Page 10 of Curvy Quirky Omega

Lucy nodded, but her eyes never left Liam.

I was still trying to wrap my fucking head around this new development and these two were sprinting ahead like everything made perfect sense…if I was shaken by all this then Liam had to be spiraling even if he looked completely calm.

No one would ever think he was about to crack.

“I haven’t found any connections between the assigned badges and the security logs, but I’m working through it,” Frankie told me, her voice muffled thanks to the mask. “I’ve asked my team of interns to go through all the security footage at the Buttercuppa Coffee café as well. If I can get footage from the surrounding buildings pulled too, I will.”

“Sounds good.” Lucy grabbed her phone and swiped before typing something into it. “Hopefully, we’ll have a license plate number soon. I’m also working on the evidence I need to prove Gideon was laundering money through Valor Construction but it’s time-consuming. Dane’s cooperation should speed things along though.”

The energy in the room shifted, and I put my body between her and Liam. I could feel the crack in him widen like it was about to split right open and if I could sense it, then so could Lucy.

But she stared down at her phone like he didn’t exist, typing something up with single-minded focus.

“Right,” Frankie said slowly, her gaze flicking anxiously between Liam and Lucy. “I don’t really like giving verbal reports so I’ll type one up and send it over when I get home.”

“You’ll give it to me now and then type one up when you get home,” Liam snarled.

Lucy looked up at him with narrowed eyes, her anger flaring.

Frankie rolled her eyes but didn’t argue. “Dane isn’t lying and he isn’t trying to get away with anything. I’ll make sure to attach my profile on him when I send over my report, but he’s ex-special forces. If he didn’t want to tell you something, no amount of torture would have gotten it out of him.”

Which was what I’d tried to tell Liam, but the asshole hadn’t mentally been in a place where he could accept that.

“Lucy went through all his tech as well as his burner phone,” Frankie reminded us, lifting up one finger as if she were counting. “She also went through Melinda’s phone and everything he said matches up with what she found.”

Frankie added a second finger to the first like she couldn’t sense the danger either, but I knew better now. She was still a legacy alpha even if she didn’t get the red eyes. “He didn’t know that Melinda told Gideon she was pregnant. No one knew or she would have gone to see Dr. Humphries. I don’t know why Gideon didn’t have her see him, but maybe she told him she did. Who knows. Until she was sure the baby would stick and that it was Gideon’s or Dane’s, it makes sense that she’d try to cover all her bases since she didn’t seem to know Gideon was planning to leave.”

Liam laced his fingers behind his head and tilted it up to stare at the ceiling, looking far more relaxed than he should be, and I didn’t trust it all.

“Dane Valor has no motive to kill Gideon,” Frankie told us, lifting a third finger. “Melinda and the pack were going to be his as soon as Gideon left. All the communication between him and the other party was about Gideon’s safety so he had no reason to believe it had changed the night someone murdered his cousin. Gideon took advantage of Dane’s trust and so did the other party. They used that blind faith to sneak into the building. And there’s something Gideon never told Dane.”

Lucy tapped her phone again and mine vibrated a second later as did Liam’s. “A few weeks after Melinda told Gideon she was pregnant, he put this property up for sale.”

I grabbed my phone and tapped the message to see it was a huge house and about as far away as Gideon could go without leaving the continent.

“A company purchased this house last August,” Lucy explained. “That company was created about two and a half years ago. Took me forever to trace it back to Gideon, but this consulting company was the one he used to launder money with for his deal with the Steele pack.”

Another message popped up and I gritted my teeth as I selected the link to the shared drive she’d set up.

“Gideon was purchasing materials from the Steele pack for the construction company and then when they were ‘lost’ en route, he got a deposit that I was able to trace back to Randolph Steele at half what the materials cost.”

She’s been busy.

On one hand, I was proud as fuck of Lucy for managing so much in such a short amount of time, but on the other hand, I knew this was only going to make Liam worse.

“So…” Liam trailed off, staring at the ceiling like a solution to all these problems might fall from the sky. “Gideon was trying to run away.”

“He was,” Frankie reminded him. “But he wouldn’t put this house up for sale only seven months later without doing any work to it.”

Liam shrugged a shoulder like this was any other day, but it wasn’t. This was the day he’d learned his brother was planning to abandon his pack without saying a word.

He was about to go ballistic.

I angled my body to protect Lucy in case he suddenly lost it.

“While you were interrogating Dane, I was looking through Gideon’s computer again and I pulled the evidence of what was being sent offsite,” Lucy explained. She gently placed her phone on the desk and hooked her thumbs in her belt loops. “All the evidence is in that drive as well as the various different programs that were secretly installed on Gideon’s computer.”

Liam scrolled through his phone and paused, vacantly staring at the screen. “These transactions…”

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