Page 6 of Betrayed Auctioned Mate

“You’re a hacker?”

“I like computers,” she tells me with an air of mystery. I decided I was right—she’ll be one of my people while I'm here.

We ascend another shorter flight of stairs to a half-level, elevated over a sunlight platform dotted with greenery. Light refracts inward through high, segmented glass windows, casting tiny rainbows across the tiled floor. Black leather couches surround a low glass coffee table on one side of the room—on the other is a more traditional meeting space, a long table, computers, desks, a projector screen, a pinboard.

I immediately know the alpha, even from the back of his head. He’s speaking with another man, both of them turned away from us. He’s tall and broad, dressed casually in a thick knit sweater. I can tell immediately that his is the energy only the best alphas possess, a kind of quiet, assured confidence—leading through reason and communication, not fear. He doesn’tdominate the room, but you would know his position from a mile away. There’s a talent in that.

Raphael calls out a greeting. The alpha and his companion turn to look over at us, and suddenly, I am in the military again, and the world cracks open in front of me.

Ado’s face hasn’t changed much. Nothing about him has. I look into his dark brown eyes, narrow and utterly focused, and I remember him the way he was, the way I assumed he would remain forever in my mind. He’s still beautiful. Bizarre and impossible details rattle through my mind, carriages of a steam train flying off the rails: I am exactly two inches shorter than Ado, and I know this because once, we measured each other against the wall. The first time I made him laugh, we were eating lunch together, sitting outside somewhere. He tipped his head back, and I remember even now how the perfect lines of his throat moved in tandem with the rumble of his sound, his breath.

All of this passes through me in a heartbeat, faster and faster. I see the faces of the girls we couldn’t save back at the agency, then the inside of my cell at the base of the Bloodtooth Pack. Birds crest into the sky over the barracks as the boys kick around a soccer ball in the early morning. Ado’s tired eyes find me in the dim light the night he came to get me out. I feel the cold steel of a gun pressed between my palms.

Aris clears his throat beside Ado. I had forgotten he was there.

“This is—shit,” he says. “Okay. Keira, hello, I guess. It’s been a long time.”

I feel Olivia and Raphael’s confusion, their eyes flicking between me, Aris, and Ado like it’s a tennis game.

I wrangle myself back to decorum as if it’s life or death. This is my job, I remind myself, and I take my job seriously. And I’d rather die than let Ado think that the sight of him can render me to a shaking mess after all this time. Neither of us wants that to be true, I know implicitly.

“Aris,” I say. “It’s a surprise, I have to say.”

He strides over to meet us. I watch him move to shake my hand, then hesitate, and then pat me on the shoulder firmly, letting his hand linger there.

“It’s good to see you,” he says honestly. “I mean that. How have you been? Still in intelligence?”

“Private now—though, you knew that.” I subtly shake his hand from my shoulder by moving to rifle through my bag. I handed him back a paper copy of my contract, signed with my name. “For your records.”

“You think we’re this old-fashioned?”

“I don’t know how they do things out here in the sticks,” I joke.

Aris smiles. I feel Olivia hovering close to my shoulder. A somewhat awkward silence descends upon us all.

“I used to work intelligence for Aris’ pack way back when,” I tell the room needlessly, then cringe at the volume of my voice. “So, we know each other. I didn’t know you’d settled down somewhere, though.”

“It’s a story,” Aris says wearily. He smiles, and a knot of tension inside me undoes itself.

Ado stands dead still on the other side of the room. I can feel the others all resisting the urge to look across at him.

“We’re all going to meet to brief on the mission later, and to get you acquainted with the rest of the team, though you’ll already know some of us, I guess,” Aris tells me. “Early afternoon. You should get settled before that. Olivia, do you mind showing Keira to her room?”

I think my feet must be cemented to the floor. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to move them. But when Olivia takes my arm, I find myself able to move somehow, through some power that isn’t my own.

I catch a single glimpse of Ado’s face as I am pulled from the room. I have never seen that expression on a person’s face before. I’m not certain I ever will again. Beneath the fraying stone of his hard exterior, he is reckoning with something inside himself. Even after all this time and immeasurable distance between us, I can see it all.

***

“So, we’ve decided we won’t ask for the baby’s sex before the birth—we’d like a surprise.” Olivia hangs one of my sweaters on a hook in my sizable wardrobe. I find myself wishing I had brought a bigger suitcase. “You and Byron would get along great—”

“I know him,” I tell her, perched awkwardly on the windowsill. She insisted on helping me unpack, but now, I get the sense I have been iced out of the process entirely.

“Oh. Oh, yeah, I guess—of course you do.” Her face alights with mischief. “What was he like when he was younger? Ineedto know.”

“Socially inept. Well—” I think about it, then rephrase. “Not as much as Ado. We were all bad. About ninety percentof our interactions every day were with each other. The military makes you a bit crazy like that.”

“But he’s always been his techy, nerdy self?”

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