“No!” A quiet fell over the conference call, but it was in no way a benign thing. Instead, it felt tangible, oppressive, and not for the first time was she glad the meeting wasn’t held in person anymore. Those steely gazes, the thread of iron, the very tail of a whiplash which would cut so much deeper if they chose to. She remembered it all too well, cutting into her, cutting off her free will, her— “No,” she said, much more calmly. “Or rather, that’s not what I’m contacting you about. I realise this is unorthodox, me making contact, but we have a situation with a nix.”
“Nix…” one man said with a sniff. “They’re a bloody nuisance, but we exile them as soon as they’re identified. The condition seems hereditary. Don’t need that polluting the blood lines.”
“What about the nix?” Alpha Johnson asked, ignoring the other man completely. Nance felt the moment his attention sharpened, when several others did the same, marking who they were, which towns they were from, and how close they were.
“I have reason to believe they are likely to pose more of a problem than they have before.”
This was a cagy way of putting it. She wanted to throw some bait out, see what popped up, and what did confirmed exactly what she’d feared. Alphas didn’t fidget, their eyes didn’t dart around, their fingers didn’t tighten around mice, they didn’t clasp their hands tight to stop them from giving their irritation and their frustration away.
“Not in my town,” the snippy alpha said, but Johnson and several others leaned forward. “I make sure—”
“Enough, Mattias,” Johnson rumbled, the other man’s lips snapping shut in shock. Johnson’s eyes swung back to the camera, seeming like he stared down the optic fibre line and straight into Nance, something that filled her with a thrill she hadn’t felt for some time. “All right Nancy Spehr, you have the floor. Tell us about your little nix problem, and we’ll see what we can do about it.”
Stalk me!
Stalk me!
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