Page 143 of Night Call

“I’m a real princess now,” Pember said with a grin.

Running his tongue over his teeth, Blake sighed. “Pem, do you realise what they’re asking you to do?”

Pember nodded. “They want to use me as an undercover operative or something.” He lifted a brow. “Not very undercover, though. They know who I am.”

“It’s not like that,” Blake said, gently tugging Pember’s shoulder. “They want to use you to get information. They’ll ask you to arrange a meet, maybe even more than that.”

Pember shook his head. “Maya wouldn’t meet up with me. She looked mad as hell when I tried to take Ru away.”

“She’ll be desperate. She’s made out like she’s in heat, thinking no one will come near her, but she’ll want to know what’s happening on the inside, what direction the police are taking. I think… I think it’s getting to the point that the inspector will use any method necessary to avoid outright arresting her. Once that happens and the press gets wind of a police employee being involved, the whole town will go to shit. There’ll be protests, protests will turn to riots, riots will turn to outright chaos. We’ve seen it in the cities. West Newton will be no different.”

Pember let out a breath. “West Newton is all farmers. What are they going to do? Stage a protest with their tractors?”

“Not them,” Blake growled. “The university students. They’ll find a cause in anything. Most of them aren’t even local—they won’t give two shits about the damage to the town.”

Pember shuddered, gripping the bag to his body. “I get that, but Maya… How bad could a meeting with her really be? Cait said it’d be monitored?—”

Blake let out a sharp breath and held up his fingers as though counting. “One, lethal overdose. Two, ripped to shreds in his own living room. Three, stabbed in the neck and drowned. Four—” Blake shivered. “—throat cut and thrown into a pit. Do those sound like the actions of a rational person?”

Pember grimaced. “I guess we never really know a person, do we?”

Blake shook his head and pulled Pember against his chest. “Only what we want people to see.”

Silence passed between them, rays of sunlight warming their faces through the dense canopy. Pember closed his eyes as he listened to Blake’s heart, the beat of it almost as erratic as his own.

“Please don’t do it, Pem,” Blake whispered, wrapping his arms around him. “Please don’t put yourself in danger like that. Yesterday was bad enough.”

“It won’t be anything like yesterday,” he said, running his fingers across Blake’s ribs. “It’ll just be a conversation. One that you’ll all be listening to, I assume.”

“But it won’t, will it? You’ll be in a room with a murderer. You have no negotiation training, no protection and no control over what she decides to do.”

Shaking his head, Pember gripped the lapels of Blake’s coat. “And what about all the omegas that’re going to be affected because of this? What protection do they have? Wouldwehave targets on our backs from the alphas when all is said and done?”

Blake’s gaze drifted off into the woods. “If the press put an ‘omega uprising’ spin on the killings, those who are already at risk from their alpha mates might?—”

“Be in even more danger, if they feel like they’re losing control,” Pember said, standing on his tiptoes to bring his face level with Blake’s. “Which is why the police need to keep control of the narrative.”

Blake’s jaw had gone back to clenching and unclenching. “You’re going to try and convince me this is a good idea, aren’t you?”

Pember smiled softly. “I don’t think it’s agoodidea. But I would do it for other omegas. Not all of them are as lucky as me.”

He would never have said that a month ago. In fact, he’d almost convinced himself that he should have just followed Imogen all along. Dead sister. Dead father. A mother who seemed hell-bent on making his life a misery.

But then,somehow,he’d done it, hadn’t he? He’d got a job that he enjoyed, moved into a house that was all his own, found a man thathechose.

Blake exhaled into this hair. “I’m going to rip that authority to shreds line by line. I don’t care if the chief constable’s signed it, he can sign it again once I’m happy that they aren’t throwing you under the bus. That anything you say during that meeting won’t be held against you.”

Pember sighed and turned back towards the jasmine. “It was only a page long, what’s to pick apart?”

Blake huffed. “You underestimate police paperwork. Alongside that authority will be a two-hundred-and-fifty-page policy document. One that I guarantee the chief only skimmed.”

“You guys really love paperwork, huh?”

“If it stops us getting sued, yes.”

They wandered back through the woods, finding George and Bailey sniffing around a tree stump that was infested with wild mushrooms.

“Don’t eat those!” Pember called, shooing them away. As he got a little closer, he realised they were brown capped chestnut mushrooms. “Nice,” he muttered, pulling a few from the ground and putting them in the bag. The feel of the cool earth beneath his fingertips was soothing.

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