31. Aiden
31
Aiden
The second we get into my office and I have the door shut and locked behind me, I let go of her and turn to say, “Tell me who you are.”
She stumbles from the sudden loss of me pulling her and practically falls back onto the couch behind her. She catches herself at the last moment, and lets out a huff of air.
“Delilah. My name is Delilah. I’m Raine’s best friend.”
My arms cross over my chest. “And how do I know you’re telling the truth about that?”
“We went to your ball together. I can tell you who I met there and danced with, your packmates. Please, Your Grace, I didn’t come here to cause trouble.”
Her sincerity has me believing her, even if my skepticism doesn’t. “I don’t want anything to do with her. I sent her home for a reason.”
“Look, whatever my pack alpha told you was a lie.”
Immediately I grab the door and flip the lock. “My enforcers will escort you back to the border—”
“Your Grace, please! She’s with your child!”
That has me freezing in place, my hand fisted tightly around the door. “Don’t.”
Delilah sighs. “I don’t know what my alpha told you, but it’s not true. Whatever happened to get Raine sent back isn’t her fault. She’s innocent. I’ve known her my entire life. Those letters she wrote to you were real. Whatever she said in them is how she truly feels.”
For some reason, her words send me into a blind rage.
Obviously you can’t know everything about a person, no matter how much you may think you do. People hide, lie, steal, and cheat all the time and no one is the wiser, not even the person they are mated to.
The same can be said for Raine and I. Her being my fated mate was a fluke accident, but one she took full advantage of.
Pushing away from the door, I storm over to my desk, grab the bottom drawer, and rip it open, the lock holding it closed breaking instantly. I dig through the files on top of the pile and down to where I hid the package I wanted to forget about the moment it’d been handed to me.
Without a word, I slap it onto the desk and glare at Delilah.
She stares at it with a frown, slowly coming over to my desk to look. Her fingers carefully lift the package, peeling back the seam to find the letter I stuffed in there poking up. She slides it out with slow precision, and unfolds it and smooths the creases.
Her eyes move across the page as she reads, and while she does so, I dump the rest of the package out onto my desk. That damn test clatters onto the wood loudly, face down. I don’t need to flip it over to see what’s on the other side of it, though.
Not when that image has haunted me for fucking weeks.
“This…she didn’t write this.” She slowly lowers the note.
“Yes she did. It’s the same handwriting as the other ones she’s sent me. Unless you’re telling me they were all forged.”
Delilah shakes her head. “No…I remember her writing them. I was there for some of them when we snuck to the human town next to us to mail them.”
“Then you were just as fooled as I was, because none of it was real.” I gesture to the letter in her hand. “Your alpha hand-delivered that to me. Why would he do that if it wasn’t true?”
She shakes her head. “Because he hates her. He’s hated her since we were kids. It’s…a long story. But there’s a reason. He wanted to punish her because he found out she was pregnant. He originally sent her here to spy on you to get information for something, I’m not really sure, but when he found out she was pregnant and refused to spy, he was livid. You can’t trust what he says, Your Grace.”
All of this seems too far-fetched in my opinion.
Why would an alpha in my own territory feel the need to spy on me when he could just as well request an audience? Why send an amateur to do the work for him? If Raine had been sent to spy, she’d done a piss-poor job at it.
All we’d done was fuck until we couldn’t talk anymore.
“What would be the point in tarnishing her name? Surely having my heir would elevate your entire pack’s status, if that were the case?”
“He never wanted that. He’s always been the type of alpha to rule over not just us but other packs. I don’t want to make any speculations because I really don’t know, but that’s my guess as to why he sent her to spy: to dig up dirt on you.”
“Then why bother coming to me and hand-delivering this?”
She frowns. “He knew you’d come for her eventually. Weren’t you at all suspicious when she suddenly stopped sending letters?”
My lips press together tightly. Of course I had been, but I’d been too caught up in trying to fend off my damn pack elders from arranging a marriage for me before I could properly present my fated mate to them.
In the end, I ended up exactly where I’d been trying not to be, so all of that work and stress had been for nothing.
“So, if all of this is as true as you claim it to be.” I wave my hand at the letter and test. “Then why isn’t she here telling me this herself? Surely since you managed to break yourself out, then you would’ve tried to help her escape as well?”
“She’s not with the pack. She was sent somewhere. Some alpha male came and got her with his pack not too long ago. They were all there for less than an hour when they picked her up, and then left back to the South.”
My stomach sinks. “What?”
“Like I said.” Delilah’s frown deepens. “I don’t know. I don’t know whose pack it was or where they went. I was being kept locked in my parents’ house the entire time it happened and only found out after the fact when I overheard one of the enforcers talking about it. I couldn’t follow after her because their scent was gone by then, or else I’d be there right now instead of here.”
Something in me begins to panic—a slow sinking thought that I don’t want to have any possibility of being a reality, but the chances aren’t exactly zero either. It would be a one-in-a-million shot.
“When was this?” I ask.
“Almost two weeks ago,” she says.
It can’t be. There’s no possible way.
Moving around my desk, I head over to the large bookshelf on the far-side wall of my office. An old rolled-up map is sitting innocuously on top of a long row of large texts, slightly dusty when I pick it up.
I turn back to Delilah while slowly unrolling it in my shaking hands.
It can’t be.
I have to hold it open when I place it on my desk to keep it from folding back together, so I nod with my chin and say, “Show me where your pack is located.”
She slips a pen off my desk and traces from where Pollis’s packlands are clearly labeled and dots her way across the map, heading east. She mumbles to herself as she counts the miles, finally coming to a familiar spot and circling it.
“Right here. That’s where we are. Andromeda.”
It’s the same one.
The one Constance circled.
No.
I fall back into my chair, practically collapsing into it. The map quickly snaps shut, sending Delilah jumping back.
The alpha from the South, coming to the North to visit a pack. Spending less than an hour there—long enough to collect something and then be on their way. Stopping in a town miles outside of it called Northwood and staying for several days.
“This alpha…” I mumble. “What was his purpose for coming to your pack in the first place?”
Delilah grimaces. “Daniel, my alpha…he sold Raine to him as a breeder. That’s…that’s why I came to you as soon as I could.”
My eyes snap to her.
Breeder ?
“Like I said, my pack alpha hates her. It was the only way he could get rid of her…make her someone else’s problem, as he’d say.”
My jaw drops.
A breeder?
No.
Surely…?
Nausea overwhelms me.
“Your Grace?” Delilah says.
No, no, no, no, no.
I need to get to Constance and Camden.