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“What do you know about my family?”

“Leave tonight.”

“It’s already morning,” I say.

“Then leave now.” She ends the call.

For several seconds, we attempt to process in silence.

Theo’s phone vibrates less than a minute after Sawyer hangs up. It startles me so badly I jump.

“Hammer,” Theo grits out. He turns the screen toward us.

Hammer: Should have taken my offer when it was on the table.

The timing makes my skin crawl. Did he hear our call somehow? Or is it just Theo refusing the earlier meeting?

Last time, Theo ignored him and called Wes. I read the new message again. The timing is too close to dismiss.

“Dr. Sawyer thinks we’re in danger,” I say. “Hammer knows Theo refused the meeting. And Crossroads connects Sawyer’s research to patients the Saints were sending for treatment.”

Ezra asks, “What are we missing?”

“What does Dr. Sawyer know that she’s not telling us?”

Theo begins typing to Wes. His phone vibrates again before he finishes.

Another message fills the screen. Doc says the omega is key. Bring her and we leave your beta breathing.

Ezra’s fingers tighten around mine. Theo’s alpha scent floods the office. I read the words twice.

The omega. The key. They see Ezra as leverage and me as a tool. Theo is the man they expect to obey when someone he loves is threatened.

My fear arrives hot, and anger fills my chest. I take Josephine’s notebook from the table and hold it against my chest. Jessamine recorded. Josephine rebuilt. Lorna kept it safe. They carried the knowledge for the next generation so that it was here for me to choose what happens to it.

“They don’t get me,” I say. “And they don’t get what my family kept.”

Chapter 38

Pepper Vines

Theo screws a steel plate over the lock on the back door while I tell myself puzzles are wonderful. Puzzles have rules. Puzzles don’t send text messages threatening to kill your beta unless you surrender yourself.

I grip the edge of Ezra’s worktable and stare at Hammer’s message on Theo’s phone. My stomach tries to fold in half.

No. Absolutely not.

I teach teenagers who believe deadlines are a form of oppression. I have extracted a frog from an air-conditioning vent, identified contamination sources from partial water samples, and survived twenty-six years as a late-blooming omega in a town that treats romance as if it’s the only thing in life. I can solve this. I just need to think.

Behind me, Theo drags a heavy cabinet beneath the downstairs office window facing the hall-side porch, then checks the lock on the office door. His movements are controlled, but his scent is rioting. Leather and dark earth roll through the room, thick with fear he can’t hide from either of us.

“The house is secure,” he says. “Wes is checking the east road. Camera feeds stay on Ezra’s screen. No one opens a door but me.”

Ezra sits at his desk with one hand wrapped around his opposite wrist. He keeps rereading the message as though the words might rearrange themselves into a threat against someone else. “This was never gonna end easy.”

His voice sounds wrong without humor inside it. It’s as if he has lost all hope. I understand why. Dr. Sawyer offered a plan. A dangerous one, maybe, but something less terrifying than walking an old ritual path with no promise of return. Now that hope is tangled with the people threatening him.

I move to Ezra and take his hand. “We’re going to find a way.”