Page 113 of Captive Omega

But I’ve just spent the last fifteen minutes getting increasingly hard in the gym.

Now all I’m thinking about is sex and about how good it would have felt to have Resa pinned between Vaughn and me.

The cold water continues to lash me. I wrench the faucet from cold to hot, brace one hand on the wall, and give into an urge I haven’t had in so long.

I wrap my fist around myself, squeeze my eyes shut, and stroke. Breath wheezes between my clenched teeth as I pump again. It doesn’t take long. Resa’s lean, curvy figure takes shape in my mind. As does the way she was moving on Vaughn.

I stroke myself harder, eyes squeezed tightly shut as I let myself imagine things that will never happen, but that I wish would.

Resa in my arms. Maybe she would knock my hand aside, claim my lips as she took over, stroking me as I settled her onto her back, nudged her thighs open and…

I groan, straining as I pump myself harder, wanting to extend my release for a little longer. Too late. Gasping, I slow my strokes and slump against the wall, the water washing away my come as my breathing evens out.

As I stand under the spray, guilt snakes into me. Resa is ours. But she’s made it clear she isn’t staying, that she intends to go back to her fiancé. We should let her. It’s not like she hasn’t suffered enough, but here we all are, thinking of how we can convince her to walk away from a life she must be desperate to return to.

Something pings in the next room. An alarm on my laptop.

I turn off the faucet and snatch up a towel, turning my back on the mirror over the sink before I can accidentally look at it. No one likes to see those scars. Not even me.

I quickly dry myself on my way to the bedroom and toss the towel in a hamper beside the door. In my room, I dig out a new turtleneck, sweats, and socks. Here I take my time. There are no mirrors. It’s one of the first things I removed when I came home from the hospital.

My room is more office than bedroom now. Just a big bed on the right side, the comforter a lighter gray than the painted walls. On the left, I spend more time at the desk I set up with my laptop, notepad, and the pregnancy book we’ve all been reading since we brought Resa home from the clinic. For the first time, I was actually looking forward to going to the clinic. I didn’t volunteer to wait in the car the way I did before. It wasn’t easy, but I’d needed to know that Resa and the baby were okay, and for that, I’d have waited in hell.

I cross over to the black desk and I drop into the seat, press my finger on the fingerprint button to unlock my laptop and take it off sleep mode.

A couple of days ago, Garrison requested some background information on an art teacher at a community college. I had a name, so it hadn’t taken long to find him on social media. A few minutes later, I had his address, his car records, and his social security number.

It’s been days since Resa said she was looking for Dexter Pieter. It’s Resa’s case. Garrison was insistent about that. But we’ve all been working in the background trying to get her the thing she wants. The man is a ghost who sprung up from nowhere years ago to become the youngest ever head of the Council. I told Resa to try his assistant, but even that detail is impossible to find.

Some people are easy. They live their lives openly. Dexter Pieter hides everything.

It took me two hours to compile the background report Garrison requested on Simon Marchant, a forty-seven-year-old community college art teacher.

I’ve spent the last several days digging into Dexter Pieter, and I still don’t know if his assistant is a man or a woman.

Whatever Rune wanted the information on Simon Marchant for, I don’t know. I hadn’t asked. I was too distracted by another background project I hadn’t told Garrison about.

Looking into Resa’s fiancé.

I told myself I wouldn’t, but I had to know what kind of man she would choose for herself. She didn’t say if this fiancé was an alpha or a beta, if she loved him or missed him. She’s been keeping all her cards so close to her chest that I needed to know.

I didn’t want to dig into Resa, so trying to find the fiancé without investigating Resa—which is exactly what I would be doing—was hard.

As a victim of Asylum, we knew an alpha abducted her from a free heat clinic. Finding reports of missing persons over the last couple of years meant the second I found her photograph, I had her full name, address, and parents' contact information from when they filed a missing person’s report.

It also meant I had her fiancé’s name: Henry Schultz.

Now I sit back in my seat, staring at the photograph from an alert I set up to deliver any mention of Henry to my inbox, and I ask myself why I didn’t listen to Garrison. I wish it was as easy as lifting my finger, pressing delete, and wiping all memory of this picture away.

It’s not that simple.

Now I’ve seen, I have to do something about this.

I get up, snapping the lid of my laptop down and taking it with me.

Since I can anticipate Garrison’s response, I bypass any room he’s likely to be in and head straight for the gym, thinking Vaughn will be there.

Empty.

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