Page 34 of Running on Empty

Said the spider to the fly, I thought idly, feeling an ache in my bones and heaviness in my limbs that had nothing to do with the Spencers. It was from muscles held tight for too long, unwinding slowly as the minutes ticked by. I nodded slowly, my eyes already falling closed as Ronan shucked off his shoes and shirt, just leaving his jeans on, his torso bare. I didn’t have it in me to pay any attention to his muscular form, not right now. But as he curled around me, pressing the softness of my blankets into my skin, I caught the flash of pain on Jax’s face, just before my eyes fell closed.

“Sleep, omega,” Ronan told me. “Places to go, people to kill when you wake up.”

Chapter21

One of my earliest memories was of hearing sounds coming from the lounge room that I didn't understand. Sometimes it would be adult TV shows playing way too loud, the hallway echoing with hard voices, loud sound effects or the sharp rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire. I wasn’t old enough at the time to work out what they were, so my mind made up scenarios to fit them. Angry sounds, violent sounds that had me forcing myself into a small ball even back then. So it was odd to wake up some time later, and walk down the hallway to hear similar sounds, as though time stood still.

“Fuck, the way her little cunt—” That voice, a familiar one, but one I never wanted to hear again seemed to echo down the hallway, the slimy words leaving a residue on the walls as it went.

Snake Spencer.

“The little fucker was struggling for a breath and I nearly didn’t give it to—”

My stomach roiled traitorously, responding to what I was hearing, but I knew from recent experience that if vomiting was going to help the situation, I’d be sitting pretty right now. I pushed on through the feeling.

“The way they heat up when they’re on Rush? Nothing fucking like it.” Snake sounded like the worst kind of used car salesman right then, selling a product that no one should want to buy. “Their cunts and their arses and their fucking throats just open, ready for you to drive yourself deeper. Of course, some of them cook from the inside out—”

Whoever was watching or listening to this shit kept cutting Snake’s patter off mid-speech, as if they couldn’t bear to hear one more word. But then they’d play another clip, then another. I finally reached the command centre door and I saw Ash.

Sitting in a big, heavily upholstered office chair, he was leaning forward to stare at multiple screens set up in a wall before him. Some showed security camera footage of the field the bunker was buried under, still others showed the outside and interior of our houses, but those in the middle? They were filled with Snake. Snake, everywhere frozen in different attitudes from smug to vicious, and the thumbnails of the files filled several screens, while Ash’s mouse moved and then hovered over the next one.

“Good sleep, omega?”

Not Stevie, because he wasn’t operating as Ash. He was all alpha right now.

“I feel like I could sleep for days,” I replied, stepping inside the darkened room.

“Perhaps you should. This will be a waiting game mostly, so catching up on rest would be a productive way to spend it.”

I snorted at his grumpy dad manner.

“While you–?”

“Work out how to take these fuckers down.”

He sighed and sat back in his chair, lifting his mug of coffee to take a drink from, but I ducked in, and wrapped my hands around it. I don’t know why I did, except I liked to bait Ash. I let him keep hold of it as I brought it up to my lips and took a sip. Black, strong, bitter. I fought the urge to splutter, and he noted my reaction with a slight narrowing of his eyes, but then I let it go and he took a sip.

“That’s what this is.” He indicated the screen. “We found a bunch of the Spencer packs files in a very poorly encrypted database. The little fuckers like to keep a record of every fucked up thing they do, but that sort of narcissism helps us. I’ll go through the evidence and collate the worst of it, then release it to the police once we have everything we need.”

“And then what?”

I demanded the answer, no longer willing to make nice and ask for it.

“And then we bring this whole exercise to an end and the Spencer pack faces criminal charges.”

Charges they’d fight with the best lawyers in the country, I knew that for a fact. Charges they’d do their damndest to evade or the worst case scenario from their perspective would be for them to serve time in a cushy minimum security prison.

“If they stick.”

My head whipped around, my focus caught by the files anew. Ash went to protest, but when I sat down on his lap his hands went up, not sure what to do. With his hand off the mouse, I grabbed it in victory, clicking on one thumbnail then instantly regretting it.

“The drug makes a beta’s core temperature spike. They’re hot, literally.” Snake’s grin grew wider. It was as jagged as Ronan’s, but Snake’s was a knife he stabbed indiscriminately into others. “And their sense of self-preservation just fades away.” His fangs flashed just like his namesake’s. “That’s why they call it Rush. Someone could murder your own mother in front of you and you wouldn’t care. Nothing matters but getting off.” He shook his head slowly, looking like he was luxuriating in the memories of past pleasures. “And that’s when we step in—”

Ash went to stop me, to stop the video, but as he did, a video call came in. Riley Taylor was the ID on the screen, and something made me click on it.

“Hi… oh!” The woman was very beautiful, with high cheekbones and long red hair she’d tied back into a sensible ponytail, which didn’t make her look any less pretty. “Sorry, Ash, am I interrupting?”

“I—” he went to reply.

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