again.

I was pretty sure that was one of the reasons he’d pushed for Frankie and me to bond. There weren’t many cases, but all the bonded deltas they could find records of stayed in that designation.

But Frankie and I weren’t like that and never have been. She’s always been more like an older sister as well as my best friend.

The keys clicking and clacking as Frankie typed was the only sound for a while and it was just as soothing as the music I’d been blasting earlier.

My life was defined by my work, and for the first time in weeks, I finally felt like things were almost normal again. It was a relief to be able to see her working across from me like nothing had changed and hear her breathing in the same space as me.

The only difference was, we had an industrial air purifier in every room now and I was wearing my scent blockers inside the apartment.

Still, it was nice to pretend for just a little bit longer that everything was exactly the way it was before.

I didn’t have to make a decision right away. The mystery of what Liam had taken could wait until tomorrow because I had a feeling my relationship with Frankie was going to change drastically, sooner rather than later.

Every omega had to leave their family eventually, and for once, I wasn’t any different.

CHAPTER 22

Cas

Three days. It’s been three days since we’ve been in the same room as Lucy and I fucking swear it was the longest three days of my life.

Our omega had done a good job of pretending she didn’t want to find what Liam took from her. She’d focused on the case instead, and the hours she worked were just as bad as her heat. Did this girl ever sleep? I fucking swear, if we didn’t already decide on a rotation we’d be screwed.

But I loved watching her.

All I could do was sit back and admire the systematic way she attacked everything from all angles, constantly and consistently chipping away at the possibilities until she had something semi-decent to work with.

The way she gathered and discarded information seemed random at first, but eventually I’d been able to figure out what she was doing.

Her method was the difference between checkers and chess. Certain pieces could move in different ways and if you only knew how to move one space at a time, you would never fully understand why a knight moved the way it did, or how that was different from the bishop or the queen.

Lucy didn’t work from the outside in either. She took everything and then sifted through it, looking for the gold. Her eye for inconsistencies and gaps in time was unparalleled. I could never do what she did, and definitely not the way she was doing it.

Apparently, Gideon Valor had a second phone that no one knew about and instead of trying to figure out where it was, she was trying to find out where he’d gone with it.

I probably would have turned his shit upside down if I’d known about it, but that would have tipped everyone off that I was looking for something.

Liam leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head, eyes fixed on Lucy. Nothing short of a nuclear bomb could distract him from watching her, even when she was sleeping.

He was a legacy on the hunt and the shift in his eyes were proof that this was it for him – they were so dark they were nearly black. Liam was surprisingly calm despite the fact that Lucy was doing everything but looking for what was missing.

It made me fucking nervous.

He wasn’t the type to sit here quietly like it was all fine and dandy that his omega hadn’t called him after three days of anxiously waiting for her to remember he existed. Not that he would ever admit he was worried, but I knew him better than I knew myself.

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