Bain #2
“You like cherries?” Chase asks, and she barks again, turning in a circle. He smirks at me before grabbing one and gently tossing it at her. She catches it in the air, making him laugh.
“You want more?” he asks when she finishes it. But she surprises us by shaking her head. “No?” She turns in another circle, and he tosses her another one anyway, but she steps to the side and lets it hit the ground.
“Hmm,” Chase hums as he stares down at her excited dance, shifting from foot to foot. Finally, he looks at me and asks, “Any ideas?”
Red looks back and forth between us then looks pointedly at the bowl in my hand and barks. I place it on the ground, and again she spins in a circle and snaps in the direction of the bowl, but doesn’t touch it.
“No clue,” I say, watching her strange behavior. She looks back and forth between us before her tail and ears drop, making me feel terrible for not understanding her.
I drop to my haunches and run my hands through her thick fur along her neck. “I’m sorry, Red. I don’t understand.” I tilt my head down, and she gently butts her forehead against mine, making my wolf whine with the desire to comfort her.
Later, I tell him.
He isn’t happy about it, so he stays on alert, ready to shove to the surface if he thinks I’m not taking care of her properly.
I decide to try to see if I can pick up Blaze’s scent outside, although I’m already pretty sure he used some sort of scent suppressor.
I go out the front first, and the scent is there, but very faint.
I follow it to the driveway, where it abruptly disappears.
He must have come here in a vehicle. Which is strange, but telling.
He’s likely not a wolf shifter, but he obviously knows about us if he used a scent suppressant.
Unless he is a shifter but took a vehicle to better hide his scent.
Kill, my wolf whines. Yes, I tell him. When we find him, we’ll kill him.
Inside, I head straight to the office and switch on the monitors as I sit down at the desk. If someone was in here, the camera would have caught them.
I find the one angled at the front door and rewind it until I see static.
I take a note of the time stamp before and after.
It was only out for about ten seconds. I move to the camera in the upstairs hallway and the same thing happens, the static appearing just before the other one stopped. The same thing happens in Red’s room.
“Dammit!” I curse, running both hands through my hair.
“No luck?” Maddox asks from the doorway.
“Nothing,” I say, flicking the monitors back to the live stream so I can see Red. She’s sitting on the couch between the twins. I let out a small sigh at seeing her unharmed. “They used a scrambler,” I finally tell him. “The feeds were all static when he came through.”
“That must have been one heck of a scrambler to cut through our systems,” he muses. I grunt in reply, my eyes still focused on my little red wolf. “She’s safe, Bain,” Maddox says after a minute of silence.
I glance up at him, almost forgetting he’s there. “She’s safe with us,” he tells me again.
“I know,” I nod, my eyes finding her again. “But I don’t like any part of this. Starfall is sounding better by the minute.”
He lets out a small laugh. “You too?”
I shrug. “There’s nothing keeping us here, is there?” I look at him properly now as I sit back in the chair. “You don’t want to be the Westgrove Alpha, so why pretend you might take it one day?”
He turns his head to look out the window into the backyard as he takes a long breath. “You’re right. We all know I have no interest in the pack. I guess I stayed because I worried what my parents would think if they were still alive.”
“They’d want you to be happy,” I tell him. Even though I never met them, he’s talked about them fondly enough over the years for me to know they were good parents, and his dad was a great alpha. “This isn’t the same pack you grew up in,” I remind him.
He nods but doesn’t respond. The need to see Red in the flesh has me leaving him to his thoughts as I seek her out in the living room, curled on the couch between the twins.
I almost scoop her up and lift her into my lap, but I pivot at the last moment, choosing a nearby armchair instead. It’s not right for me to stake a claim over her. As much as I want her to be mine, this is a complicated situation. She might be fated to one of my brothers.
When Gage finishes cooking, I make sure to cut up the chicken for Red. I know she won’t get sick from undercooked chicken, but she hates raw food. Luckily, he’s fully cooked it all this time… a little too cooked, in fact.
When I place the plate down for her, she sniffs it then looks up at us sitting at the table, as if waiting to see if we eat it first. We all turn to Gage, who’s watching us expectantly.
“Go on, try it,” he encourages us. “I think you’re really gonna like this one.”
“Why don’t you do the honor?” Maddox says, trying to hide his grimace from the strange-smelling chicken.
He frowns at us, and I see Red starting to lower her head toward the plate. As subtly as I can, I reach my foot out and pull her plate between my feet. When she tilts her head at me, I give mine a small shake. I don’t want her eating that crap.