Page 62 of The Alpha: Part Three
I thought she was dead. Everyone thinks she's dead. My dads were taken and then she was gone. I was so young when we lost her. Mateo stepped into the place where my parents were and made sure that my brothers and I were okay, especially me and Gabriel. This is surreal. We thought she was gone, and the rogues had her this whole time. For years. She's okay. She's right there on the screen and okay.
Mateo is smiling when he answers my video call. It dies as soon as he sees my face. “What's happened? Are you alright? The baby?”
“Look at this, Mateo. Tell me what you see.” I switch the camera to show the picture on the screen. “Tell me I'm not crazy, Mateo. Tell me.”
He doesn't say anything for a few seconds then he's screaming for our brother and running down the hallway in his house. “Lucas! Lucas! Come quickly! Oh my god. Lucas!”
He finds him in the kitchen washing dishes. “Look at this.” He shoves the phone in Lucas's face. “Look.”
I watch slow recognition and even slower realization climb across Lucas's face. “Oh my god,” he whispers. “Oh my god. We need to tell Sebastian and Gabe. Where is she, Mateo? Where has she been? Is that a recent picture? Oh my god.”
“So it is definitely, without doubt, her?” Nathan asks again.
“Yes,” Mateo says. “Yes. It's our mother. Where is she?”
“The big rogue compound in the Northern territory,” Nathan answers. “The one we've been watching.”
Mateo's jaw clenches and he looks off camera at Lucas. “Who sent this to you?”
“Minos.”
“Why wouldn't he send it to me instead? What's the point of being involved with the WCC if I'm to be excluded in things that involve my family?”
Seth draws a breath and leans close to me so that Mateo can see him. “He only got it a little while ago and he sent it straight to me to show Desir'ee. We called you as soon as she saw that it was your mother.”
“Am I to be included in the plan to get her out?” Mateo growls. “Or am I to sit here and wait patiently for other people to go on a rescue mission to savemymother? My mother who, for years, I thought was dead?”
Nathan sits back in his chair, his lips pressed into a flat line as he looks at Seth. Seth sighs. “You can't go, Mateo.”
“HIjo de la chinga tu made, pinche carbon! Why not?”
“Because,” Devon cuts in, taking over the conversation, “we have been watching this compound for months. We know how it runs. We know when people leave and how often they arrive. We have been working out a plan to get those omegas out and we are not going to waste the opportunity to do it by going in there with a feral son, no matter how rightly placed that rage is. You are a councilman now. You have people under your care. We will do everything we possibly can to get your mother and the rest of those omegas out. I swear to you, Mateo, we will get her.”
I look from my brother's fiery anger to Seth's somber determination and back to my mother's face on the screen. I know what the people in the COT program are capable of. I saw some of the aftermath of what they did to get me away from Flores. Mateo is going to take this poorly no matter what, though.
“Mateo.” I wait until he's focused on me to continue. “You have to let them do this. You have to trust them.”
He holds my gaze for a long moment and then shakes his head. “If anything goes wrong...”
“We won't let anything go wrong,” Nathan tells him. “We'll get her out. We'll get all of them out.”
I can't help plan an attack, or a retrieval as they're calling it. All I want to do is leave this minute for that compound and kill every jerk standing between me and my mother. I know that's not the best plan, I'm not stupid. But Iamvery angry that I've missed all this time with my mother. She's alive and I need to concentrate on being grateful for that, but it's so unfair. She's missed so much that we can never get back.
“Regretfully, this young man has had enough of me.” Corso comes into the security room with Calian cuddled against his shoulder. “I believe he may be hungry and ready for a rest.”
I still can't believe my life is entwined with Corso Zaphir's. It's absolutely wild. My children are going to grow up alongside his. My pack and his pack are going to have family outings and dinners. If anyone had told me this would be my life I would have laughed at them.
Ben takes Calian from Corso and hands him over to me. “Do we need to go home?”
I shake my head. I can't leave without knowing there is a definite plan to get my mother home. “I can feed him here and he'll sleep through anything. I need to stay until they're finished planning.”
“Alright, but ifyouneed to go rest we'll take you home.” He starts helping me to get settled into one of the extra chairs.
“Hang on,” Trent says as he leaves the room. He comes back with a C-shaped nursing pillow and hands it to Seth. “Do you have one of these? If you don't, get one. Get two. These things are great, and you'll use them a lot.”
“We have one,” I tell him, positioning the pillow under the baby, “but I didn't think to grab it. Thank you, Trent.”
Talia comes in with two cups of tea and hands one of them to Ben. “That's for her. If you want anything you know where the kitchen is. What's the plan?”
