46. Aiden
46
Aiden
Entertaining a pack alpha for an entire day with my advisor sneaking around in the shadows trying to dig up any information she could on the whereabouts of my fated mate was a lot more annoying than I expected.
For one, Daniel is insufferable. And two, trying to keep myself from snapping at him every minute spent with him borders on impossible. The only reason I was able to keep my head on straight was Camden holding me back from doing so.
“You’re just going to feed into it,” is all he’d say before letting go of the back of my shirt.
He’s right, of course. Unfortunately.
During the day, Daniel decided to take us on a tour around the pack in order to show us how he’d been running it since his beta up and left almost ten years ago—a fact that instantly had Camden and me raising our brows.
It’s one thing for the rumor of a beta defecting to be just that—a rumor, especially in front of an alpha king. However, Daniel’s boastful nature doesn’t give him the sort of humility needed to run a successful pack in the first place.
Andromeda, while self-sustaining, can barely make ends meet. It’s no wonder both Raine and Delilah were desperate to get out of here and find some solace over in my packlands. Compared to this nightmare, mine seems like a damn paradise.
By the time the afternoon rolled around, Camden and I successfully were able to break away from Daniel with the excuse of exploring the rest of the forest that surrounds their lands. After some convincing, Daniel relented and retreated back to his mansion.
No other enforcers or patrols follow us into the forest after that, thankfully.
“Thought that guy would never leave,” Camden mumbles.
I lead us back to the small cabin that Delilah showed us the day before, where we could all meet up after Constance’s heist. It’s a rundown shack that looks barely inhabitable, though when I knock on the door and push it open, I’m surprised to see it’s fully furnished.
“Hey,” Delilah greets us. “You guys back already?”
While Camden makes a face at the question, I simply nod. “Constance should be back soon.”
“I put on a pot of soup if you guys are hungry.” She gestures with a hand and heads over to the kitchenette, where a pot is boiling on the stove.
“You stay here often, Delilah?” I ask curiously.
Even with the rundown appearance on the outside, in here is much more cozy. Sure, there are clear water damage spots on the ceiling, as well as most of the furniture looking rather worn and old. Aside from that, though, I can see Delilah living here while wanting to get away from the pack.
“Uh, sometimes? This isn’t actually my place,” she says, stirring the pot with a large metal spoon. “It’s where Raine’s been staying for the past few years.”
My heart sinks. What?
When my eyes dart around the cabin again, I’m shocked to find that this place isn’t at all what I was led to believe she had been living in. My mate had been staying here ? I know now that she’s been ostracized by her pack, but how could it get this bad?
Sure, she made the most of living here as far as I can see, but why had she been forced to?
The thudding in my chest has made it hard to breathe. “How many years, Delilah?”
She shrugs at me. “Since her dad left.”
Gods…
Even if it turns out Raine lied to me about the baby and wanting to be with me, I’m starting to see that her desperation to get out of this predicament when she first found me is becoming more and more justified by the day.
How could anyone let a pack member be treated this way? Daniel’s certainly got plenty of things wrong with him, but this takes it to a whole other level.
The guilt in my heart grows stronger by the day, as does my regret for letting my emotions get the better of me the day she arrived at my borders and begged to see me. I should’ve told Camden. And then I should’ve let him talk me out of sending her away before we could get to the bottom of the truth.
He would’ve at least kept Raine long enough to figure out what was real and what wasn’t.
Now all I’m left with is chasing her down and hoping like hell she’s okay.
The door to the cabin is pushed open and Constance’s scent wafts through the doorway. “I think I got what we were looking for.”
I turn to see her, and she holds up a large binder that has a thick string wrapped around its middle, tied off by a loop. She hands it to me when she gets closer, the door to the cabin shutting behind her haphazardly with how warped the door is.
Camden passes by her to lift the door back into the jamb while I grab a seat at the small dining room table and spread the folder out. “Where did you end up finding it?”
“In his office, like you suggested. Dodging his nosy enforcers was annoying while I was leaving,” she says, taking the seat opposite of me. “But I managed to come back here without a tail.”
That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. If Constance is anything, it’s a damn shadow.
“Is that really going to tell us where Raine might be?” Delilah asks, spooning some soup into a bowl for me and bringing it over.
She leans over Constance, a few pieces of her long, wavy hair falling into my vision. I have half a mind to tug on it out of sheer impulse—needing something to do with my hands that isn’t picking at the skin around my nails obsessively.
“It might.” Ignoring my own thoughts, I flip open the folder and scan the first few pages.
The contents are mainly reports of Raine and her activities throughout the day while she’d still been with Andromeda. Her comings and goings were recorded quite heavily and with enough detail for me to find uncomfortable.
What had been the purpose of Daniel’s obsession with her? Sure, her father had been his beta, but he seemed to have an uncontrollable need to punish her for her father’s wrongdoings for some reason.
I’ve never heard of that before. While it’s exceedingly rare for a beta to walk away from their duties to their pack, it’s not completely unheard of.
Why wasn’t Daniel putting in half this much effort into tracking down his estranged beta?
“If anything, it’ll at least tell us where she got sold to,” Constance says, interrupting my thoughts. “As long as we have some kind of direction or clue as to where she might be, then we can figure it out. I grabbed the ledgers too. So if Daniel’s been doing business with this pack longer than getting Raine sold to them, we’ll know.”
Nodding, I flip through a few more pages. She’s a damn genius.
More notes about Raine’s treatment within the pack. Details surrounding certain packmates treating her poorly and what had been done about it—which was realistically nothing. What kind of resources she’d been taking up. How things were distributed among the pack and giving Raine the least.
The lists and notes are endless and with each passing one, I grow that much more angry.
My mate was treated terribly for much of her growing years, and into adulthood. I can’t even fathom how she turned out the way she did, with her kind heart and her even more open personality. Even if her father defected all those years ago, he must’ve been a great man to teach her those things.
“Look.” Camden points. “Some kind of correspondence. And it’s recent.”
The top of the photocopied paper is dated from a few weeks ago, Daniel’s scratchy penmanship littering the page with what looks like some kind of letter to someone looking for a breeder, ending with an offer to negotiate a price “upon acceptance of the terms.”
The next photocopied page is the same writing—Daniel’s—seeming to be responding to a letter that was sent to him, with prices and an admittance to the “breeder” in question already had some kind of defect.
Throughout the letter, Daniel apologizes several times to the person he’s writing to, pleading with the buyer not to back out and that a severe discount will be implemented, should the sale go through.
“Sale” has my stomach turning.
Even suggesting that Raine could be sold in such a disrespectful manner is horrible. Breeders were never meant to stay with the pack they were born into, but that didn’t mean they were eventually to be sold like cattle.
Becoming a breeder for another pack was supposed to be honorable, but this letter treats it as anything but.
And whoever is responding to it is clearly just as callous, because the next letter is an original from whomever it was who eventually took Raine. The elegant and loopy handwriting is a little hard to read, but it states that the “condition” of the breeder will be overlooked as long as the price is cut in half, which Daniel clearly ended up agreeing to.
The air in the room is suddenly sucked right out, leaving nothing but a burning feeling in my lungs.
At the bottom of the paper is a name that I never thought I’d see in a million years.
Yours truly, it reads, Nyx Calloway .