He was my-my lover. My favorite. My partner.My darling. I would die without him.
We arrived in the small town of Brownsville an hour later. Kyle had broken a lot of laws to get us there so soon, and I was feeling like I was going to break a few more. By the time he pulled up outside Jax’s father’s house, I was pretty far gone, but Kyle bravely put his hand on my arm to stop me.
“If you kill him, he can’t tell us where Jax is.”
I answered with a growl.
“Look, Dominic, I know. I get what you must be feeling, but you need to calm down a bit before we go in there. For Jax’s sake.”
I didn’t answer. Just sat there seething. “Would you agree to let me go in and talk to him first?”
I whipped my head around and growled again, and by this time I knew I was partially transformed into my Dragon.
“Dominic. Let me go in first. I think I know how to get him to tell us where Jax is.”
“How?” I said or tried to and was alarmed to hear that word come out as a cross between a growl and a hiss. It surprised Kyle too and he stared at me for a minute and then took a deep breath. “Bro, you know I’ll help you kill everybody in the place and hide the bodies if that’s what you decide. But I don’t think Jax would like it if you killed his whole family, am I right?”
I hesitated, but finally gave a sharp nod.
“Okay, then let me go in first. I’m going to dangle another offer in front of him—far more money than he could imagine. If he jumps at it, like I think he will, then he’ll give me the address and we can go get your boy. If not, I’ll transform myself, and I’ll help you lay down the flames and light this whole town up.”
Reluctantly, but knowing he was right—Jax wouldn’t want me to destroy his whole family. Probably. I nodded again, and he jumped out of the car and went to the door. He was admitted pretty quickly by a swarthy looking guy who looked to be around forty years old. He glanced at my car and at me and then pulled the door open wider for Kyle to go inside.
Kyle was gone long enough that I got restless and got out to start pacing around and around the car. I spat out some flames and set a couple of bushes by the driveway on fire, and the mailbox. And the neighbor’s mailbox. It helped a little.
Finally, I saw the front door open, and Kyle came out to stand beside me, looking around uneasily at the small fires here and there, and the neighbors running to drag out their garden hoses to put them out.
“Okay, here’s what I found out. Of course, as you know, omegas are usually auctioned off to the highest bidder in their own area. But owing to Jax’s status as an Alpha’s son, albeit a minor Alpha, and because he’s so good looking, his father thought he might be able to get more money for him than just a regular local auction. He had put an advertisement on-line for Jax on a website on the dark web.”
He glanced over at me when he heard my suddenly rapid breathing and patted my arm again. “Now this is the part you’re not going to like. He included some nude photos in his ad because he wanted to be able to attract higher bids, and he said that because Jax was small and had all that blond hair, he felt like Jax was the kind of male omega most ‘real men’ might want.”
I found I was unable to speak for a moment. His words made my guts clench like last night’s burrito special at the Taco Hut. I thought I was beyond being shocked, but this was a whole new level. It was hard to imagine a man showing contempt like that for his own child. It was despicable.
“Right,” I said, nodding. “I’m going to kill him now. I’ll be right back.”
“No, wait,” he said, grabbing my arm. “The buyer had to come from Texas. He just arrived this afternoon, and we only missed him by about twenty minutes. He hasn’t had time to—to ‘hurt’ Jax, if you get my meaning.”
“Where is he?” I said, barely able to get the words out.
“They’re checking into the local Holiday Inn right about now. That’s what he said. I think we actually passed it on the way here. I told him we’d double the guy’s offer for Jax, and he jumped at it. Dominic, wait! Listen! He said that the union hasn’t had time to be ‘consummated,’ is the way he put it. Damn it, hold on a second!”
But I was already getting behind the wheel and Kyle had to scramble to jump in the passenger seat beside me as I was pulling away from the curb. “Uh, okay, I guess we’ll go back after we get Jax, huh? I told him we’d make the purchase right away, because this other guy will have papers on Jax.”
“Which aren’t worth the ink he used to sign them. The local human police won’t appreciate the finer points of a contract his father used to sell his own son. This guy from Texas won’t dare cause any trouble. And if he does…”
“Yeah, I know. You’ll kill him.”
“You got it!” I agreed with a huge, feral grin and burned rubber all the way back into town.
Chapter Fifteen
Jax
I kept telling myself that panicking wouldn’t help. The only trouble was I had to keep chanting that like a mantra, over and over, just to keep myself from starting to scream and then never being able to stop.
The Alpha beside me as we walked down the motel hallway had come to my father’s house earlier that day and handed over a large amount of cash to him. In exchange my father gave him a paper he’d had printed up, which in effect, sold me to this man as his slave. Or at least that’s what it felt like to me.
Over the last few days since my father and brothers showed up at my house to take me with them, I had begged and pleaded with him to listen to what I had to say. I’d told him I’d give him money to let me go, and he jeered at me, saying anything I had was already his. If he’d realized my nana had figured a way to somehow leave me the shop, he’d have come to sell it long before now, so I’d been lucky in a way to have kept it from him for this long. I should count myself even luckier that he couldn’t afford to punish me now since he’d already sold me—putting marks on me at this point might mess up his lucrative deal.