Page 62 of Old Secrets

“That big dog was a Fenerec, then.”

“Correct. And because of your ties with me, the circumstances of the kidnapping, and the Inquisition having flagged you as a possible witch, they made certain to have the appropriate personnel on hand in case your witchcraft awoke. But it turns out you have something a little more than basic witchcraft.”

“No kidding.”

“This is where I’m going to take a few sharp turns, putting together what I’ve been thinking about versus what we witnessed. Before we came to Japan, Mellisa had been talking to me in therapy about the changes in my behavior.”

“Thus, the whole Omega thing.”

“Right. She isolated several points in my FBI history where my behavior changed. Unbeknownst to me, one of our bosses had flagged us as a potential pairing; I had fixated on you, and I had a tendency to react poorly when something happened to you. I’ll admit, my wolf was invested the instant he met you, and he wanted to surrender and follow you around like a puppy from the start. What got us flagged was my abandonment of my overly aloof ways with previous partners. Which, apparently, is a symptom of a submissive who has to hide being submissive. The aloofness is our bad attempt at trying to keep a distance without putting our tails between our legs and pissing out of fright. We cover it trying to act bold. In reality, we’re big softies who want nothing more than a hug.”

I read between the lines: my mate needed extra cuddles after we ate dinner. “I’ll make sure you’re given proper attention after we eat.”

He chuckled. “She thinks you started working on me in earnest after about a year into our partnership; that was when you started to trust me. I think, over that year, my wolf and I became what was needed to support you. Whatever makes you you then started working on me to make sure I stuck around. Fenerec die from one of three ways, typically: the plague, bodily harm, or running wild and being killed. Of the three ways, I was at higher risk of running wild than most. Before your intervention, Mellisa estimates I would have run wild by the time I turned a hundred due to trying to be dominant when I’m really simply not. She is concerned it might have been sooner, possibly by the time I turned fifty. She found indications in my file about probable symptoms of being unbalanced. At that stage, not a risk to anyone, but I had the behavioral oddities displayed in those who are at higher risk of running wild.”

I winced. “And as I hadn’t really understood I was a fox then, it would have been the magic that makes me sink like a stone in the water.”

“The entirety of the Earth loves you, although not nearly as much as I do.”

I laughed at that, shook my head at the absurdity of his statement, and rather than question him, I ate more of my food. “That leads to my transfer to CARD.”

“I did not handle your transfer to CARD well. Mellisa showed me parts of my file, and she explained my behaviors—mated without being actually mated, essentially. Which tracks, because until recently, you’ve had a hell of a time picking up our mating markers. Whatever makes you you hides that—and I suspect it’s due to your parents.”

I stopped eating to regard him with wide eyes. “What do you mean?”

“Your parents knew they had one child who possibly survived. They are old, and they are powerful. They would have wanted you to live, and sometimes, the easiest way to hide someone is to mask their presence. Considering how they can influence auras, I suspect their magic has been working on you the whole time, safeguarding you. I think your brand of the same magic is starting to overpower what they can do at a distance, resulting in hidden things, like our mating bond, being revealed.”

I wrinkled my nose, as the lack of scent markers had caused us so many problems. “And if that is the case, I can’t even get angry at them over it. It’s a sound theory.”

“It did create a lot of problems for us. And a lot of the blame goes to me, although Mellisa is trying to convince me that until I’d fully transitioned from submissive to Omega there was truly nothing I could do to fight it.”

Being a victim sucked, and when the victimizers were parents, the level of suckage grew to epic proportions. We’d both weathered that storm, albeit in different ways. “You couldn’t fight them because of your status as submissive.”

He nodded. “I wanted to, but my wolf kept balking, and it went beyond just being upset.”

“Terror.” I understood terror. I also understood how Jake’s parents might not recognize the truth about their submissive son. “That would be when my magic worked in earnest.”

“You would have been expending a lot of calories doing it, which explains your dramatic weight loss during our separation. You were undereating, but nothing in anything we investigated indicated you were undereating to the extent of losing all of your muscle mass like you had. That should have taken substantially longer.”

Huh. That hadn’t occurred to me. “And the London shooting?”

“In Mellisa’s opinion, that would have been the pivotal moment for your magic to really start working on me. Your true nature woke up, and your true nature identified me as your mate. Our noses and general abilities couldn’t pick up on it, but your fox did.”

I could believe that with little effort, and to buy myself some time to think about it, I ate another gyoza.

“That takes us to our separation.”

I wrinkled my nose, as while we’d discussed it more than a few times in the past, with Mellisa serving as a referee, I abhorred the memories. “Do you think the Hemshaw case is linked to Greenwich?”

“I don’t know. They’ll be looking into it, but due to the nature of the case, it could go either way. I don’t think so, but a lot of what we thought proved to be wrong. Hell, the Inquisition initially thought someone was trying to expose the Fenerec when we were working on Jacob’s case. We’ve since determined our preconceived notions cost us a lot of opportunities to uncover Greenwich operatives right under our noses.”

“Like my team.”

“There was nothing you could have done about that, Karma. It was two against three, and the only potential ally in that mess had been deliberately soured against you by the Greenwich operatives. And since we hadn’t even known Greenwich had infiltrated the FBI, it wasn’t a mountain you could climb. I will make sure Mellisa talks you through it, because you’re going to need a lot of therapy before you return to CARD, fix what Greenwich broke, and decide where we’re going from there. If you want to save kids, we’ll save kids—and we’ll do so in a friendly environment. The cards were all stacked against you. And no, I will refuse any team with my parents on it. Mellisa has told me more times than I care to count that my parents are going to have to learn how to be parents again, and that I’m best off at a healthy distance.”

“As long as they change for the better, especially for the other submissives in their pack,” I muttered.

“Fortunately for the other submissives in the pack, they are treated much closer to how they need to be treated. I just wasn’t because my mother believes she couldn’t possibly have anything other than a dominant son.”