Chapter 17
NASH
Iwake feeling mostly fine, which is both a relief and an insult considering I passed out in front of half the mafia pack yesterday. My head is clear. My palm is healed. My wolf is steady.
Mostly.
There’s something under my skin now that wasn’t there before. Not mine, exactly. Not Grey’s either. More like a single ember left behind after standing too close to a wildfire. Small enough to ignore. Hot enough that my wolf keeps circling it warily.
I tell myself it’ll fade eventually.
Mia isn’t at breakfast or the morning meeting.
When I ask, Grey tells me she’s on a personal errand.
I don’t press it since we’re in a room full of people I’m still not sure whether I can trust, but it leaves me unsettled.
Mia’s not one to put personal shit before work, especially at a time like this.
I text her, but she doesn’t respond. Then, it’s time for me to start the pack interviews, and I lose myself in the task for a few hours.
Marcus manages to get out of all but the first one, thanks to a tip that comes in from one of our scouts about the missing hex witch, Davina.
Until the leak is found, I don’t trust anyone else to follow up, so I send him to run it down.
By lunchtime, I feel like I’ve been interrogating hostile witnesses for a week straight.
It’s not the process that’s draining. Grey and I built a clean framework—structured questions, careful sequencing, pauses to give the alphas time to assess.
But digging into their personal lives as an outsider feels wrong.
Even with Grey knowing my secrets, it’s not fair that I should get to learn all of theirs in a way that is designed to make them feel guilty until proven innocent.
Then again, it seems to have helped that I gave up mine first. Everyone I talk to is a hell of a lot more cooperative today than they were yesterday. With Grey’s help, I’ve already cleared Dutch, Crow, Razor, and Camila.
Razor’s interview was the fastest of them all at eleven minutes flat.
He sat across from me with his arms crossed and his jaw set like a man prepared to be offended by the whole enterprise and then answered every single question with a bluntness that made the process faster than it had any right to be.
When he left, I glanced at Grey. He nodded.
Clear.
Of course he is. The guy’s an open book.
Dutch took forty minutes, mostly because he is apparently constitutionally incapable of giving a short answer to anything and, at one point, went on a tangent about pack communication infrastructure that was genuinely interesting and had absolutely nothing to do with what I’d asked.
I redirected him twice.
He was also honest, not to mention thoroughly and exhaustively loyal to Grey, and I now know more about Dutch’s philosophy on operational transparency than I ever expected to.
I also know he’s in love with Andy Balistrieri.
Crow was the quietest. And the hardest to read—at least for me.
He sat across from me with the particular stillness of someone who has spent a long time being overlooked and now prefers it that way.
He answered everything in complete sentences that contained exactly what was asked and nothing more.
A lot going on behind those eyes. None of it is treachery. Grey’s nod confirmed it.
Clear.
But should probably seek therapy.
Camila’s session was just as straightforward, although I did accidentally learn that she tried escaping Indigo Hills once and was publicly whipped by Franco for the failed attempt.
The nod I get clears her, but by the end of the sessions, Grey looks a little glassy-eyed.
“Why don’t you take a break and let Lexi do a couple,” I suggest.
He hesitates, and I know he doesn’t want to subject his mate to the grueling work of sifting through truths and possible lies. So, it’s a testament to how exhausting this is when he yawns, nods, and says, “Maybe just a couple. I’m going to grab a coffee.”
“Go. I’ve got this.” Lexi plants a small kiss on his cheek before practically pushing him out of the room and sliding into his place.
Then it’s Andy’s turn.
She sits across from me with her tablet face-down on the table and her hands folded on top of it and the expression of someone who finds this process professionally reasonable and personally insulting in equal measure.
I understand. I ask the questions anyway. That’s the job.
We work through the standard sequence.
“Name?”
“Andrea Balistrieri.”
“What’s your pack affiliation, position, and rank?”
“Mafia pack. Lexi’s second in command.”
“Were you always part of the Giovanni regime?”
“No.” She pauses slightly then says, “I was married to one of Franco’s generals. Toros. Lexi killed him during her first shift. I was part of Franco’s pack until his death.”
I debate whether to offer her my condolences on the loss of her husband, but when I see the hard glint in her eyes, I decide against it. “Did you feel a particular loyalty to Franco?”
“I gave my oath,” she says.
“I’ll rephrase. Did you feel a loyalty that extended beyond the obligations that came with your alpha oath?”
Her expression darkens. “No.”
“And do you feel a particular loyalty to Lexi?”
She softens, glancing at her alpha. “Yes.”
The temperature in the room lifts slightly.
I move on to questions about her access to information, relationships within the pack hierarchy, and whether she’s ever met with Ramsey alone.
She answers everything with the precise economy of someone who has been debriefed before and knows how it works.
No embellishment, no defensiveness, no performance of innocence. Just facts, delivered clean.
Then I get to the question that always changes the temperature in the room.
“Tell me about your history before the leadership change,” I say. “Before Lexi.”
A pause. The first one she’s taken.
“As I said, I was married to Toros.”
“For how long?”
“Three years.”
“Tell me about that.”
She looks at the table for a moment. Not evasively—just finding the right place to start.
“I won't tell you it was a good three years because it wasn’t. He was—” She stops.
“He wasn’t a good person. I stayed because leaving wasn’t a safe option and staying kept me alive and kept the people around me safer than they would have been without me there. ”
I hate that I have to make her answer this, but the drill is to ask a few open-ended questions about the past to see if Lexi senses anything nefarious.
“And when he died?”
She lifts her chin. “When Lexi killed him, I wasn’t sad.” No hesitation. “Not because of my own feelings either. It was the right call for her.”
“It was an accident,” Lexi puts in.
Andy shakes her head. “Even if you hadn’t done it that day, it would have been necessary eventually.” She looks at me. “I chose Lexi before Lexi knew she was choosing anything.” A pause. “And I’d make that choice again every time.”
The two share a look of pure friendship.
“Why her specifically?” I ask.
Andy considers this with the seriousness it deserves. “Because she walked into a world that did everything it could to break her and decided to be decent anyway.” She says it simply. “That’s rarer than it should be. I wanted to be part of what she was building.”
I look at her for a moment. She looks back without flinching. It doesn’t take an alpha’s bond to know Andy is unfailingly loyal to her new alphas.
“One more question,” I say. “Do you have any personal relationships within the pack that go deeper than professional? Anyone you’d describe as closer than a colleague?”
She hesitates a beat. “Yes.”
I wait.
She exhales once. Short and controlled. “Dutch and I,” she says. “It’s… new. And not something I’ve advertised. But you asked, and I’m not going to lie about it.”
I glance at Lexi. Her expression is doing something complicated that I think might be delight she’s trying to keep professionally contained.
“I’m sorry that I have to ask, but did you ever meet up with Dutch before Lexi became your alpha? Maybe with Ramsey present?”
Disgust flashes. For the first time, she looks insulted. “Of course not. I was married.”
“Fair enough.” I set my pen down. “That’s everything, Andy. Thank you.”
She stands. Picks up her tablet. Pauses at the door.
“For what it’s worth,” she says, “whoever it is, they’re not in the group you’ve spoken to today. I’d stake everything on it.” She glances over her shoulder at Lexi. “Which means your problem is more complicated than you thought.”
She leaves, and Lexi sighs, leaning back in her chair. Running her alpha senses at full capacity has already left a visible mark. “Clean,” she says. “All of them, which means Andy’s right.”
“I know.”
“Andy and Dutch.” She softens. “I’m so happy for them.
Andy deserves something good after everything Toros put her through.
” She looks at the door Andy just left through with an expression that has nothing to do with pack politics and everything to do with genuine affection. “Dutch will be good to her.”
“He seems like the type.”
“He is.” She pauses. “He's also the type to drive her insane on a daily basis, but I think that’s part of it.”
I almost smile at that, thinking of Mia.
We sit for a moment in the quiet, neither one of us in a hurry to call in the next victim.
The afternoon light streams golden through the windows.
For a moment, I get caught in the beauty of it.
The way the dust motes dance. The aura glowing at the edges.
The pulse of life as it streams into the room.
Then I blink, and almost laugh at the poetry I’m weaving. What the hell. I must still be exhausted from yesterday’s encounter with Grey.
“Well, I think I’m going to find Grey and check on him. Maybe grab a coffee for myself.” Lexi starts to stand.
“You haven’t seen Mia around, have you?” I ask.
“No. She had an errand, I think.”
“Seems like a long time to run an errand,” I say.
She smiles ruefully. “In all the time I’ve known Mia, I’ve never once had to worry about her.”