Page 16

CHAPTER 16

Soren

That pink-haired psycho didn’t seem to exist no matter how hard I dug and it was really starting to piss me off.

I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at my computer screen.

Pulling the security footage from the café the other day was child’s play when they hadn’t even secured their network yet.

The legacy alpha with pink hair did show up on that, but nothing else.

I tried to follow his trail after he left the café, but I didn’t have access to any of the stored footage from the traffic cameras.

Running the clearest image of him through my facial recognition programs triggered nothing. Having it go through everything on the dark web gave me an error report which should be impossible.

It was like he didn’t exist outside that single moment in time.

I didn’t like not knowing who else was working this job or why, but there wasn’t much I could do about it right now. If I saw him again, I’d plant a tracker on him like I had Frankie and go from there.

Leaning back in my chair, I studied the sharp features under that baby pink hair, wondering why I hadn’t reported his presence.

By all accounts, he was a dangerous player who could cause potential problems for my employer, but I had this uneasy feeling he was more than just a wild card.

I started up another search, worldwide this time. It would take forever to get a match, but it was very unlikely he could erase his face from every camera in the world.

All I needed was a lead, then I’d have some idea of what to do with this new player.

I sighed and checked my phone to see she was late again which wasn’t unusual for her, but after what happened the other day, I felt strangely anxious.

Getting here before dawn wasn’t because I wanted to show off, but because I couldn’t sleep.

I’ve been up every night trying to figure out who that legacy alpha was, even reaching out to my various contacts. While I waited for their responses, I read through anything I could find on Frankie and the Lopez pack in the hopes I’d get some answers.

Finding her weakness was the ultimate goal, but I couldn’t do that if I didn’t understand her.

Just yesterday, I’d thought I had a good idea of who she was as a person, but the incident in the gym and her reaction to it proved I had no fucking clue who Francesca James Lopez really was.

All I knew was she was nothing like the person she pretended to be.

That was the only explanation I could come up with for the way she’d abandoned me in the gym and then returned to the office, greeting everyone else with a wide smile.

I’d say she hated me, but she had to show emotion for that to be true.

Frankie didn’t show any emotion toward me at all because to her, I simply didn’t exist.

Nothing has ever bothered me this badly before. It made me feel fucking crazy to see her look through me like I wasn’t standing right in front of her.

Running my hand through my hair, I leaned forward and grabbed the mouse, scrolling through the data I’ve gathered as I wondered for the thousandth time why she even left the Lopez pack to begin with.

Everyone knew she’d disappeared as a teen, but no one knew why.

The Lopez pack adopted many children over the generations, just like all the other legacy packs, but they rarely made who they adopted public until they reached adulthood. I respected that considering how vile the media could be, but it didn’t make my job any easier.

Lucy Parker Lopez was one of those children, an omega who’d ended up bonded to two of the most powerful alphas in the country. Her relationship with Frankie outside work was unknown though.

The rumors going around Genesis were that Frankie has been pining after Lucy this whole time, but that didn’t really make sense. There wasn’t any evidence Frankie felt that way in any of the pictures of them over the years.

It was a very platonic relationship from what I could see and nothing about Frankie’s current demeanor made it seem like she was upset about Lucy’s new alphas. Every time I caught her looking at her phone, she was smiling with genuine relief in her eyes.

So, the logical conclusion was Lucy was a headstrong, stubborn omega and Frankie felt responsibility for her as her alpha sibling. Once Francisco announced Lucy was also his daughter, it all made sense.

But I didn’t understand why a legacy alpha would let his daughters leave the pack with zero promise they’d ever return.

Frankie had even changed her name.

All these years and no one knew who she was related to thanks to Francisco’s insistence on his children’s privacy.

Was her sister really the only reason she’d left?

It seemed so, but my gut was telling me that wasn’t the only reason.

Thanks to how locked down the Lopez pack was, I wasn’t going to be able to unearth anything from her childhood. My employer would have a better chance of discovering that since they all lived in the same compound.

All I could do was find something from when she was Frankie James, or something in her present, but so far, she was squeaky clean.

On the surface, Frankie James was a popular alpha who had a lot of different connections thanks to the Genesis Agency, but after some digging, I was able to find her employment contract and it started a day after the Genesis Agency came into existence.

Going through government information was easier than trying to dig into anything the Lopez pack owned and I had a feeling it was all thanks to Lucy Parker.

All the data I needed was so locked down I couldn’t weasel my way through the firewall like I normally did.

If I so much as tried, I’d immediately get shut down and alerts would be sent off, exposing who was poking their nose where it didn’t belong.

But the government was different. Businesses were public information and going through everything I could had led me to an interesting truth.

The Genesis Armed Detective Agency was owned by Genesis Pharmaceuticals and that company was owned by another and then another until finally I’d reached the end of the rope. All those companies were owned by a trust and that trust belonged to Francesca Lopez.

A normal person wouldn’t be able to figure that out, but uncovering confidential information wasn’t difficult for me as long as it existed digitally.

I laced my fingers together and pressed them to my lips as I considered this information.

Changing her name allowed her to remain separate from the owner of her company as well as her pack. Even if someone found out what I had, no one would assume they were the same person since there weren’t any pictures of Francesca Lopez before her father announced her as the heir.

The only way someone might make a connection between her and the Lopez pack was due to the fact that Lauren Michaels was Francisco’s sister, though they haven’t shared the same surname since she left the pack at eighteen years old.

On the surface, it looked like the CEO of Genesis had nothing to do with the Lopez pack. She never attended legacy events and she was a beta, not an alpha.

But I didn’t think it was that simple.

Not that I had any proof to back up my hunch.

Lauren was never in the public eye before becoming the CEO of Genesis. I couldn’t find any record of her holding a job or owning any property. She had a bank account and some credit cards but that was it.

Her bank accounts did receive regular deposits but they came from Genesis Pharmaceuticals despite there being no record of her working there which led me to believe she was doing some work for Francisco he didn’t want anyone to know about.

It sounded like some wild conspiracy theory to say I fully believed all the legacy packs here had their own secret, private militaries, but I had a good reason to believe that.

Acheron was a city founded by four legacy packs. They were the originals – the ones who had the most power and strength whether it was measured in people or money.

Other legacy alphas born outside those four packs were adopted, but if they refused to leave their current pack, they became a new legacy – one that was either crushed by the original four, or left to limp along by making alliances and swearing allegiance to the original four.

None of the new legacy packs have ever reached the same level as Valor, Lopez, Steele, or Grimm. At least, not until Valentine came along.

A few months ago Liam Valor shook all of Acheron with his announcement – he would leave Valor to take the name Valentine.

There had always been speculations that Liam was secretly seeing his assistant, Cassius Valentine, but it was never confirmed.

Technically, it still wasn’t, but Liam and Cassius had both bonded to Lucy Parker Lopez and with Liam giving up his legacy for them…he could have taken the name Parker but he didn’t.

They all became Valentine.

But that wasn’t what had really caused the city to lose its collective mind. No, it was the fact that Valor then swore allegiance to Valentine when it was one of the founding packs of Acheron.

That was unheard of.

For the first time in two hundred years, a new legacy ascended and allied with not one, but two different legacy packs.

Now Lopez was allied with Steele thanks to Frankie’s engagement to River and that pack has been a legacy for nearly as long as Lopez has.

About a hundred years ago, Steele ran Acheron thanks to making a fortune in mining iron, copper, and gold.

They then invested in industrialization and hired scientists to create different kinds of alloys until they’d cornered the market on steel. Then about forty years ago, their wealth started slowly declining.

At some point, Lopez surpassed them despite focusing on law and accounting firms and Valor was always neck and neck with them in terms of net value until Nicolette Valor took over the pack.

Three out of the four founding packs in this city were now allied.

From the information my employer sent over, Lopez has hired Grimm on occasion, but mostly for protection. They were the only ones who didn’t actively pretend they didn’t have their own private military, but Grimm offered services and nothing more.

There was nothing Grimm wouldn’t sell if you had the money. They kept to themselves and only ever brought the bare minimum number of members to the legacy events.

None of them openly worked with anyone unless they were contracted.

And all Grimm soldiers had a tattoo on their neck declaring what pack they belonged to. It was a marketing ploy as well as a way to distinguish between contract soldiers and private military trained by any of the other legacy packs.

That pink-haired legacy alpha didn’t have a tattoo on his neck and I hadn’t smelt makeup on him either so I knew he wasn’t covering it up, but he was definitely a soldier. Some kind of trained assassin or spy.

Frankie had similar training from the way she held herself and how she moved.

At first, I didn’t think the other packs had anything to do with Frankie or Lopez. I didn’t think this information would help me learn her weakness either, but with all of it laid out before me, it was easy to see the gaps and inconsistencies.

Lauren Michaels didn’t have employment records before becoming the CEO of the Genesis Agency.

There were guards that worked for Lopez who were definitely not a part of the Grimm pack and I couldn’t find a single record of where they’d come from and what company they worked for.

When I dug a little deeper, it had led me right back to Genesis Pharmaceuticals, which didn’t make any fucking sense.

Lopez and Co was the main business owned by the Lopez pack. Under that umbrella was Lopez at Law and various other businesses including a few nonprofits and their newest acquisition, Mobookie, a phone and network provider that almost everyone in this city used thanks to their low prices.

But Genesis Pharmaceuticals wasn’t under the Lopez & Co umbrella. It belonged to Francesca Lopez’s trust.

Why?

Why were guards being paid through that company despite not being officially on their payroll? And if Lauren Michaels used to get paid by that company, then it was safe to assume she did something similar to those guards and whoever else Francisco was keeping out of the public eye.

Everything was put together in such a way that even when I untangled all the threads, I couldn’t use any of it against Francisco or Francesca Lopez.

The only thing I might be able to use was the fact that these people were on the payroll without having an employment contract with the company.

If it were anyone else, I’d consider that valuable, but this was Lopez we were talking about. Francisco was a notorious shark lawyer who hasn’t lost a single case for over twenty years.

This small bit of information wasn’t enough to be considered a ‘weakness.’

It wasn’t all that long ago that packs used to go to war with each other over resources so it wasn’t surprising they now warred internally for the only resource left – power.

I tapped my tablet and selected the program that had access to all the traffic cameras in the city.

The Lopez pack had land on the east side of the city and their compound wasn’t as large as some, but they had more international dealings than anyone other than Steele.

Selecting one of the cameras closest to the compound, I saw nothing but a black screen with a warning that the camera was out of order while they did repairs.

The Lopez pack was definitely paying off someone on the inside to make sure no one could see who was going to and from their compound.

I wouldn’t even bother with this if Frankie wasn’t sleeping there most nights. She rarely stayed at her apartment anymore.

Until the other night.

Closing out of everything and erasing my tracks took seconds. There was no way anyone would find out what I was doing on this computer, but if I so much as breathed wrong near anyone else’s I’d get caught by Lucy’s insanely aggressive programs.

That was making this job a lot harder than it should be.

Typically, I spent a week, maybe two, gathering intel.

That was it.

But this job? I had a feeling it was going to take longer than that and I couldn’t afford to dilly dally. Not when I was constantly second-guessing everything.

Even if Frankie had a weakness, could I report it, knowing what would happen next?

I opened one of the apps on my tablet and watched the tracker I put on her make its way to the Genesis building.

Why did I even care about what happened to her? It wasn’t like this was anything new for legacy packs. They all spied on each other and planned the downfall of their own family members just to gain a tiny sliver of power they hadn’t possessed before.

All of them were like this, looking down on those who weren’t legacies – sneering at anyone who didn’t quite meet their standards even if they were a legacy.

It was why I respected Lucy and Frankie as much as I did.

Neither of them fit the traditional standards or expectations and yet, they made that work for them.

Frankie had gotten incredibly lucky being Francisco’s daughter. Anyone else and she’d never be named the heir with blue eyes instead of red, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t worked her ass off to make Genesis as successful as it was.

It wasn’t like I didn’t know how hard it was to be anything different or out of the norm.

Technically, I was a legacy alpha.

The strength of my pheromones measured above average when compared to the majority of the legacy alpha statistics and I was just as big as any ‘true’ legacy. I possessed two knots and could make other alphas submit to my dominance if I felt like it.

I just didn’t have the same instincts the others had. I’ve never felt the need to prove my power and strength.

If that weren’t bad enough, I have never once reacted to an omega’s scent, not even when exposed to their pheromones during their heat cycle. I’ve never felt the urge to breed or claim with teeth and claws.

All I had was a single red eye with the smallest fleck in the other.

The grief this eye has given me…I’ve even considered going overseas and getting a transplant, but there was no guarantee the pheromones and genetics wouldn’t eventually contaminate the new eyes too.

This was a fate I couldn’t escape from, so I knew better than anyone just how much Frankie struggled.

Maybe that was the real reason she’d left the Lopez pack and name behind. Because then, she could just be another alpha in a sea of alphas and no one would ever think twice about the color of her eyes.

I was actually jealous that all she had to do was change her name to go unnoticed.

So, maybe the real question wasn’t why she left the Lopez pack, but why she ever came back.