Page 32 of Running with the Alpha’s Son (The Alpha’s Son #3)

It’s dark out by the time Jasper has finished speaking with his father and we’re able to slip out of the apartment. Of course, it’s never actually dark in Manhattan—the streetlights, the gleam of office windows and storefronts, illuminate everything. There’s not a star to be seen overhead, just the moon, waning and low on the horizon. I glance at it as we make our way around the back of the packhouse to the prison’s separate entrance. Is Selene up there now? Is she watching me? Does she think we’re doing the right thing?

“Come on,” Jasper says, a few feet ahead of me, waving me on. “The entrance to the prison levels is this way.”

“Seems a little weird to me that we’d keep all our most dangerous criminals right under the hub of pack activity,” I say as we approach a rolling garage door.

“We don’t,” Jasper says. “Our major prison facility is upstate at a secret location. My father only told me where exactly last year. This is more like a holding facility, a halfway house, where we keep prisoners before they’re officially sentenced.”

When we reach the entrance to what looks like an underground parking garage, Jasper waves a fob over a spot on the wall and a door I hadn’t even noticed opens up, a piece of the metal wall sliding away to reveal a dimly lit, concrete box.

“So Omar hasn’t been sentenced yet?”

Before we step inside, Jasper turns and places a hand on my arm. “Not officially, but Max…”

“What? What is it?”

“Earlier today he confessed.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He was probably told the judge would be more lenient if he fessed up. It’s a tactic they use to avoid lengthy trials.”

“So they won’t be lenient? It was a trick?”

He sighs and drops his gaze. “He attacked the alpha’s family in their home. There is no leniency for traitors.”

I flinch at that word.

“I wish there was more we could do,” he says, and I almost believe he means it.

We step into the concrete chamber and the door slides shut behind us. No defining features distinguish one wall from another, apart from the glass square in the center of the wall to my right. The light in here is weirdly yellow, casting a sickly glow across the single window, and there’s a strong industrial smell, like metal and dirt, and strangely I can’t sense the presence of any other wolves above or below me.

Jasper steps to the window, which I see now is not a portal to the outside but rather a partition between this and a small room on the other side. A gamma wolf in uniform sits behind the glass reading a magazine and chewing gum.

“Jasper Apollo, son of Alpha Jericho,” Jasper says to the man in the window. “I request access to the prisoner Omar Martinez.”

The guard looks up, unimpressed. “Reason for the visit?”

“The alpha wishes me to interrogate the rogue, for personal reasons.”

When Jasper drops Jericho’s name like a hot tamale, the guard stiffens up in his chair. “ID?”

“I’m the alpha’s son,” Jasper says, a little pouty.

“It’s just a precaution, sir. Even the alpha himself has to show ID.”

“Fine.” Jasper pulls out the same fob he used to open the door and swipes it over a black pad in the bottom right corner of the window. The guard turns to a screen, casting a blue light on his pale face.

“Very good, sir.” He glances behind Jasper at me. “And this is?”

“Maximilian Remus,” Jasper says proudly in a way that makes my stomach do a little flip. “My mate.”

“He got any ID?”

Jasper glances at me hopefully, and frantically I pat myself down, searching for the wallet I know is in my left jeans pocket. I pull out my school ID and hold it up for the guard to see.

“It’s all I have,” I say. “Will this do?”

“That’s fine,” the guard says. I exhale with relief. “Prisoner 18157215 is in cell D-17 on floor minus-four. Take the elevator straight down. Your visitation time is thirty minutes, you will be notified when that time is up. You’ll need to return here and register your IDs again to leave. Understood?”

“How is he?” I ask, before Jasper can say anything. “Is he being treated well?”

The guard gives me a bored look, like he couldn’t give two shits. “The prisoners are treated equally and within the precautions set out under the Prisoners’ Rights Act of ’87.”

“What does that mean?” I ask, stepping closer to the glass.

“It means he gets fed three times a day and fresh sheets every seven days. Other than that, I really don’t care.”

“You’re a real hero,” I mutter.

“Your visitation time has begun. Return here in thirty minutes or we will have you escorted out.” The guard shifts his attention to Jasper. “And that goes for your whole party.”

Jasper moves to step forward to hand this guy his ass, but before he can the guard smashes down on an unseen button and the wall to our right slides open, the concrete making an earsplitting scraping sound as it drags across the floor. Behind it is the inside of an elevator, all metal and chrome. The guard has already turned back to his magazine, so deciding it’s not worth it, I take Jasper’s arm and pull him inside. The elevator door slides shut behind us and we are swiftly lowered into the depths of the packhouse’s basement.

The elevator clanks to a stop and the door behind us grinds open. The temperature down here is hotter than outside—the air no longer has the sterile scent of the entry room, instead it’s thick with wolf sweat. All the layers of concrete must be to block out the wolf energy that’s pulsing through the walls down here.

It’s darker than I imagined. I thought the packhouse prison would be well lit, with decent ventilation and guards prowling everywhere. But instead I feel like I’m in the industrial basement of a warehouse somewhere on the outskirts of the city. The walls are plain cinder-block brick, with patches of damp where water is leaking from the pipes that run overhead. The lights must be super low watt, and only dot the long corridor that stretches out ahead of us every few feet.

“This is a prison?” I ask Jasper, who is staring down the hall with an unpleasant look on his face. Clearly he doesn’t come down here all that much either.

“You thought it would be cheerier?”

“No, I…I just didn’t think it would look like this. They really keep people here?”

“I guess so,” Jasper says and takes his first step down the hall. “For what it’s worth, I wasn’t expecting this either.”

A few feet away is a large panel of black glass that reaches from the floor to the ceiling, and next to it the number D-1, spray-painted on the brick with a stencil.

“Is that a cell?” I ask.

We both stare into the shadows before us and I can just make out more of the glass panels. They must be the cells. Picking up our pace, we make our way to the one that corresponds with Omar’s cell number, D-17. We stop in front of the glass panel and a red light, from a black box on the ceiling, blinks to green. The color of the glass slowly changes, the black fading, until the glass is transparent.

“It’s automated,” I say to Jasper, who seems just as bewildered as me.

Behind the glass is a small gray room, complete with a low-hanging bed attached to the wall with a couple of chains, a chair and a metal desk on the opposite side, and in the back corner what I assume is a toilet. Omar is sitting on the bed, his back pressed against the wall, his knees to his chest. As the glass finally finishes transforming he looks up, anger and fear twisting his bruised and swollen features.

I step forward and place a hand on the glass.

“Oh my moon gods. What did they do to you?”

“Cuz,” he says, his voice hoarse, “what are you doing here?”

“Your face,” I say, unable to ignore the crusted blood under his lip, the purple and yellow protrusion around his eye.

He lifts a couple fingers and touches the bruise gingerly. “Oh this. It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

“You’re right.” He nods into his knees. “They busted me up pretty good. Just the price of doing business I suppose.”

“That’s not okay.”

“Oh yeah, what’s he got to say about it?” He lifts his head at Jasper, who has remained a couple of steps behind me, lingering in the shadows.

“He didn’t know, otherwise we wouldn’t have let them do this to you.” I turn and gesture for Jasper to step forward. “Right?”

He doesn’t move, but the look on his face says it all. He’s horrified.

“This is unacceptable,” he says, or chokes is more like it. “I will make sure the wolves who did this are suitably reprimanded.”

Omar lifts his brow. “Sure, sure.” He returns his gaze to me. “What are you doing here anyhow?”

“I wanted to—to see you and make sure you’re okay and…” Suddenly, in the face of Omar’s brutalization and this rank excuse for a holding facility, the idea of asking Omar to explain himself seems ridiculous. No one, especially him, deserves to be treated this way.

“And to see why I did it?” he finishes the thought for me.

I press my other hand on the glass, wishing there wasn’t this barrier between us.

“If you tell us we might be able to help you. Right, Jasp?”

He crosses his arms, but nods.

Omar scoffs. “I told your hounds everything, already. Then they did this. What’s telling you going to help?”

“I don’t know, it just—it has to. Please, let us try?”

His head flops backward onto the wall like he’s thinking about it, then he turns and looks at me, studying my face. I try to convey just how serious I am, how badly I want to see him freed from this cell.

“Fine,” he huffs. Omar stands and comes to the glass. Up close his wounds look even worse. And there are more, on his arms and neck, I couldn’t see before. He’s wearing a white tank top and where the tattoo on his shoulder is exposed is a deep, nasty-looking gash, like someone slashed him with a blade. “What do you want to know?”

“Just start from the beginning,” I say. “Try to be detailed.”

Omar takes a deep breath. “Okay. It all started when my pack threw me out and my mate rejected me to stay. I was homeless, more or less, with no way to make money or to buy food. I spent a long time traveling, a long time. It’s easy to keep walking when you don’t know where you’re heading. I spent some time hunting on the prairies down south, living wild, you know? I thought maybe I could make a life like that but eventually food became too scarce and hard to find, and something, I don’t know if it was boredom or loneliness, made me leave. I went in search of other wolves.”

I glance at Jasper. Even rogues need to know they’re not alone.

Omar continues, his voice tired and catching, but he pushes through. “Eventually I found this group of rogues.”

“In Pittsburgh?” I ask. “Rogue City?”

“Yeah I guess. They all had this tattoo and I knew they were no good. Rough types mostly, the dregs of society. But they offered me a corner to sleep in and food if I hung out. I didn’t realize their kindness came at a cost.”

“Like what?”

“Small stuff at first. They gave me tasks, assignments. We’d rob some random gas station way out nowhere, scare campers away from their vehicles then take what we could. It was mostly food, small amounts of cash, just enough to get by. But things got more intense pretty quickly. The jobs got bigger. We’d terrorize towns on the outskirts of packs, raid their stores and homes. I didn’t want to do any of it. But after spending all that time alone I didn’t know where to go. And as long as we were only taking a little something, from wolves with too much anyway, it didn’t seem so bad.”

“Did you ever think of leaving?”

He puffs out some air. “Yeah, all the time. But where was I supposed to go? And besides, I saw what happened to wolves who tried to leave.”

“What?” I press closer to the glass.

“They were beaten, left for dead.”

“Right, of course you couldn’t leave.” I glance at Jasper once more. He seems unmoved, or maybe he’s just trying to process all this new information.

“Eventually, after a couple of wolves tried to escape they gathered all of us in this shed.” My mind goes back to the grain silo in Rogue City where Aisha was held—I wonder if that’s the same place Omar is talking about. “They gave us this big dumb speech about how we owe them and how if we’re ungrateful and try to leave they’ll straight-up kill us. That’s when they decided to mark each of us.”

He reaches up to his tattoo, wincing where some pack wolf has torn through his skin.

“Once we’d been branded we were told we could never escape.”

“So what about the attack at the packhouse? That seems like another escalation even for these guys.”

“I remember the day it happened, I was sitting out on these stairs with a bucket trying to get my one set of jeans clean when this fancy car showed up and a man from the city got out.”

Again I flash back to my time in Pittsburgh, that time we were there and we saw the car with the blackout windows. At the time I’d wrongly assumed Jericho was inside. Now the pieces start coming together.

“Mr. Peng,” I say. “He came to hire the rogues to abduct Aisha.”

“Huh?” Omar looks genuinely confused.

“You know, George? He was at the Sanc. He paid the rogues to kidnap Aisha when he thought she was Jasper’s mate, then he hired them to attack us in the Hamptons.”

“George never came to Rogue City.”

My head feels like it’s about to spin off my body. Jasper steps forward now, a perturbed look on his face.

“What do you mean George never came to Rogue City?” he asks, a deep rumble tumbling in his chest.

“We saw him,” I say. “Or at least we saw his car.”

Omar shakes his head.

“George may have been involved—I know he suggested we replace you Max, with his daughter. But he wasn’t the one in charge.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think a chauffeur could afford to pay off enough rogue mercenaries to infiltrate the alpha’s house?” Omar’s eyes dart from me to Jasper. “Don’t tell me you all are that dopey.”

Jasper and I are both dumbstruck. What is he talking about?

“George was just as much a pawn in this as me. The real wolf responsible is someone much more powerful.”