Chapter 134

Sarah POV

A few minutes with Google had backed up Melissa’s assertion that the Beta Auxiliary League did good work. They had three primary activities: college scholarships based on merit and need, free vocational workshops, and free daycare for parents who were going to school. Melissa was going to talk about setting up a series of workshops for developing online skills, and I was given a seat at one of the head tables.

Lunch in the hotel’s main conference room was the usual grilled chicken and salad with iced tea, and table talk mostly concerned news of the Abrigan Mine, especially whether betas had been involved in the mistreatment of the human workers (yes), whether I would continue to work on improving the miners’ lives now that Melissa was doing the same (yes), and whether I really thought it was a good idea to take the girls there to see the place in person (yes).

“But isn’t it traumatic for them?” asked a beta male named Sean. No one at the luncheon, I had noticed, used their last names to introduce themselves.

“I’m not an alpha, and the girls and their father are,” I said. “Alpha Zane wanted his children to see conditions there so they would understand the responsibilities they will face as alphas. That said, I have been monitoring their mental health closely.”

“How so?” Sean asked.

“Talking with them, mostly, making sure they’re eating and sleeping normally, that sort of thing.”

“May I take your plate?” one of the waitresses asked me.

“Please,” I said while looking up to smile at her. Oddly, I saw she was an alpha wearing green contact lenses. As she walked away, I looked at her hair with its dark roots. It had obviously been dyed a soft brown.

Why would an alpha want to disguise themselves as a gamma?

I looked around. I had thought there were about a dozen gammas in the room to wait on the betas, Melissa, and me, but now I saw another one who was obviously an alpha in a wig and lightly tinted eyeglasses. I saw him look toward the waitress who’d taken my plate. She was pushing a small cart to the door leading into the kitchen.

It was just another catering cart, and on it sat two pitchers of ice water and another of tea.

The door was next to was also the door closest to the platform on which Melissa and three officials from the league—the president, treasurer, and secretary—were seated and having their own plates removed by two genuine gammas.

“Is something wrong?” a beta female named Jaimie, who was sitting to my left, asked me.

I wanted to say that of course nothing was wrong, but the words wouldn’t form in my mouth. In fact, I was starting to feel something was very wrong indeed.

Without thinking too much about it, I drained the last of my tea and then stood up with the empty glass in my hand. I was being incredibly rude, of course, but I could only hope the betas would dismiss my behavior as some sort of weird human thing. Looking around as though searching for a pitcher of tea, which meant ignoring the one at my own table, I made my way over to the cart.

I reached for the pitcher of tea, made a tiny show of almost dropping it, and set the pitcher down heavily, which let me reach over the cart and peer down the side facing the wall.

I saw wires.

I set my glass down as well, turned to see about half the room looking at me, and smiled and waved. This drew a few chuckles.

Next, I walked over and took the two steps up on the side of the platform. Smiling broadly, I walked behind Melissa’s seat and bent down to murmur loudly enough for her and the auxiliary’s president to hear, “Is there some reason that cart over by the door there should have electrical equipment hidden under the tablecloth.

The president, a beta male whose name completely escaped me, kept a smile on his own face as he turned to look at me and asked, “No. Why do you ask?”

“Because the cart was put there by a female alpha who has disguised herself as a gamma.” I looked around the large room, noting the gammas on the floor under the bright lights of the chandeliers. “A female alpha who’s not in the room anymore, and neither is the male alpha disguised as a gamma I saw looking at her earlier.”

He looked like he were about to ask me if I were certain, then he took a phone out of his pocket and muttered something like, “System A is in place.” He put the phone back just as the lights began to flicker and an alarm rang out.

He stood. “Ladies and gentlemen, that is the fire alarm. I’m sure it’s a false alarm, but please make your way to the marked exists.”

People gathered their purses and phones and moved as three hotel security agents and my two bodyguards came to the platform and told me to follow them.

“Melissa Thibodeaux too, please,” I said.

“Thank you,” she whispered to me.

I nodded, and we were efficiently ushered out of the room through the door opposite the one with the cart. But whereas I thought we would be taken outside, we turned into a smaller hallway and then inside a somewhat cozy room with a wall full of monitors showing various areas of the hotel.

As soon as the door closed behind me, Melissa, and three of our security detail, I could no longer hear the alarm.

“This is a safe room,” explained one of my bodyguards, an alpha male with the truly unfitting name of “Buddy.”

“I’m afraid your phones won’t work from here,” he said. “But there is a landline. I’ll be letting Alpha Zane know what’s going on.”

“We shouldn’t just go to the car?” I asked.

“The bomb might be part of a scheme to flush you out,” Buddy said and looked at his phone. “The bomb squad is on its way.”

“What about the others?”

“They’ve been taken out the back, but they say nothing like this has ever happened before and any bomb on the premises would be for you or Alpha Melissa.”

“I’ll be so embarrassed if this is nothing,” I confided.

“It isn’t,” he said shortly and looked over to the hotel security agents. For a horrible moment, I thought it was some scene from a movie when the good guys turn out to be bad guys, but instead they all sort of nodded to each other before Buddy turned back to me.

“We’re going to help with the evacuation of the hotel.” He led me back to the door, which I saw now had large hinges and a combination lock. “Please insert a code of five numbers.” He looked away.

I used my ATM number plus a six, my lucky number. It made five little beeps.

“Press the green key, please,” he said next, and I realized he was looking at a monitor showing the hallway just outside.

“Clear,” he told the others and opened the door so the hotel security agents could exit. I realized they were both holding guns. Buddy looked at me.

“Do not open this door for anyone you don’t know, especially anyone you first met at lunch.”

“Understood,” I said.

He nodded again and left, shutting the door behind him.

I turned to find Melissa looking at the screens. When I joined her, she shot me a glance and pointed to a monitor.

“That’s how they know it’s not nothing.”

The screen was showing the conference room we’d just left. Someone had taken the tablecloth off the cart, and if that weren’t a bomb we were looking at, it was something that had been made to look like a bomb.

A very large bomb.