Page 38 of Rivers and Roads

He stared with wide eyes. “You could have fucking died. You…” He stopped abruptly, and I desperately wished I knew what he’d been about to say. “You want me to thank you for this?”

“Yes,” I told him, lifting my chin. “Because we need your dumb ass. You were not expendable, Zane.”

His silence only served to make me angrier, and instead of picking a fight, I stood up and stormed out of the cabin. I snagged the phone on my way, and when I was a hundred feet from the door, I punched in Kor’s contact and listened to it ring.

Three, then four passed, and I was certain I was going to get a voicemail when the one person I didn’t want to speak to picked up. “Orion.”

I closed my eyes. “Misha. I need to speak to…”

“I know, but he’s with Francisco and Theo right now,” he interrupted, sounding actually apologetic. “He asked me to answer if it was you.”

I didn’t want to take my anger out on Kor’s Omega. The kid didn’t deserve it. Hell, no one did. “Look, I just need to talk to Danyal, okay? I know Kor didn’t want any communication going wild, but…”

Misha sucked in his breath, and I went silent. “I thought he told you this morning.”

“I didn’t speak to him this…” I stopped when I realized it had been Zane’s call. “That wasn’t me. Zane woke up from whatever fog the humans had him under.”

I heard Misha let out a tired sigh, and then the sound of something soft, like he’d sat down on a bed. “Right, I forgot.” He went quiet a long moment, like he was bracing himself for something. “Danyal’s missing.”

My heart immediately began to speed up. “I’m sorry, what?”

“We think Danyal went to look for Zane,” Misha said. “When we got word that Nadya had to light up ComTech, and you didn’t get to the burner Kor sent in the time he had anticipated, we all sort of assumed that you uh…were taken.”

It’s what I would have assumed. “So, he just went after Zane?”

Misha made a soft noise of assent. “We don’t really know. All we know is that left in the middle of the night. Mikael managed to tap into a traffic cam, and we saw the humans take him.”

“That stupid fucking bastard,” I spat. “Zane knows?”

“Kor must have told him this morning. He called a few hours ago.”

Before I woke, I realized. Zane had gotten up early—found himself tangled in me with the evidence of what we’d done covering his skin. It was obvious now why I found him cleaned up and as far away from me as he could get.

My stomach roiled, and it was a miracle I didn’t sick up all over the ground. “What’s the plan, then?” I hated asking Misha, but I appreciated that Kor kept him up to date because I knew it would be a while before I heard from my Alpha.

“Mikael went after Danyal. We have all the information now. It spread to the government, of course—both sides, but it was enough. Nadya’s got the code for all the labs and all the experiments the humans have been working on, and she’s going to call Kor when she’s safe and has it decoded.”

Relief hit me like a physical blow, and I staggered back a few steps. “She’s alive?”

Misha laughed. “Yeah. She’s alive. She called us about an hour before we heard from you. She was hurt, but healing, and she’s heading out of the country. It’ll be a while though. And you two…”

“I get it,” I told him. I didn’t need to hear it aloud—how Zane and I were trapped here, how it would be longer than we thought because everything had gone to hell and back at ComTech. And while the world knew at least some of the atrocities committed by the humans, we still weren’t safe to exist in public.

“There’s a lot more,” Misha said, “but I know Kor wants to be able to talk to you about it when he gets there. I promise it won’t be forever.”

I hadn’t expected that the human Omega could soothe me, but speaking to him calmed the storm in my gut in ways I couldn’t describe. Maybe that was his power. Maybe that helped Kor as he came out of the months of torment and still found himself capable of falling in love.

Or maybe, in spite of my never giving him a chance, Misha was simply a good and kind person.

It wasn’t a crisis I needed right then, so I brushed it aside. “Thanks. Just…tell that fucker to call me. I don’t want to be sitting on my ass here without some idea of how badly shit is falling apart.”

“You won’t be left in the dark,” Misha promised.

I said a quick goodbye, then glanced back at the house, unsure how I was going to manage living with the man I had taken advantage of. But it wasn’t like I had much of a choice.

Chapter

Seventeen

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