Fragile Bonds

by Adelaide Walsh

  My little office in the tower was gray. Very very gray. And as I sat there, staring at the gray ceiling, lost in the current of my thoughts, I came to the conclusion that Joaquín freaked me right the hell out. On the heels of that conclusion, I also realized that it was nearing on eight in the morning. I’d been awake for over twenty-four hours at this point and my sleep deprived brain was struggling to preserve its focus on anything. Carro only had about eight hours left, and I still had nothing. No leads, no ideas, and no brain power to figure out what my next step should be. I’d tried my contact at Justice twice now, both times the call went straight to voicemail. If they hadn’t dispatched a unit though it was unlikely they’d be able to offer me much help.

  I packed up my things, deciding a change of scenery would improve my mental prowess. I figured I should go home and get an hour or so of sleep if I was going to have any chance of coming up with a plan.

  As I walked out into the violent sunshine of the street, the damp morning heat already suffocating, I felt the tug of anxiety, and shoved it down into the deepest, blackest, most desolate corners of myself. I could not afford to drown in doubt. I was busy snuffing out that putrid flame when I made it to my Jeep, parked in the underground garage by the tower. My Jeep, however, wasn’t alone.

  Sitting on the roof rack of my black four-by-four was a thickly built man with hair the color of polished obsidian and a face that made me think of war paint and arrow heads. And he was alone. A thought which, curiously, disturbed me on some level.

  “How’d you manage to give your body guards the slip, oso de peluche?”

  He jumped off the top of the Jeep in a move so strangely fluid I caught myself wondering if maybe I’d blinked and missed some part of it. I took a step closer to him, laying my hand on the hood of my Jeep, deciding that I would not give this man—this alpha—the satisfaction of seeing me hesitate. This was my territory that he’d now trespassed upon. He may be an alpha to his people, but I would not as easily come to heel. I claimed my space with squared shoulders and a spine made of steel regardless of my earlier doubts.

  “You wound me, reinita.”

  “The square root of I is I,” I quipped, as I shrugged, spreading my hands in a gesture of resignation. “Don’t fault me for seeing through your title.”

  He raised one dark eyebrow and fisted his hands at his hips in a quintessentially-male pose. Despite the fact that he was very much outside of his little ‘kingdom’, he maintained the air of man who had laid a claim over the ground he walked.

  “Nabokov did seem to understand the God Complex, didn’t he?”

  I affected an expression of mock surprise...although, truthfully, I was a little surprised.

  “He reads!”

  “I do. I’ve even read a few of your pieces.”

  As a journalist I got comments like that often, I’d learned to accept them with pride. But I suddenly felt...embarrassed? The sensation was strange.

  “You find your man yet? Trail I’m on is a dead-end.” I changed the subject and watched as the smirk on his face fell to a solemn expression.

  “Our retrievalists are...struggling.”

  I thought for a minute. Considering my options. If he’d found me here it meant his men had a tracker on my Jeep. There had been plenty of time to get one installed. I’d have to deal with that eventually, but right now, with only a few hours left for Carro, I figured it was a problem for another day. Even without the tracker they’d be able to find my address with a simple internet search. It’s not like I put a lot of stock in privacy. To be a journalist was to be a public figure.

  My eyes tracked him from head to booted foot, and I resigned to the offer I was about to make. There wasn’t enough time left to argue. He wouldn’t be here if he didn’t have something useful for me, and I simply couldn’t keep going without some breakfast and a rest.

  “Hop in.” I jerked my head toward the Jeep. “You can give me whatever you got over breakfast.”

  “What makes you so sure I’ve got anything at all?” His still severe look belied his teasing remark. I crossed the two steps to where he stood and shouldered him out of the way of the driver’s side door. He didn’t move an inch. “And I don’t ride with a woman. I drive.”

  Ugh. Men. I gagged a little, mostly for show—partly because of the cliché.

  “Joaquín,” I chided, “am I threatening your manhood? I’m so sorry.” I looked up at him and held up my keys directly in front of his nose. His nearness making the movement awkward. “Please, by all means, if driving my Jeep would let you feel a little more virile, then be my guest.”

  His eyes flicked between my own.

  “Ooh, reinita, you got a mouth on you.” He clenched his teeth, feigning pain.

  I just plastered a saccharine sweet smile on my face.

  “I find it helps control overly entitled men.”

  “Ouch.”

  He shoved away from the door and rounded the rear of the Jeep and slid into the passenger seat shaking his head.

  Traffic this early in the city was usually bogged down with the morning rush of people heading to work. Today it seemed, however, that Bogotá was getting a slow start. People were no doubt unsure of what their lives would be like now, under this new regime. The whole of Karinna Holdings Group, the company that owned the myriad newspapers and media outlets I worked for, had sent out an email to every employee on the payroll last night saying that the office would be closed for the next two days in fear that, as the primary network covering the regime change, the building may be targeted in acts of violence. All field work was apparently continuing as normal. I’m not sure what they thought two days was going to buy them, but I guess it seemed courteous enough to at least make an effort to protect their employees from terrorism.

  I wondered at whether the management would have had to receive an actual threat to close the building or not as I weaved through the narrow streets of the inner city. Joaquín, apparently, could only be content with my silence for so long.

  “My team has been running every angle we can come up with since the abduction. Trail is ice. Justice is unresponsive and if we confront Dariel with this we’d be starting a war.”

  The insurrection in Colombia had been a stealthy one. But something hit me just then that I hadn’t thought of before.

  “Has Dariel reached out to you? The packs?”

  Joaquín shook his head. “We didn’t know anything more about this than the humans did, Adriana. But changeling rules of engagement still apply. Dariel has simply made a territorial grab, even if it is the territory of the humans. No pack can step in without opening hostilities. Las Furia is strong, but Dariel absolutely has more firepower than we do. We can’t risk him coming at us directly right now. We aren’t prepared for it.”

  Last night he’d been entirely close lipped about pack details, but he’d just handed over two pieces of wildly important information. Las Furia had an army stocked with ‘firepower’—even if the Snakes had more, Las Furia had some. And he’d said they couldn’t risk an attack ‘right now’. The Bears, it seemed, were preparing. Interesting.

  “Why the sudden change of heart on secret sharing?” I asked, still concentrating on the roads.

  He threw an arm behind my seat and turned that big body toward me. He seemed too big for the confined space of the Jeep. I met his gaze looking out of the corner of my eyes.

  “We found...the leak. Our entire communications server is compromised. Fuckers had everything they needed to pick up any one of my patrols. Most of our data stores are held externally. We will be rectifying that today.”

  I nodded, hoping like hell the pack had the resources to lock down their own servers. Unlike human entities, it was very-very hard to come by financial data on packs.

  I let that comment hang there in the air between us for a long second. Now that we were alone, on my turf, Joaquín seemed no less imposing, but the distance between us now felt...less. As though I was no longer talking to an alpha, but
an equal.

  “You didn’t make the hike all the way up here just to thank me though.”

  “But I do want to thank you.”

  The ease with which he thanked me threw me off. I hadn’t expected this overbearing, arrogant person to be able to throw out such sincere and humble gratitude. I blinked back my surprise, forcing myself to keep my eyes on the road.

  “Um, sure.” I stumbled over words in my head. My usual snarky replies didn’t appear to fit in this situation and I felt lost. “Happy to help.”

  Five minutes later the Bear alpha was following me into my apartment, and I had the strangest sensation of being followed home by a stray. As I unlocked my front door, he pushed past me with a clipped command of “stay.” The high-handed tyrant returned.

  Obviously, I was not going to ‘stay,’ especially after being ordered around like a house pet. I followed him through my flat as he swept through each room on the bottom level. He had no weapon—in his hands at least—and I wondered if he would even need one should his search of my flat turn up an intruder. His concerns were not unfounded. The Snakes might not have been actively looking for me as of my meeting with Emmanuel, but that didn’t really mean they wouldn’t start. I’d been a voice for many of the people and packs in Argentina and Venezuela while he was establishing his operations in both countries. I hadn’t released anything about the Snakes in Columbia for months simply because there’d been no concrete proof that what was happening was actually happening. Until, of course, three days ago, Snake military units cleaned house in Bogotá. I had no idea my country had been this close to a turnover. I don’t think anyone did. I had known Orcanas was in bed with Dariel, but all the signs were pointing to a political alliance. A long term game. Even the correspondence within the Snake camp that I’d been able to intercept gave no indication that Dariel would be making a grab for my Colombia so soon.

  When Joaquín made a move toward the spiral staircase I bodily blocked his progress.

  “Yeah, I can sweep the bedroom. Help yourself to the fridge.”

  He gave me an assessing look and after a moment's pause he shrugged and sauntered to the kitchen island. I ascended the steps at a jog and scanned the upstairs rooms with the gun I grabbed on my way past my closet. Couldn’t hurt to be appropriately armed with a Bear alpha sitting in my kitchen. Right?

  Satisfied my flat was clean, I made my way back downstairs, sparing a longing glance at my nice fluffy bed.

  “No baddies up there,” I said to the man now draped over a bar stool – his back to the kitchen island, legs splayed out in a position of unqualified confidence. I made a little show of tucking the gun into the waistband of my jeans.

  “You look tired,” he returned.

  “You sure know how to woo a girl.”

  “You didn’t sleep.”

  I moved to the countertop across from where the alpha sat and leaned into hands spread wide on the polished concrete.

  “I don’t think Carro is sleeping either.”

  He dug a small envelope out of the back pocket of his jeans and slapped it down on the counter.

  “Photos, from our surveillance system.”

  My heart sunk in my chest. I had hoped he had something more for me. We were running out of time for Carro. I picked up the envelope and shuffled through the pictures. The story they told was a grim one, no different than any of the other politically motivated abductions I’d been investigating over the last months. Carro was taken at gunpoint by five men toting an arsenal of fully automatic weapons. I didn’t recognize any of the men. The Snakes have always had numbers on their side making the chances of recognizing one at random extremely low.

  I quickly laid out the photos and took pictures with my phone. If we were really lucky a quick image search would turn up something on one of these guys that we could follow.

  Joaquín sat in silence as I furiously tapped through search results on my phone. We only had clear images of three of the men in the pictures, and luck was not favoring any Colombian this day. None of the images turned up any useful results. Two of the men had no discernible digital presence—at least nothing I could dig up based on these photos. The third man’s picture turned up an old mug shot for a petty crime committed over a decade ago. I almost threw my phone.

  “I’ve got nothing. I know who took him. I know what they’re going to do to him. But I have no idea how to find him,” I admitted through a frustrated growl. “It’s like they just disappeared.”

  And it hurt my heart to say it out loud. Joaquín’s full lips thinned.

  “We’ve thrown every skill we have access to behind this, but unless we call out Dariel we aren’t going to find him.” His voice was subdued and I could feel the heartache inside him at failing his own man.

  “Justice never responded to the tip. Never tracked the vehicle upon exit from den territory. I’ve checked every surveillance system I could get into in the last four hours and found precisely nothing. They are either manipulating data, which is entirely possible: Dariel’s people probably have unfettered access to all the cities data stores by now. Or they simply took a route not covered by cameras. We don’t even know for sure they came back to the city.”

  Joaquín fisted a big hand on the countertop, the tension in his entire body strung taught enough to snap.

  “We couldn’t chase them into human sectors. We cannot step in without bringing Dariel to our doorstep. I have no issue in starting a war to protect my people, but I will not start one we have no hope in hell of winning.”

  I leaned over the counter, laying my hand over his. I felt with this man. He might be an arrogant prick half the time, but he was loyal to his people. We were going to run out of time and there was nothing we could do. I felt like the minutes were slipping through my hands, every second a drop of heart’s blood lost. And there was just nothing I could do about it.

  Carro had less than eight hours left before his captors would confirm the hit via email, like they’d done with each of the other victims. An email which would be sent to a huge list of addresses, more than likely meant to register as spam and overwhelm any tracking program attempting to trace the sender. The account the emails came from was a throw away one anyway. No useful information stored in it, not used for anything else. I’d intercept the confirmation long after I could do anything to stop the deed. And the failure would weigh on my heart for a very, very long time. I knew how it was going to hurt me, but I could only guess at the hurt Joaquín—Carro’s alpha, his friend—would feel.

  Chapter 8

  I wasn’t sure exactly what to say to make this better. Time was running out so quickly and we still didn’t have anything. Fuck.

  “We’re doing everything we can, Joa.”

  He pulled his hand away from mine and shoved it into his back pocket, digging for his phone.

  “Any ideas about locations?” he asked, eyes locked on the screen of his phone.

  I racked my brain. “You got someone visiting places cold?” I shook my head. It was a long shot. “Maybe try the warehouses south of Usme? Lots of abandoned buildings down that way. Low foot traffic. Lots of space. Good spot to take somebody if you don't want to be seen.

  He dropped the phone on the counter in front of him and scrubbed his hands over his face, growling out his frustration.

  "Unit has been down that way for the last four hours. There is just too much ground to cover when we have no fucking leads."

  Fuck. I felt sick to my stomach. Turning around I quickly collected the necessary items to brew coffee and slapped together two rather pathetic looking sandwiches from whatever it was I had in my fridge. There wasn't much, mostly condiments actually, but I made it work. When I was finished, I slid a plate with food over to Joaquín and filled two mugs with a rich, chocolatey coffee grown in the highest elevations in Colombia. My country had so many wonderful, inspiring resources. So much to offer. Our beloved rainforest gave us so much, and yet, it put us at risk at the same time. Those incredible res
ources—the wood, the flowers, the coffee, and yes...even the drugs drew the attention of greedy, thoughtless people around the world who would take and take and take from it until our forest withered and died. And with the Luz Mala gone, Dariel in power, and the packs of the country literally cowering in fear, it was just a matter of time before those black hearted people realized the opportunities our turmoil presented. Carro's body would very soon be joined by many, many more.

  The realization hit me like a ton of bricks. I wasn't going to be able to help Carro. I was going to fail.

  We ate our food in silence, both of us knowing we were facing a clock that would run out and take a life with it. Neither of us were willing to discuss that vile knowledge. When I'd eaten as much as I could stomach, I slid my seat back and mumbled to a stoic Joaquín that I was going to grab my laptop.

  I ascended the stairs, grabbed my laptop off the desk, and fell on to my bed, still crumbling under the impending failure. What else can I do? What else is here? What am I missing?

  I tapped, once again, through the caches of comm files I'd intercepted from the Snakes. This time I searched for random words, anything even remotely related to a successful mission. There were hundreds of hits, but nothing that fit the timeline. I tried phoning my contact in Justice one more time but was again met with a voice mail. A thought occurred to me that it wasn't exactly polite to leave the Bear alpha sitting alone in my kitchen, but the idea of going back to him with nothing burned a hole in my gut. I was laying, horizontal across the end of my bed, tapping through street surveillance images in a last-ditch effort to find something—anything—when the hours began to catch up to me.

  My eyes fluttered open when the laptop under my head was slid away from me. Joaquín, in all his masculine ferocity, was standing over me with a look on his face that entirely escaped me. There was hurt there. There was a kind of tenderness, too. But I wasn't sure that either of those things were for me.

  "Shit," I rubbed at my eyes with the back of one hand, "I fell asleep."