Chapter 148

The next morning, I woke up with a whole new determination blazing through me, pounding in my head—or maybe that was just the after-effects of the alcohol. But whatever the reason, I had decided that I wasn’t going to let Charles get to me.

I guess I really had been right. He did need another sort of woman, the kind who could be the alpha wife he needed. And I had my access to the dark web now, so I wasn’t in a horrible place.

I was going to double down, and I would personally solve the problems plaguing Packhaven, even if I couldn’t solve the problems plaguing my own life. I threw myself into writing nothing but feel-good articles for my editor while I waited for my next get-together with Jasmine.

The night Jasmine came over, Theo excused himself and went into the bedroom, shutting the door. I tiptoed over and put my ear to the wood, pleased when I could hear that he had started up a program.

He had been watching some thriller series about espionage. Personally, I thought it sounded too much like work to find that relaxing for him.

Jasmine waited until I gave her a thumbs up and then went and got a backpack that she’d brought in. She handed it to me.

“Find a place to hide this,” she said. “The computer, all of your login passwords, and a new phone are in here. Don’t use them for anything connected to the Packhaven government or for your work. Don’t use them to contact anyone here. And especially not Charles. He doesn’t have a clean phone.

“Okay, I can do that,” I said. “Thank you for all of your help on this.”

“No problem. And if you decide you want another of the phones for Charles, just let me know. I’d be happy to smuggle one to you for him.”

“Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” I said, my voice heavy.

“Oh, that doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not.”

“Do you mind if I ask why?”

“Charles broke up with me,” I answered.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Jasmine said. “Why? Oh, never mind. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.

“Maybe next time. It’s all pretty fresh.”

She nodded with understanding. “You know what? Who needs men? We’ve got tacos, girlfriend.”

Jasmine proceeded to make the rest of the night lighthearted.

I waited until after Theo fell asleep that night and then snuck back into the living room, opening up my new computer and following the instructions that logged me on.

The portal onto the dark web looked pretty much like any other browser. Except when I put the cursor in the search box, it had a drop-down list of websites I’d never heard of.

I selected one titled Packhaven Truth and opened that one up. What I found floored me. I went through the other suggestions, and they all turned out to be the same or at least contain the same material. The whole lot of them were websites, forums, and discussion boards, all surrounding deep-rooted corruption.

I found information for an advocacy group for Southhaven that did independent water testing for homes and offered ways to get ahold of personal water purifiers. There were complaints about corruption within the government about officials operating outside the law. And I found exactly what Jasmine had told me about: entire sites dedicated to the women of Packhaven and the struggles that they had to go through.

Unfortunately, these were the last ones that I found and the ones that hit me the hardest on a personal level. But it was already almost three in the morning. If I was going to function the next day, I was going to have to get some sleep.

Reluctantly, I shut the laptop and looked around for a place to hide it. I ended up putting it in a plastic garbage bag and going out onto our small patio. There was an air conditioning unit out there, and I tucked it against the wall behind the air conditioning unit, wrapped in the garbage bag.

Hopefully, the AC wouldn’t put up too much heat and disrupt the laptop, but I couldn’t take a chance with Theo discovering it.

The cell phone I took and put inside the drawer where I kept my feminine hygiene products, down at the very bottom. Luckily, it was a fairly lightweight phone, and unless Theo felt like going through my most personal feminine items, he wasn’t going to find it. And I doubted he’d do that sort of a search at this point.

He might have done that early on, but I felt like we were at a point where he trusted me. I’d like to say I trusted him too. He was a nice guy. If I could be sure I knew where his loyalties fell, I would definitely confide in him.

For the next couple of weeks, I continued to research until late at night and spent my days writing fluff for my editor. The dark web got wind of the interviews that Charles and his co-workers had been doing with the alphas and started posting material on that subject.

Those forums reminded me that Charles had gotten a different reporter to help him weeks ago, and I had no idea what was going on with his investigation. So, I devoured that news as a link to my old relationship.

The further we got from the day that I caught Charles with another woman in his arms, the better I felt about my decision to let Charles go to be his own man and to find a wife who wouldn’t trip him up with his family, and his role is an alpha.

It still hurt to see myself replaced, but at least I knew I’d done the right thing for him. At least I felt better until one of my nighttime browsing sessions ran across a thread speculating why Charles Rafe hadn’t been called in for questioning.

Evidently, they hadn’t gotten wind that Charles was the one questioning the other alphas. They only seemed to know that he hadn’t made the trip to Packhaven to be interviewed. The fact that his whereabouts were still unknown led to all sorts of wild speculation, most of which centered around the government deliberately harming Charles.

This made me shudder because if the government really was willing to hurt Charles, then we were still in danger.

I was rolling over this information for the hundredth time, walking from the building where I had just interviewed a doctor for a story on the opening of a new women’s health facility. I was lost in a bubble of my own thoughts, the outside world passing me by, only to have Theo’s voice cut through them sharply.

“Elena!” he cried.

The next thing I knew, he rammed into me, and the two of us hit the concrete wall of the building hard enough to knock the wind out of me. Before I could even process what had happened, he curled around me as a pane of glass shattered on the pavement, and the shards flew everywhere.