Page 84 of Run Wild Omega

“Coffee’s on,” he says, nodding toward the pot on the far counter. It’s been sitting there a while, I can tell by the slightly burnt smell, but I pour a cup anyway. Black. No sugar. I need the bitterness.

“You look like shit,” I say, taking a sip.

“So do you.”

“Fair enough.”

We stand in silence, two exhausted men in a dark station at five in the morning, listening to a cat eat. It’s not comfortable, exactly, but it’s familiar. We’ve shared worse silences than this—after bad calls, after close calls, after the kind of days that make you question why you chose a job that requires you to carry other people’s pain home with you.

The side door opens. Miles steps in, stamping snow off his boots. He’s wearing a wool coat over a sweater, his glasses fogging from the temperature change. He looks like he hasn’t slept either—there’s a pallor to his skin that the overhead lights don’t help—but his eyes are sharp and alert.

“Pip,” he says by way of greeting. The cat lifts her head from the bowl, assesses him, and goes back to eating.

“Coffee’s burnt,” I say.

“I know. I could smell it from the parking lot.” He pours a cup anyway.

We migrate to the map table—the large, scarred surface in the center of the room that’s usually covered in topographic maps and incident reports. This morning it’s empty except for a laptop Miles brought in with him, which he opens and sets on the table.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says, sitting down.

“Dangerous,” Wyatt says, pulling out a chair.

“About the statement. The one Daniel and Reddick drafted.”

I lean against the edge of the table, wrapping my hands around the warm coffee cup. “What about it?”

Miles pulls up a browser window. On the screen is the text of the joint statement—the same one Tess signed last night. I’ve read it three times. It’s clean, clinical, and carefully worded to avoid naming Tess directly.

“Read the third paragraph,” Miles says.

I scan the text. “The Sweet Creek Search and Rescue team conducted the extraction in accordance with established protocols.”

“Now think about what happens when we file the bond registration.”

I frown. Wyatt shifts in his chair.

“If we register as Tess’s bonded pack,” Miles says, tapping the screen, “that statement becomes compromised. Right now, it’s presented as an objective assessment from an independent SAR team. But the moment the public learns that the three men who wrote that statement are also the men who’ve claimed the victim as their Omega, the framing changes entirely.”

Wyatt’s jaw tightens. “It looks like we were protecting her.”

“Exactly. Every word in that statement becomes suspect. ‘The guide’s compliance has been verified’ stops being a factual endorsement and starts reading like a pack circling the wagons.”

I set my coffee down. “So we’re caught between two bad options. If we don’t register the bond, the predatory packs keep circling and the media keeps speculating. If we do register, we undermine the only official statement that defends Tess’s professional conduct.”

“Yes.”

“Is there a third option?”

Miles takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “The timeline helps us. If we let the statement circulate for another week—let it get picked up, quoted, embedded in the news cycle—it becomes established fact before the bond registration goes public. By the time anyone makes the connection, the narrative has already hardened. The statement isn’t ‘the SAR team defending their Omega,’ it’s ‘the official record that was filed before the bond was announced.’”

“A week?” Wyatt’s voice is tight. “The Ashfords aren’t going to wait a week. Neither are the Voss people.”

“No,” Miles agrees. “Which is why we accelerate the visible markers of the claim without filing the paperwork yet. The scenting this morning is step one. A public appearance together—her at the hospital with us, visibly claimed—is step two. The registration is step three, and we file it only after the statement has had time to settle.”

“So we perform the bond before it’s legally real,” I say.

“For about ten to fourteen days, yes. It’s a risk. If anyone challenges the claim before it’s registered, we have no legal standing. But the packs won’t challenge it openly—they’ll go through back channels, through lawyers, through the regulatory boards. That takes time. Time we use to get the statement entrenched.”