Page 54 of Captive Omega

It’s an innocent question.

I think.

Yet it feels like a challenge. Like he doesn’t think I can do this.

I still have my knife, so if I need to protect myself, I will protect myself.

I walk past him into the room and take a seat at the big round table.

The door closes with a gentle click and Garrison’s steps are surprisingly quiet for such a large man as he rounds the table and takes the seat directly opposite.

I lean back, keeping a tight grip on the knife in my lap.

He slides a gray folder, a thicker version of the one containing the NDA, to the center of the table. Not my side, but in no man’s land. “Jerome Walker went missing three days ago. The cops didn’t suspect foul play and assured his parents that, like any other college student, their son would return with a sore head from a college party in a day or two. This was despite his parents informing them that Jerome’s heat started and he was going to his usual clinic. There was no trace of him at the clinic. The police checked and so did we. His parents felt the police weren’t doing nearly enough to find their son, so they came to us.”

With what’s going on with Asylum, I don’t blame them for thinking the worst. “Do you think an alpha grabbed him?”

Like what happened to me?

He shakes his head. “I don’t.”

“Because?”

He taps the edge of the file with his index finger, drawing my attention to his powerful hands. It is not a comfortable thing to notice while sitting this close to him. “Something in there tells me he’s alive, and that his disappearance has nothing to do with the Asylum.”

“And that something is?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Oh.”

Amusement softens the hard angles of his face. “So, as you can imagine, I’ve hit a roadblock with the case.”

I flip open the file and come face to face with a young man in his early twenties with short burnished red hair, smiling green eyes, and pale Irish skin dusted with freckles. He’s slim, wearing a navy graduation gown, probably from high school.

Before I can turn another page, Garrison says, “His parents gave us the photograph. We like to blow up a picture of our clients, so we always remember there’s a real person behind our cases. It’s surprisingly easy to get lost in details and lose sight of what truly matters when you do a job like this for years day in day out.”

“You mean desensitized?”

“Not exactly.” His expression is thoughtful. If I didn’t know he was the boss, that look would have convinced me I was dealing with the man in charge. “We do what we do because we like solving mysteries and finding solutions to problems. The photograph reminds us of our end goal.”

As he pushes to his feet, my fingers tighten around my knife.

“Take your time with it. I’ll grab us something to drink and be back in a few minutes.”

He leaves, giving me time and space to go through the information they gathered on twenty-year-old Jerome Walker, an omega who left his dorm one Friday afternoon and never come back.

It is a strange feeling to dig through a person’s past to work out what might have happened to them. I understand why Garrison refused to share anything without me signing an NDA and why Vaughn was so vague. It’s personal. Too personal.

Even with permission, I still feel like I’m doing something wrong.

In a way, I appreciate the distance it gives me between my problems. Finding Dexter Pieter is starting to feel like a pipe dream, but maybe I can help find Jerome Walker.

Nothing jumps out at me from his college schedule, the interviews Garrison conducted with Jerome’s parents, pictures of his parents’ home and his dorm.

I flip through yet more interviews with Jerome’s friends, including one with Tobias, his college dorm mate. Since they shared the same free period, he spoke to Jerome before Jerome left for the heat clinic.

It all looks ordinary. He has more books than I thought a college student would take with him, but that confirms he was more of a reader than a partier.

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