Poison Ivy Ch. 10 Pt. 01

They knew all this, of course, because they had hacked into the jellyfish's tablet, as well as his phone, laptop, and home security system, with Aella's help. She was quite the little computer whiz. The tiny blonde Omega was carving out a spot for herself in their hearts and lives. She was sweet and kind, insanely smart and strong as steel. She'd had to be, to survive what Maverick had put her through.

She and Ivy had become fast friends almost immediately, and after learning a bit more of her history, he'd understood why. Neither of them had ever spent any time in an Omega compound. Aella had been exposed to a few mated Omegas during the period of time she'd been chained to the general's side, while Ivy had never met an Omega prior to Aella.

Most Omegas were taken from their homes during adolescence, typically 12-14 years old, after presenting their dynamic. During the years spent in an Omega compound, until they turned 19 and could be paired with a suitable Alpha, Omegas were given a basic education in math, sciences, reading and writing. A more extensive curriculum focused on ensuring the girls (and a small number of boys) were prepared to make a successful match. As such, emphasis was placed on grace, poise, manners, self and home care, and first and foremost, the skills required to please their mates.

Before he'd met Ivy, Hunter had accepted all of this as a simple part of normal life. Watching her struggle through the transition from an independent Beta medic to a mated Omega left him with an uncomfortable feeling. He'd begun to question the entire process. As much as she could drive him up the fucking wall, he enjoyed Ivy's fierce personality. While Omegas were given literally every comfort and luxury while living in a compound, the curriculum was designed to instill obedience and submissiveness in its participants. Imagining Ivy as a docile robot did strange and unpleasant things to his psyche. And imagining someone trying to take his daughter away from him when she was only twelve years old filled him with an unexpected surge of rage.

While Ivy and Aella had two very different personalities, he saw in the sweet blonde Omega a quiet inner strength that rivaled most of the seasoned officers he knew. Had either of them gone through the normal process of isolation and education, he doubted they would have retained any of the attributes that made them both so very special. Aella certainly wouldn't have been able to assist them with their digital enterprises.

It was only with Aella's help that they'd dug up more than enough dirt to bury Hickson permanently. But Hunter was after more than just his public and political ruin.

He was out for blood.

He'd served a few years abroad with Trevino, but he hadn't ever spent this much time up close and personal with the very deadly, very quiet sniper. After three days, he'd started to learn how to translate the man's grunts and sighs into actual words. And the grunt he made as he decoded the message was clearly Trevino-speak for, we've got him.

That quiet noise was even enough to silence Pyle and Fowler. Pyle, unable to contain even a single iota of his seemingly endless energy, fist pumped hard enough to make a dent in the roof of the flimsy-ass sedan and wedged his body in between the two front seats, panting happily like an excited puppy.

"Where we headed, boss?" Pyle asked, as though he hadn't just positioned himself directly over Trevino's shoulder so he could read the decoded text. Instead of answering, Trevino tore the page from the notebook and handed it to the grinning, crooked-toothed, overgrown child, who summarily plucked it up and fell back in his seat to read the message out loud. "He's heading to his sidepiece for a booty call! Not the exact wording he used, but close..."

"Fucking finally," Fowler growled, rubbing the side of his bearded face with an oversized paw of a hand. "No offense to you smelly fucks, but I'm ready to be back with my old lady. If I have to listen to Pyle snoring for one more night, I might stab him in the throat."

"EXCUSE THE FUCK OUT OF ME?!" Pyle screeched, his voice raising quite a few octaves. "I am the stinky, snoring asshole in this relationship?! You're the walking, talking bear, Fowler!" He laughed indignantly. "Talk about bad smells... If we bottled up a few of the farts that come out of your ass, we might be able to kill Hickson with them! And another th—"

"Enough," Trevino said quietly. A quiet word from Trevino could be a very dangerous thing, and blessed silence fell over the car. Thank fuck.

"I mean... he started it," Pyle pouted, crossing his arms over his chest like a petulant child. Seriously, what was it about their current situation that had made the two burly, war-toughened men regress to such an extreme?

Although, he had to admit, out of the four of them, Fowler was most definitely the loudest, and the smelliest. Pyle hit the nail on the head when he called him a bear. He was roughly the size of one, and every word out of his mouth was growled rather than spoken. He'd gotten into some trouble in the military and was discharged early, but even when they'd been stationed together, Hunter couldn't remember a time when Fowler wasn't covered in dirt, mud and grease, and he somehow always got away with facial hair that went way past the point of military regulations.

But he owed his life, and probably Ivy's, to the massive, growly Alpha. Without his help, and the use of his family's summer cabin they'd been utilizing as a safehouse, they most certainly wouldn't have been able to extract Ivy as soon as they had.

Except, they hadn't exactly extracted her so much as intercepted her. By the time they were ready to raid the asylum where Ivy was being held, his infuriatingly fearless mate had already extracted herself. Fowler had just happened to spot her as she'd been making a mad dash to the treeline. It still made him sick to his stomach, and feverish with rage, when he thought about what he'd found in her empty room.

After a few seconds of Trevino tapping away on the burner phone, he opened up a set of maps detailing the area surrounding Hickson's known residence. It would have been too risky to coordinate an attack on Ivy's father while he was at a public event or in his home. If they'd had more time and more men, it may have been somewhat feasible. Unwilling to involve any more than the four of them and a few auxiliary contacts they'd called in favors to, and considering they were all eager to get this done and return to their lives and loved ones, they'd had to wait for an opening.

An opening which had come in the form of Hickson's twenty-two-year-old sidepiece. Annika Flint, a pretty, strawberry blonde Beta, single mother of two, was an interesting name to find on the VP's hidden financial records. Steady streams of cash, over the past four years, had supplied the girl with enough funds for an upscale Condo in the nice part of town about three hours south of where they were currently driving around in circles.

About twice a week, Hickson shook off most of his security team and met up with a private firm that supplied mercenaries by the hour. Although marketing themselves as being discreet and anonymous, Aella was easily able to hack into their system to set up a monitoring program. The message Trevino had just decoded told them that a call had been made to the security firm. They'd also intercepted a message from Jellyfish's cell phone, instructing Parsons to meet up with him at the designated area.

They'd been unable to determine the whereabouts of this designated area. But they were able to discover the location of Ms. Flint's condo.

The oldest of Ms. Flint's two children, Marley, was born around the same time the generous payments from Hickson began. It wasn't hard to connect the dots. Unwilling to endanger an innocent, young woman and her two children (who, Hunter had realized the night they'd received this information, were most likely Ivy's half-siblings), the four men had easily come to the decision that Annika was to be left untouched. And she would be.

They just needed to borrow her condo for an hour or two.

Or five.

...............................

"How are you feeling?" Aella, perched on a stool in what was rapidly becoming her spot in the grizzly bear known as Fowler's vacation-slash-safe house, took up a corner of the kitchen island with her computer and a spiral notebook. She carefully scanned Ivy from head to toe with a critical eye. "You look a little better. You'd look a lot better if you started eating more."

Ivy rolled her eyes and dragged a stool over, hopping up and eyeing the open notebook curiously. "I think I've eaten more in the past three days than I have in the past year, Aella. I'm half-convinced Hunter is paying you off somehow to keep me distracted by plying me with insane amounts of delicious food."

Aella chuckled, turning back to her laptop as Ivy continued to check out what was drawn on the notebook. There were a few scribbled addresses and coordinates covering the page, above a crudely drawn map of what looked like some crazy arcade video game maze, a line of arrows roaming between evenly-spaced rectangles marked by similar sequences of letters and numbers. The final arrow was aimed at a rectangle marked SQ-V974. Unlike the others, the sides of this box had been drawn so harshly, it had almost scratched through the page, with a thick border of aggressive pen strokes. Ivy looked up.

"What's this, Ace?"

During the first, very difficult night of Hunter's absence, Aella had entrusted Eva to Cody and stayed at Ivy's bedside. Ivy had been upset, angry, sick, and restless, and the two had stayed up late, talking about anything and everything to take their minds off recent events. Somehow or another, the topic of comic books came up, and they discovered they shared a mutual love of a relatively unknown comic book series about an evil scientist and a band of geeks who come together to save the day. Ivy's new nickname for Aella was a nod to Ace Grayston, the badass hacker of the group.

At the sound of her new moniker, Aella's eyes crinkled and her lips twitched, but she avoided meeting Ivy's eyes. She placed her open palm on the top of the page, absently tracing the markings she'd made with her finger. Without looking up, she asked, "If you knew that something bad was happening, that someone was hurting people, and you might be able to stop it... Would you?"

Ivy frowned. "I guess it depends. Who's being hurt? And by whom? And why?"

Aella straightened her spine and finally met Ivy's eyes. "Remember I told you that Cody and I used to live with our older brother?"

She nodded. "Yeah. In a shipping container, right? After your parents died."

"Right." Aella pointed to the rectangle marked with such angry lines. "This is the shipping container we lived in. I need to go there."

"Okay... I'm sure Trevino could --"

"No, Trevino can't know about this. I don't want anyone else to know about this."

Ivy furrowed her brow. "Why, Ace? What's going on?"

Aella sighed, looking back down at the notebook. "There were a few rare occasions when I had access to a computer over the past seven years. When I did, my priority was finding Cody. I thought that the most important thing was figuring out where Maverick was keeping him. Even if I'd been successful in getting this information, I'm not sure what I would have been able to do with it, but I couldn't think of anything else. I just needed to know where he was, that he was safe and alive.

"As soon as Trevino found him and brought us here, I started to wonder about what had happened to Derrick. I never... He... Well, maybe it doesn't matter anymore. But Derrick had the chance to protect us from Maverick, and he didn't. He wanted us gone. Wanted us out of the way. There was always something a little off about him, but I'd never thought he would do what he did. And I started to think about why."

Aella swiveled on her stool to face Ivy fully. "We weren't the only kids who tried to stay out of the foster care system. I... we had friends. At first, nothing was organized. Derrick rented the shipping container, and we started making money however we could. It was just small amounts, you know? Hack a little money here and there, pick a few pockets, shoplift from some of the boardwalk tourist traps.

"There were always people who thought they could take advantage from dock rats like us. Whatever else Derrick was, he was a great leader. He started to organize the dock rats, using whatever extra money we had to buy food and clothes for the other kids, and renting a few more shipping containers. He set them up so no one we ran with had to sleep on the streets. He gained their loyalty, and to everyone but Cody and I, he was kind, charismatic, and fair.

"As soon as he'd taken someone in, fed them and clothed them, gave them a place to sleep... He started demanding that they work for him. He started giving us quotas to meet every day, and if we couldn't... we were punished. He employed a few of the bigger kids as enforcers, and if anyone fell out of line, all he had to do was point in their direction and the dirty work would get done. A few of us tried to leave. I tried to leave. I tried to take Cody, and some of the girls, and a few of the smaller kids. About eight of us, in all. But he wouldn't allow it."

Ivy growled, not liking where this was going.

"Before we'd gotten as far as the next town, his enforcers caught up to us, and... It wasn't good. One kid, around nine or ten years old, he was beaten so badly that he died two days later. And what they did to the girls... I still get sick to my stomach thinking about it."

An angry snarl tore itself from Ivy's throat. That little fucking prick...

"It was another two weeks before I tried to run again. Everyone else was too terrified to leave, but I had someone who was going to help us get away. I went out that morning, acting like nothing was different. My plan was to grab Cody and get us both out of there, and I would have gone back later for the rest of them. Somehow, Derrick knew. I have no idea how. But he knew. That time, he didn't send his enforcers. That time, he came for me personally.

"When he was done with me, he told me that since I was so eager to get away from him, he was cashing me in. The next day, Cody and I were handed over to Maverick. After that, every day became about survival. Survival, and finding Cody.

"Last week, I began looking for some of the kids I left behind." Aella gestured to the laptop, spinning it around to show Ivy the screen, where a table was broken into two columns. Names were on one side and addresses on the other. A few had a similar sequence of numbers and letters as Aella's shipping container. "I could only find a few of them. The enforcers are still hanging around by the docks. Derrick still appears to be the leader, and he's replenished and expanded on his gang of homeless orphans. But the kids I remember, the ones who tried to run, and even some who didn't... They're gone."

Chewing on her bottom lip, Ivy studied the table, then looked back at the notebook. "What am I missing, Ace? Where did they go?"

Aella took a deep breath, and glacier blue eyes locked onto Ivy's. "They were sold."

.......................................................

Ms. Annika Flint's condominium boasted some seriously prime real estate. It was located across the street from a sea wall and had an amazing view of the ocean from its third floor patio. Hunter stretched his arms out, enjoying the feeling of free space after spending so many hours cramped up with three other restless Alphas. He tilted his head from side to side, cracking his neck and flexing his jaw.

Even better was the knowledge that this would soon be over. Hickson would be dead, and Ivy would be safe. They would return to his estate, where he could give his pregnant mate the proper care she needed.

He turned to take in the expansive living space. Four large bedrooms, each with its own private bathroom, broke off from the hallway that led into the center of the main living area. The kitchen was modern and sleek, with grey and navy-blue tones and a large island, and a swinging, salon-style door separated it from the room he currently stood in. A huge flat screen TV dominated the far wall, with a tasteful, grey cloth sectional centered across from the screen. There was a black leather recliner, large and dominating and expensive-looking, and distinctly out of place in the relaxed, pale blue and grey color scheme.

Trevino, needing something to take the edge off of the manic energy that overtook him before a kill, had walked over to that chair as soon as they'd entered, plunging a knife into the supple leather over and over, butchering what must have been placed there for Hickson's bi-weekly visits. Now, all of that beautiful, expensive leather was ripped to shreds, the remains scattered over the floor as if a bomb had detonated.

Trevino hid his scars well, but Hunter had seen what rage could do to a man with the innate capacity to enjoy the taking of unworthy lives. The pure evil of what Hickson had helped Maverick do to Aella had ensured that whatever else happened today, the Vice President's death would be slow, methodical, and exceedingly painful.

The condo was a far cry from the sharp lines and contemporary design of his own expertly crafted home, but it was tasteful, comfortable and nice. It was very nice, for a twenty-two-year-old single mother who waitressed at a nearby greasy spoon diner. He puzzled over that. She obviously had enough funds coming in every month to afford everything she needed and more, so why was she working at all?

After decoding the message from Hickson's security team, Hunter had abandoned the SUV they'd been trailing and sped to the condo. Having to stop and switch out his guards and intercept his PA, who would ensure Hickson's privacy as he fucked his mistress, would slow Hickson down enough to hopefully give them a nice head start. They'd watched the video feed from the camera Fowler had placed in the condo during their first visit on Pyle's large tablet as Ms. Flint dressed and readied her two children, running her fingers through her own hair and pulling it up into a high ponytail as she rushed them out the door on some errand. It had given them enough time to break in, set up what they would need once they had Hickson, and hide the really scary stuff so they wouldn't alarm Annika.

Well, so they wouldn't alarm her more than the presence of four tense Alphas in her neat, feminine space would.

With that thought, he heard the distinct, high-pitched electronic beeps of a code being entered on the opposite side of the door. The timing was a bit off; they'd planned to all be present when Annika first entered. She'd be overwhelmed and frightened, but they'd wanted to get through the unpleasantness of handling a terrified female as quickly as possible. She'd come back earlier than they'd expected. As the only Alpha presently located by the main entrance, Hunter would just have to wing it.

The two-toned beep that indicated the correct code had been entered on the electronic padlock sounded too loud in the large, empty room. The handle slowly turned, and instead of an adult-sized person entering, a little boy with startling, bright teal eyes slipped through the crack in the door, an excited smile on his adorable face as he clutched a brown paper bag in his left hand and started to make a beeline to the kitchen. He froze when he spotted Hunter, the eager smile slowly disappearing as his eyes widened.