Irregular (mlm)

Chapter 23

Paxton and Amy had taken them to the police station, where they now sat in the meeting room staring at a blank whiteboard. Owen hadn't even gone to his desk, even though Paxton said he'd left a copy of all of their files for the case there if he wanted to go through it. He didn't want to leave Kai alone.

He hadn't said a word since he read the letter. Not when Paxton told them to get dressed to leave, nor in the car ride there in the back of Paxtons cruiser. All he did was stare at the photo of the girl, which he hadn't let go of. Owen knew he didn't talk much in general, but to be completely silent was unnerving.

Owen looked at his mate, hands wrung on the table they sat at. "Kai?"

He looked at him. His eyes were tired. He could see all of the emotions swirling around in them, feel them through their freshly sealed bond. Anger, fear, dread. Even a little bit of sadness.

"I don't know what to do."

His voice was quiet and pained. Like it was hard for him to even speak. Owen reached over and clasped their hands together. "I know."

"He has this little girl." Kai swallowed, his throat bobbing. "I never knew... I never knew one of them had survived."

Them. The pups. Owen remembered how Kai had been in the lab they found. He'd seen all of those dead werewolf pups in preservation tubes. He'd interacted with them when they were alive, from what he understood. "Do you recognize her?"

Kai looked at the photo again. "Maybe. She looks like one of the pregnant mothers I saw in the lab a few times. It was a couple of years ago."

Owen was quiet. He didn't know what to say. Kai hadn't opened up about any of this since they met.

"She was so scared. But she was kind to me. My father had been doing tests on me more than usual around that time." He took a deep, shaky breath. "I guess he was making sure he was doing something right with the mother."

"Do you know what her name was? Or what happened to her?" Owen hated his instinct to get more information, but it came with being part of the pack police force, and he needed to learn what he could while Kai was opening up.

He shook his head. "No. I never knew any of their names. I don't even know if they were kept alive after they gave birth. I wasn't breastfed, my father used formula. But he kept my mother around for a while so I don't know."

He set the photo on the table in front of him and rubbed his face. After a moment of silence, he dropped his hand and looked down. "I found a room one time, when I was wandering around the tunnels under the warehouse. I was still living in the warehouse he's using now. I'd gotten out of my room because I wanted to go to my sister. I had a nightmare and by then my father had separated me from her and mom and made us live in separate rooms." He paused, looking at the photo of the little girl. "All it had in it was a metal slab with wheels and a giant oven covered in ash. It smelled like death."

Owen let the horror of that sink in. If his father had been using that warehouse even after he burned it down, then he had access to that room, and that oven. He was cremating the mothers, possibly even others who he'd killed. "Oh my god..."

Kai swallowed again. "We need to get her out of there."

"We can't go there yet. We have no plan. We don't know the layout, or how many wolves your father has." Owen shook his head. "It's too big of a risk."

"She's a child." Kai looked at him, face more distraught than he'd ever seen. Even when he was emotional, he rarely showed it on his face. But now his features were drenched with fear and anguish and Owen didn't know what to do. "She's a child, Owen."