Page 114 of Captive Omega

I left Vaughn and Resa down here, and I wasn’t in my room long, maybe thirty minutes freezing under the shower. So they must have ended things soon after.

I try the computer room next. Equally empty. No one is in the den or in the meeting room. I don’t bother checking the backyard. In summer, we’ll maybe go out there once. Otherwise, it’s all work and no play in Lucas Security headquarters.

Vaughn’s bark of laughter clues me in where he is: the kitchen. As I head that way, Garrison’s low rumbling laugh comes from the same direction.

I briefly pause, prepare for Garrison’s expected response, and keep going.

Garrison is sitting at the dining table, a sandwich in front of him, as is a cup of coffee and another copy of the same pregnancy book we’ve all been reading.

Vaughn has pulled on a dark gray hoodie since Resa’s self-defense lesson. He’s leaning against the kitchen island, arms crossed, as he tells Garrison about how well Resa did in the gym. Something about his raised brow makes me wonder if he hasn’t figured out why I rushed out of the lesson as fast as I did.

There’s no sign of Resa.

Maybe she’s upstairs showering and getting dressed. She’ll be down soon, wanting to talk about finding Dexter Pieter or solving the Jerome Walker case. But for now, she’s not here, which makes now the ideal time to say what I need to say.

I wait until Vaughn has finished telling Garrison about Resa putting him on his ass with a sneaky trip he hadn’t seen coming and which, if I didn’t know what I know now, I’d ask him to tell me about it.

“Her fiancé is getting married,” I say.

Vaughn snorts a laugh. “Yeah. The clue’s in the name.”

I walk across the room and take my usual seat. Back to the wall, where I never have to worry about anyone needing to pass by me on the way from the dining table to the kitchen. “He’s getting married, but not to Resa. To someone called Emily.”

Silence.

Garrison sits up taller in his seat, a line bracketing his brow. “I told you not to?—”

“Yes, you said not to go digging, but I had to know,” I interrupt. “Surely you wanted to know about the fiancé?”

He doesn’t immediately respond. Then he blows out a heavy sigh, closing the pregnancy book and pushing his half-eaten sandwich aside. “What did you find out?”

Vaughn joins us at the dining table.

“They worked together,” I say. “He’s a realtor. A beta.”

I give them a second to absorb that.

“Is he ugly?” Vaughn asks.

I look at him. “Really?”

“What?” He glares at me. “Don’t tell me you weren’t wondering if he was competition before you went and tracked the guy down.”

I deliberately do not answer that question.

Instead, I open my laptop, unlock it and swivel it to show them.

A long moment passes in silence as we study the man with short dark-blond hair beside the pretty, smiling blonde woman showing off her engagement ring. The engagement picture is what triggered my alert. They’re not just engaged. They’re jetting off for their destination wedding in a couple of weeks. It looks like neither of them wants to wait to get married.

“He looks like he might be nice,” Vaughn eventually says. “Not greasy like your typical realtor. And he didn’t cheap out on the ring.”

Garrison raises his brow.

“I did not steal a ring like it,” Vaughn denies. “But I can tell.”

I was Garrison’s first hire when he started Lucas Security, named for the detective who saved his life as a teenager.

Garrison doesn’t talk much about his childhood, and I haven’t gone digging. From bits and pieces he’s said over the years, I got the impression he fell in with the wrong crowd and his cop neighbor turned his life around after saving it.

---