Page 72 of The Beta: Part Three
“There's been nothing out here for a few minutes. I think it's done. I don't know where the COTs are. They should have been here by now. I'm coming down.” By the time I climb down from the tree, Pratchett has decided to walk around to the front door and is standing on the porch.
From inside I hear shuffling and Trent calling out, “wait, Jasper. Just wait a minute.”
Jasper's laugh is sharp. “Why?”
Then the door opens and Pratchett turns to face Jasper, and I'm running. I don't know why, though, to be perfectly honest. I can feel determination and a hint of joy in my bond with Jasper, and an odd combination of violent aversion and tenuous hope in Talia's bond. I know what's about to happen, I don't mind in the slightest.
“Jasper.” I can hear Pratchett from where I am. “Is Talia alright?”
“Don't ask about her.” Jasper walks straight at Pratchett, crowding him off the front steps. I'm a few feet behind him when he leaves the bottom step. Jasper is still walking down them.
“Seth asked me to come. He wanted to come himself.”
“I'm sure he did. Did you know she asked us not to kill him? She stood up for your piece of shit son after what he and his pack did to her? Get on your knees.” There's a strange clicking sound coming through with Jasper's words. The hair on my forearms stands up as it intensifies the closer he gets to Pratchett. Devon, Trent, and Alex are rushing out the door and down the stairs. They might as well be standing still.
“Jasper.” Devon quietly calls, but inevitability is heavy in the air.
“She's a good girl. She didn't deserve any of it. It was wrong. I was wrong.” Pratchett's shoulders slump as he drops onto first one knee, then the other. “I made a mistake. I only wanted the best for my son. Talia would have been the best omega, but she wasn't meant to be his.”
“You're right. She's mine.” Jasper raises his arm, then blood and bits spray across my shins and shoes as the sound of the shot bounces off the front of the manor. Pratchett's body falls sideways onto the ground, but Jasper never sees it.
He turns around and walks back up the stairs between the others. “Where are the fucking COT units we called for? I thought we called your father directly. Now we've got to get several clean up crews in here. I'm calling Obi to come check Talia over, she's had two panic attacks in the last hour just because that mother fucker was on the property. And you know Jamison and the rest will come with him after they find out about all this. There's no good reason for there to have been so many for just us...” his voice trails off as he walks back into the house, and I look up to find Alex and Trent smiling down at Pratchett's body while Devon is scowling.
I expect Devon to be upset about Jasper killing a senior alpha and councilman on the front steps, but he says, “I did call my father directly. The COTs should have been here a long time ago.” He pulls out his phone and after a second he's seething into it. “Where are the COT units? We needed help, and fucking Jonas Pratchett is who showed up. They were after Talia. They could have taken her, there were enough of them to do it. Then what, dad? We could have lost everything. Why didn't you send them?”
He stalks down the stairs and starts pacing in front of them. “What do you mean? They never came. It's been my pack, Jonas Pratchett, and nine of his men this whole goddamn time, against a whole fucking army of bullshit. Now we have to deal with Pratchett's guys because he's fucking dead...Yes, dead..Jasper. He had it coming. Everything with Talia and Seth was his fault...No, I don't really give a fuck about Joyce, she's better off without him and she has the rest of her pack. We'll contact Seth...I hope not. You'll look into it, right? Nathan's been shot and we're getting Obi over here to look over Talia, too… Fuck no, don't get Elizabet over here. Talia will call her when she's ready…Yeah, alright. You, too.”
Trent walks down the stairs to stand over Pratchett. After a few seconds of silence he rocks back on his heels. “Sooooo, what are we going to do about that?”
Alex has the perfect response. “I have some fireworks. Maybe we can get Talia to make one of those refrigerator cakes with the whipped cream.”
Chapter thirty
Corso
“It's a problem solved as far as I'm concerned. Now nobody has to convince him to step down until his boy is well enough to step up.” Marcus says, with a yawn.
I agree with Marcus. I agree with my whole heart. The only unfortunate thing is that Seth is still nowhere near ready to assume a council seat and I have agreed to sit in his place until he is. I truly loathe politics. I just want to take care of my pack and my distillery, and now my children will be the ultimate priority. There's no way to keep the dramatics and scheming of the council away from them because Devon will eventually be a permanent member of the council and Talia is just as tied to it, but I had hoped that we could keep it in the far distance. Now it appears that I will be much more involved than I ever wanted to be.
“I'm just a placeholder, Marcus. Don't count on me to upend anything or make any major moves. I am only holding the seat until Seth is ready. I don't even feel comfortable voting on my own without at least discussing it with him. It is his seat, after all.” I don't mention that the idea of speaking civilly with Seth Pratchett makes me want to pull my hair out. Talia sees value in him, and I trust her implicitly; but I would just as soon rip Seth's throat out than look at him.
Marcus waves his hand nonchalantly, which is usually a sign that he's got an underlying motive. “Sure, sure. We know, just until Seth can manage on his own. How did he take the news? Kaleb called him?”
“I did,” Jasper says. “I told him exactly what happened and why. I told him about Talia's reaction to just knowing his father was on our property, and about her much more intense reaction to actually seeing him. He was upset, understandably, his father is dead on top of losing his entire pack a few months ago. That's a lot to handle, even at the best of times; but he said he didn't blame me. He said that he'd have done the same thing, and that he knows he should be next on my list. I told him Talia doesn't want me to kill him and he laughed. I don't think he's well. I don't think he'll be okay for quite a while.”
Talia's reaction to Pratchett's presence was violent. Her utter fear traveled through her bonds like an earthquake. I had to fight the urge to vomit right there on the stairs in the middle of an invasion, and that was secondary to what she must have been feeling. I have only felt that level of fear from her one other time, and that was the result of my own actions. I actively and vocally agree with Jasper taking Pratchett's life. It is both very interesting and completely expected that her trauma chose Jonas Pratchett as a focal point rather than Seth, who did the actual physical harm. I often wonder what would have become of Seth if his father had been more like Talia's or even Devon's.
“Seth has been moved to Mercy until a bed opens up at one of the other facilities. We've screened the entire staff as well as we can, but Elizabet has a permanent team in place to monitor him and the staff. Nearly a quarter of the staff at the last place he was in was part of the rogue operation. It's ridiculous, really. Doctors, nurses, councilors... not typically positions I'd associate with rogues.” Thaddeus takes a sip of his tea, and gestures at Devon's father. “Any word on what the actual blue fuck happened with the COT units?”
We've been sitting in the main room watching five crews remove bodies, glass and bullets for the past two hours. Nathan has been properly stitched up and is currently in my bed being coddled by Talia. She didn't even want to come downstairs to see her fathers. She said she didn't want to see her home in disarray in person. She did well enough to let Obi check her over and do a quick scan to check the babies. All she's interested in doing right now is, in her words, “getting these fuckers, dead, alive, and otherwise, the hell out of our house so she can feel safe again”. None of us enjoyed hearing that our omega feels unsafe in our home, not even temporarily. I have overheard two separate conversations that sounded too much like planning an actual moat around the manor, and Reid sent one crew for a different style of door to replace the French doors that lead to the terrace. I don't know how well Talia will take that, she enjoys the look of those doors. A moat is likely out of the question, as well, due to the potential drowning risk once the babies aren't babies anymore.
“Devon called me and I called the dispatch myself. Lawrence and Taylor never got the order. Protocol is a phone call directly to the COT lead, and those calls weren't received. Meghan was at the desk last night. I looked back on the feeds, she made calls, I even heard her telling them where to go, but she didn't speak with Lawrence or Taylor. We're looking into trying to find out who she spoke to, but I'm doing good if I send a text successfully so I'm hoping Nathan will feel up to checking up on it. I don't think I'd trust anybody else at this point, anyway,” Anthony says. He's taking this very, very hard. He feels personally responsible for this because he heads the COT program. There's a disconnect somewhere in his department that could have caused the complete destruction of our pack. He's apologized countless times, but how was he to know the deception runs so deep?
“Minos,” Kaleb says. “Seth said the name Minos. And Cobb.”
Thaddeus rubs his hand down his jaw and across the scruff on his chin. “The only Minos I'm familiar with is an Alpha Minos on the west coast council. His family has held a seat for generations. He's a bit of a bastard, but not in a treacherous sense. More in a pompous, arrogant fuck sense.”
Trent snorts a laugh and shrugs when everybody looks at him. “Sorry, it's just hilarious when you pompous, arrogant fucks talk about other people being pompous, arrogant fucks. This asshole must be extra fun to be around if y'all think this much of him.”
