Free Omega's Run by A. J. Downey, Ryan Kells

the pack was protected, and you got to pick off wolf-kind for your own purposes.”
    He nodded, a slow grin stealing across his lips.
    “Ahhhh, finally. Understanding dawns like the morning sun over the horizon,” he mocked. “It took you long enough. I’m really rather disappointed in you, Remus. You were supposed to be the clever one.”
    “I couldn’t care less, Mathias. You’ve got some explaining to do. Why would you want to attack my pack now after protecting it for who knows how long?”
    “The arrangement I had with your father, Declan, was no longer adequate.” He shrugged and started pacing back and forth on the other side of the bars, just out of reach of my long arms.
    “When I first entered into the arrangement with Declan, the Northwest pack was attacked fairly frequently. There was a steady stream of new specimens for me to work with. But over the last few years, the other packs learned the futility of even attempting to encroach into the Washington Territory. My men did their jobs a little too well it seems. The rest of the packs of you rabid dogs were too scared to even try to go near Washington. I found my need for new specimens severely outweighed the supply available, things needed to change.”
    “You sick fucking bastard,” I snarled. “You contacted Romulus. Didn’t you? I always thought he found you somehow but no, it was the other way around, wasn’t it? You reached out to him. You got in touch with him and offered to help remove our father as Alpha.” It was suddenly so painfully clear. The Hangman was well known for never leaving evidence behind except the damage to whatever body he’d dropped. He should never have left his weapon when he’d killed our father.
    “Why did you leave the garrote?” I asked suddenly, and he blinked owlishly. “There’s no reason to do that unless you’re trying to draw attention to yourself. We knew it was going to be you. We arranged for you to meet with our father under a pretense of peace. No one else in the pack knew but us. So leaving your weapon... that was only to draw attention. Wasn’t it?” I frowned, turning over his actions in my mind. “You wanted to draw William’s attention. You wanted to force a fight for Alpha figuring we would kill him and eliminate that potential threat.”
    He shook his head and I frowned again. “Your brother is little threat. Simply a minor roadblock in the grand scheme of things.”
    “If it wasn’t about removing William from the table...” I felt feverish. My mind whirling faster than ever, struggling to piece together the puzzle that was Mathias Young. I considered what I knew about him. What the pack knew, and what I had discovered since first meeting him. Cold blooded was an apt description for the old man. Cold, methodical, precise, and manipulative. Manipulative to the nth degree. There hadn’t been a scale invented to measure the level of manipulative villainous shit this man was into…
    “Chloe,” I blurted out before I could stop myself, just as the thought occurred to me. The fucked up horror of it blossoming in my mind, flickering to life like a tongue of flame licking at the edges of dry paper, ready to consume everything else.
    “You’re doing something down here, capturing wolf-kind instead of killing them, but even you have to answer to someone. Even you have superiors. They don’t know what you’re doing, do they? And you were counting on William kidnapping your daughter. In fact you wanted him to kill her so you could garner sympathy from your superiors.”
    He didn’t move. He didn’t blink or shift his weight. His breathing remained exactly the same. But somehow I knew I had hit the nail on the head. His lack of a response, his total stillness was telling in and of itself.
    “You are some piece of work,” I breathed, shaking my head in shock. “You would sacrifice your own daughter just to advance whatever fucking agenda it is that you’ve got going on? You sick