Page 21 of Penny for Your Saints

I don’t have a chance to respond, because his heel makes startlingly fast contact with the space beneath my right eye—sending the world careening into darkness once more.

Say what you want about Louise Penny, but the bird certainly has fight in her.

I am embarrassed to say this is the second time I’ve underestimated her. I know well enough to know there won’t be a third opportunity—one of us will end up dead.

Who’s to say which one of us it would be… While my pride is dear to me, I’m not so foolish as to proclaim my own guaranteed victory.

I scoop up Louise’s limp body and toss her over my shoulder, the working girl who had pointed me in Louise’s direction, has already departed—likely looking for greener pastures, or at the very least—an alleyway more readily stocked with John’s.

When I make it back into the safehouse, Seb is conscious again—though probably wishing he wasn’t—his tall, muscular frame is folded in on itself as he sits before Frank like a contrite child, head hung in shame.

“You think that she’s some soft, tender little girl?” Frank snaps as he paces to and fro before Sébastien.

My eyes flit to Cazimer—his heavily inked arms wrapped protectively around his own body as he watches Seb take his punishment, warily.

Louise’s body slides easily from my shoulder into my arms as I lay her back down on the empty futon mattress.

Caz’s eyes find me as I kneel in the dirty sheets, my hands working deftly to close Louise back into her handcuffs and waist chain. Those shockingly blue eyes fix me with silent accusation.This is your fault too. You’re the only one who can stop him now.

I hear the loud cracking sound of Frank’s hand flying across Seb’s face and can’t help but wince.

“She’s a professional! Louise Penny is a fucking murder weapon, honed and perfected by years of training, and stoked by the fires of vengeance. Step it the fuck up,” Frank barks, his alpha aura so stifling—styrax, cedar, and smoking-gunpowder flood the room, and I actually have to crack a window to be able to think straight.

“It’s on us too,” I grumble at Frank—my eyes not quite willing to meet his when he’s like this.

Even for me, Francis Stone can be a terrifying monster. Moments like this—it truly feels as if there’s someone else inside there looking back at me. I don’t know that man, but I know enough to fear him.

Frank turns on me, those steely blues alight with ecstatic rancor—and it takes every ounce of my strength to push on. “We all underestimated her that day at the center. Once we realized the reality of what we’re dealing with, we should have taken a few steps back—redrawn the map. None of this shit has been properly set up for someone like—” but before I can finish, Frank has somehow seemed to teleport within the bubble of my personal space.

Even though Frank is a few inches shorter than me, it doesn’t stop him from getting as physically ‘in my face’ as he can—his perfectly sculpted nose with its always-angry-looking sharp up-turn.

“So what now, Tin-tin? If you can see the error of our ways so fuckin’ clearly, how the hell do we deal with the shit now that we’re stuck with this little viper in our midst?” he challenges.

I know he expects me to defer to him—the alpha at the helm of this ship of fools—but if he expects me to act as his goddamn second, I’m going to stand my ground until he makes me bend the knee. He may be the leader of the Saints, but he’s not my alpha—as much as I may wish he was sometimes. Moments like now, I’m not sure if I’m thankful or mournful that our fucked up little quartet isn’t actually pack.

Ten years ago, I met Francis Stone. Back when good ol’ Frankie was still on FBI payroll and I was doing dirty work for MI6—before Michael Duboze got his hooks in Frank, before the accident.

The two of us worked opposite ends of a hostage situation at JFK involving a flight from the UK that was being hijacked on account of some “Alpha Rights” extremists attempting to kidnap some British diplo en route to the whitehouse to speak against said religious extremists being allowed to set up a branch of their church in the states.

One could argue that I’ve never really known Frank—even though we’ve gotten to ‘know’ each other in the biblical sense more than once while working the field as the proverbialoneso often does. Even so—he feels more and more the stranger each day that passes in this bizarre new paradigm, as if the small glimpses I think that I’ve caught of the man inside—might not be anything more than additional smoke and mirrors.

Back then Francis had hardly been the perfect example of what a Fed should be, but he was more on the straight andnarrow compared to the lawless anarchy of Frank Stone in the here and now—but what might actually be more frightening is the palpable shift in group dynamics since we decided to grab that little snatch Louise Penny.

As a seventeen-year-old freshly shipped off to an omega center after receiving my designation late in my last year of school, I had been told about how my body would become traitor and tool; how I would fall into heat cycles that would make me in equal turns insatiable and irresistible—that I would be driven to bond with my pack and breed; the fate of all omegas.

Because I had been such a sickly child—constantly in and out of hospitals with my mother, unable to play with most other children, unless there were others on the same ward as me; a rare but cherished occasion. I often found myself lonely and wanting for companionship that I could count on—not just the rotation of nurses and doctors with the occasional fellow wan, convalescent child to break up the monotony.

Ironically, I would grow up to be big and strong—uncommonly so for my designation. In fact—when I prepared to take my entrance exams, the physician in charge of my case was shocked to find out that I was an omega rather than an alpha based on my physiology alone; tall, broad, and muscular rather than the typical delicate, sleek body common to nearly all male omegas.

Once I had started down the tracks toward the MI6 of course, I would learn how to use my looks, my very omega nature as a lever. Greed, lust—powers that became mine to control; the tools of any successful honeypot.

Perhaps that’s why I found myself so shockingly off balance when we brought home our little unlucky Penny.

While Louise has been dosed steadily on literal government grade suppressants and scent dampeners, I have been dabbling in black market scent blockers and enhancers in my time as afree agent. When we intercepted her at the Diamond Center, I was doing my best to present the scent profile of my false identity—a beta massage therapist named Hans. I not only used drugs to conceal my own omega scent profile in order to present the false beta scent from my own black market brew of various enhancers, but I also took some incredibly strong scent and hormone dampener to avoid my own reaction to others in the center—but especially Louise; noted to have an incredibly strong sigma aura even while medicated—to say nothing of her break-through scenting…

Prepared to use my usual manipulations, I had made my first earnest attempt at flexing my aura on her in the safehouse after she came to. Not only was she able to resist me, but I could feel her—her own expanding aura overlapping, penetrating my own with a deep resonance that threatened to shake me apart if I held on much longer. All of this while, both of us had yet to run up the full dosage of our suppressants—neither of us in heat.

To think of what might happen if such a disastrous convergence were to occur while on the lam is an exercise in catastrophizing that I will not endure.

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