15. Avery #2
She nodded. “Only your mate, your true mate, could have. Only they can find the wolf inside your mind. I’m told it’s quite something.”
“I hope you find your true mate someday,” I said, turning to look at the unconscious alpha beside my bed. “Because yeah, it is quite something.”
My mother, who awoke moments after Graeme passed out, had all the information about how everyone was. Kat took a seat on the padded shelf my mother had been lying on, on her phone, not about to leave her boss sleeping and vulnerable in my hospital room.
All my fellow detectives were well, and the fact that I’d kept Wade Massey from my mother for so many years was, I was told, nearly unforgivable.
They’d seemingly talked almost nonstop the entire first day, and he was invited to the engagement party.
She was also having him in to speak to her seventh and eighth graders in the next two weeks.
She had, in essence, annexed him, and I wasn’t surprised in the least. When he came into my room an hour later, he hugged her before he hugged me.
“Why do you smell like toasted pumpkin?” I asked him.
“I have no idea,” he grumbled.
“You’ve been with Linden.”
“Uh”—he smiled sheepishly, which I’d never seen him do in three years—“yeah.”
Huh.
“Tell me from the beginning.”
After my mother excused herself, she and Kat went to get coffee, as Wade could be counted on to protect not only me but my mate as well. They gave each other a nod.
“You and Kat buddies now?” I teased him.
He squinted at me. “Are you kidding? That woman is badass. After you were shot and Graeme knocked Saoirse down, it took all his focus to keep you alive. Saoirse got up, and she’s got a gun, and that guy, Daw Abernathy, he’s got a gun, and all I could do was yell into the duct tape over my mouth… and then Kat—Jesus.”
She had put a bullet in Saoirse’s right shoulder, put one in Daw’s leg, disarmed them both, zip-tied them both, and kept Bridget from leaving the basement with a punch to the face that knocked her out cold.
“She’s a fuckin’ ninja. I’d marry her if she liked guys.”
“Tell me the story.”
He nodded slowly.
Bridget had planned to have Lucas kill Remy Talmadge to stop him from putting the omegas younger than her into a mock heat.
She had left the party with Lucas, and together they headed to Talmadge’s place.
Once there, Lucas ordered Bridget to stay in the car.
When he discovered Saoirse at the front door arguing with Talmadge, Lucas beat the crap out of him and then carried Bridget’s little sister back to the car.
But when he got there, he discovered Bridget was gone, so he locked Saoirse in the trunk and went back to the house, thinking that was the most logical place for Bridget to go.
Bridget had snuck out of the car while Lucas was distracted, hid, and while he was busy stuffing Saoirse into the trunk, Bridget walked into the house, ran into Highmore, and he escorted her up to the bedroom, thinking she was there to be put into mock heat.
He told her he could take care of her immediately, as Imogen, who was very young, had swooned.
Bridget saw Imogen passed out on the bed, smelled all that had gone on in the room, and snapped.
Her fear, her jealousy, her anger, all of it was unleashed in a wave of lunacy and rage that crashed over Trent Highmore.
Bridget, who had always been an incredibly fast shifter, was a wolf in seconds, and the alpha didn’t even have time to run.
Sometimes speed superseded strength, and the murder had been one of those instances.
In short, it was a classic crime of passion.
Lucas must have heard the mauling, because he quickly located Bridget in Talmadge’s bedroom murdering Highmore, but hid when he noticed Talmadge fleeing down the hall toward the panic room.
Seconds later, he saw Imogen running toward the front door.
Keeping a cool head, he went into the bedroom, found and grabbed the camera, and then moved things around in the room to throw off anyone who might be looking for the recording device.
Bridget had shifted back to human by the time he’d finished, so Lucas carried her and the camera back to the car, got Saoirse out of the trunk, put both sisters in the back seat, and headed home. On the way, he told Bridget about seeing Colby and Linden.
“Lucas lied when he told us he saw Colby earlier that night in the house.” Wade made sure I had every last detail. “The first time he saw Colby was in the driver’s seat of his sports car, idling in the street outside Talmadge’s house, while he and Linden were waiting for Imogen.”
Linden had left the gathering party with Colby and had him drive up to Talmadge’s house to collect Imogen when she’d called him, begging for a ride.
Bridget had then called Linden, ostensibly to chat.
When he told her that he and Colby were stopping to score before taking a friend home, she called Daw—an old family friend—and gave him a heads-up.
“Colby wanted drugs, and since there’s only a few places to get stuff strong enough for lupines, Daw knew where to go.
So, seeing a chance to get rid of his rival for Linden, namely Colby, he waited until the other alpha was on his way back out from scoring, killed him, robbed him, and then found Colby’s car with Imogen and Linden inside. ”
“So who killed Imogen?”
“Daw,” Wade told me. “He was going to rape her and tear her apart. That’s his confession he gave to his father and Peck. You know wolves can’t lie in the presence of their alphas; the alphas can tell.”
I nodded.
“So yeah, I guess it was going to be brutal, and he was going to do it in the alley, to make it special for her first time, but Linden got out when Daw yanked her from the back seat and put himself between them so she could run.”
My breath froze in my chest. Linny tried to save her?”
Wade nodded. “But Daw threw him into a wall and went after Imogen.”
I winced, waiting for the end.
“I guess when he landed on top of her, from what he confessed to his alpha, he accidentally snapped her neck.”
“And it made him so mad that he couldn’t rape and torture her, he spent time desecrating her body.”
“Yeah.”
I nodded. “Then what?”
“Linden ran, made it home, and an hour later, Daw showed up. He made arrangements with his father for Linden’s contract, and as a show of good faith, paid his father a quarter of a million dollars to take Linden with him for no more than two nights.”
So not only did my friend have to see Imogen die, but then he was forced to leave the safety of his home with Daw. He was, at heart, a gentle soul, and to be betrayed and brutalized… my heart hurt, thinking about him.
“He begged his father not to force him to go, but to no avail.”
I couldn’t even imagine.
“From what he said, his father’s been pimping him out for a long time, since before he was of age, and he’s been through several heats.”
And I’d told him for years that he was crazy, that there was no such thing, while the whole time he was going through them because his father saw him as a whore.
I had to own that my denial of an omega’s heat, of my own heat, had more to do with my dismissal of everything wolf-related than anything else.
I had never wanted to believe it, and because all I’d ever dreamed of was to be a police officer, and to live my life as a human and nothing more, I had gone out of my way to prove to myself, and others, that it didn’t exist.
But everything changed when Graeme came into my life.
I had a safety net in him. He loved being a wolf, embraced his wolf wholly, and I needed to learn that piece from him, trust in the part of me I had always raged against. I had immersed myself in being human, in being the same as Wade and the majority of my friends.
Now, with Graeme’s help, it was time to do the opposite and embrace the feral part of my nature that, if I was being honest, had shaped who I was just as much as anything else. It was time to make peace with my wolf.
“Avery?”
“Sorry,” I choked out, hurting for Linny and hoping that it wasn’t too late for him and me. I had to start with an apology and hope we could build from there. “I’m surprised Linny told you all that about his life.”
“Why?”
“He’s always been a bit more secretive than that,” I answered, saddened that we’d been friends since childhood, but Wade was the one he chose to confide in. I took a breath. “Did Daw rape him?”
Several emotions crossed Wade’s face before he answered my question.
Knowing him as well as I knew myself, I suspected chief among them was something like a virulent, righteous fury.
“Yes.” His voice was flat when he continued.
“Brutally. Daw shifted into a wolf and tortured him, and then shifted back into a man and violated him.”
“Okay.”
“It was vicious, what Daw did to him,” Wade rasped, squinting to ensure that no tears fell. “If Linden were human, he would have needed stitches. Do you understand?”
“I do,” I managed to get out. “How long did he have him?”
“From Friday night through Saturday and into Sunday morning, when he was in the basement with us.”
Clearing my throat, I met Wade’s gaze. “Where is he now?”
“He’s down the hall.”
“What, uh…what’s going to happen to him?”
“I don’t know, but it’s no longer up to his father.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your mate there, he bought Linden’s contract from his father and sent movers to the house and packed up all his belongings. Apparently he’s been moved into your old room in your parents’ house.”
“Graeme moved Lin in with my parents?”
“He did, yes. Originally, he was going to have him live with you guys, but your mother insisted that he move in with her and your father and the rest of your family instead. She wants to, and I quote, ‘Smother him with affection and make up for lost time.’”
I smiled at him.
“She made it sound like she’s been wanting him to be hers for, well, forever.”
I nodded. “Yes, she has.”