Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Marcus
The door to my office opens, and I look up. Adrian walks in and drops into the chair across from my desk, sliding a folder over without a word. I flip it open.
“Two cases,” he says. “The latest involves two young males, both out of the Ridgeback pack, three territories over. They hit a human club one night and never came home.”
“When?”
“Months back. Everyone wrote it off. Those two had a reputation, so the alpha figured they’d run somewhere with louder music and looser rules.”
“And you don’t buy it.”
Adrian taps the folder. “One of them had a girl. Shifter, same as him. She says he proposed the week before he vanished. He’d been pricing houses near her parents, saving every cent he could scrape.”
“People run from weddings too.”
“He left the money behind.” Adrian leans back. “I pulled his accounts. Every dollar is still sitting there, untouched. His card’s last swipe was a bar tab inside that club.”
A man building a life doesn’t walk out on it and his savings in the same night. “So they didn’t run.”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“You said two cases.”
“About a year before, a couple disappeared the same way.” He pulls a second sheet from under the first. “Shifters, both of them, in love. Families on both sides hated the match. The two of them checked into a human-owned hotel together and dropped off the map.”
“Let me guess. Everyone blamed everyone.”
“Her side swears he stole her and ran. His side swears they eloped.” Adrian shrugs. “Except she kept a cash stash her family never knew about, and she left every bill of it behind. Nobody elopes broke when they’ve got a way not to be.”
I close the folder. “Hunters in that area?”
“Active. And here’s the part that’ll interest you.” He waits until I look up. “One of the hunters worked the search for the missing boys. Stood right there beside the pack, helping comb the woods. Name of Leroy Hades.”
That one I’ve heard before. “I know that name.”
“You should. Leroy’s the right hand of the man who runs the local syndicate.” Adrian’s mouth goes thin. “Kylan.”
“I’ve met Reuben once, but not Kylan,” I murmur. “He’s the new leader, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know about new,” Adrian responds. “He’s been around for six to seven years now.”
I had heard about Reuben’s death when it happened. I didn’t know much about him except that he was a cruel bastard. His brother is probably cut from the same cloth.
For a moment, neither of us speaks. Hunters run an order older than our packs, with their people seeded through courts and council seats, the same trick we work in reverse.
“If you found out about her stash,” I say slowly, “then Leroy knew about it the same day. He buried it.”
“That’s what I thought too.”
“Stay low. Keep digging.” I stand and move to the window. “If hunters took them, they didn’t keep anyone breathing. Those kids are dead, Adrian. We need the bodies.”
“And how do you want me to manage that?”
“You’ve got friends in the Ridgeback pack.”
“A few.”
“Get a handful of them quietly into the trees out there. Tell them to stay where wolves don’t run.” I glance back at him. “If those bodies were anywhere our kind passes, somebody would have caught the scent already. Look where nobody looks.”
Adrian nods slowly. “That’s smart.”
Four shifters gone in two years, and every time the pack shrugged it off. The killing I can stomach. What I can’t stomach is how clean it was, how willing everyone was to call it running and move on.
He gathers the folder, then doesn’t move. His eyes land on the coffee table by the couch, on the cluster of white lilies in a glass. “You keeping those?”
“For now.”
“You aren’t allergic to lilies?” He’s already up.
I press my tongue to the inside of my cheek. “I am.”
Adrian crosses the room, scoops the flowers out of the vase, and drops them in the trash can by the door. “Are you out of your mind? Throw them.”
“All right fine.” I sigh. “I don’t need them anyway. I just wanted to check something.”
Guilt spears me at the pain Mia had been in. I hadn’t thought she would actually have a reaction to the flowers. Luckily I had the antidote on hand.
Adrian stops, turns, and looks at me longer than I’d like. “What’s going on with you?”
“Do you remember ten years back?” I keep my voice even.
“What are you talking about?”
I force the words out. “Do you think I could have slept with a woman and not remembered it happened?”
Adrian’s brows climb. “I don’t know. You’d want Voss for that. He was running your schedule back then.” He scratches his jaw. “I was in the pack, not on the road with you. What window are you looking at?”
“January maybe.”
“You were playing a run of matches around then. Away the whole stretch.” He frowns, dredging it up. “You weren’t even in the city.”
“Which city was I in?”
“Ashford.”
Everything in me goes quiet. Ashford is where Jessa and Mia lived before Hemlock Hollow. It’s the city she loves enough to grieve.
I was there a whole month, hotel rooms I can’t tell apart, nights that blur at the edges. Somewhere in that month, did I find her, or did she find me?
“Do you remember anything else from—” I stop myself. “Forget it. I’ll call Voss.”
“Marcus.” Adrian’s watching me close now. “What is this?”
I don’t answer that. “Have you met Mia?”
“I haven’t met her. I’ve seen her around the academy.” He tilts his head. “What about her?”
I let the silence stretch, and I watch him put it together. He goes very still.
“You don’t think she’s yours, do you?”
“No.” It comes out tipped up at the end, more question than answer, and we both hear it.
“Marcus, the girl’s human.”
“Hybrids don’t shift until their teens.” I turn from the window. “Bella’s a full-blooded wolf, and she won’t change until she’s older either. We don’t actually know what Mia is. Bella has no wolf-scent on her yet; only grown shifters do. A child gives you nothing.”
Adrian sets the folder down. “You never met Jessa before. Did you?”
“I don’t remember her.” I rub the back of my neck. “But she goes guarded around me, and it sharpens the second Mia’s in the room.”
“That’s suspicious.”
“I’m aware.”
“Her birth certificate?”
“It says Derek. He’s the stepfather, a friend who put his name down to keep her respectable. He didn’t father that girl.” I meet his eyes. “Jessa let it slip once. The real one is somebody else, somebody she calls a deadbeat.”
Adrian studies me for a long moment. “You’re not a deadbeat.” Then, gentler, “Though I’ll grant you, back then, maybe you were halfway there. You ran through women.”
“I didn’t.” Heat moves up my throat. “I had a couple of girlfriends, sure, but that was before the matches, and I was careful every time.”
“What if she drugged you?” Adrian doesn’t blink. “What if Jessa put something in your drink and took you to bed?”
I stare at him. “Then what? She has my kid and stays silent for ten years? That’s nonsense. If she drugged me, slept with me, and bore my daughter, she’d have come to me with her hand out.”
“What if she did try?”
My mouth opens. Nothing comes. I think of Jessa in my kitchen, jaw set, telling me she reached out to the father once and his people shut the door in her face. The memory stays put, too heavy for me to move.
I shake my head. “Jessa’s not the type to drug a man.”
“It was a theory.” Adrian lifts a shoulder. “Maybe you were just drunk past sense.”
“I don’t know.” That’s the truth of it, and I hate saying it. “My wolf likes them. Both of them.”
Adrian grins, the bastard. “Maybe she’s your mate.”
“She’s not.” The denial is immediate. “A fated bond doesn’t whisper. It slams into you all at once. I’d have known the first second she got in my car.”
I lost my brother and his bonded mate in one night. What it did to the wolf he left behind taught me never to hand anyone that much power over me.
“So what do you want to do?” He spreads his hands. “Easiest road is a blood draw. Shifter blood reads different from human under the right eyes. A lab can’t tell you she’s yours, but it can tell you she isn’t fully human. That’s the only thing you need.”
“It is,” I agree. And still I hesitate.
A test hands me an answer I can’t give back.
If she’s mine, ten years were stolen from me, and I’ll have to decide whether I can forgive Jessa for it.
Say she isn’t, and I lose the picture I’ve been building without permission, the one where I keep them both.
Neither ending leaves me where I’m standing now.
He catches the pause. “What’s the holdup? What exactly have you got that’s twisted you up this much?”
“Mia’s allergic to the same flowers I am.” I count it off. “She has a birthmark in the same place I do, matched to mine. The kid won’t touch a carrot.”
Adrian blinks. “She hates carrots. That’s a pillar of your case.”
“Did you miss the birthmark?”
“The birthmark, fine, that’s strange.” He holds up a hand. “But half the world swells up around a lily, and every child on earth hates a vegetable. You might be chasing something that isn’t there.”
“There’s one more.” I hold his eyes. “Last week I put a bandage on a bite on her shin. By the time we reached her mother’s door, the skin was clean, no welt, no scab, nothing.”
He sobers. “How long?”
“Under an hour.”
He has no quick answer because he knows what closes a wound that fast, same as I do, and none of it is human.
“There’s something here,” I insist before he can talk himself back out of it. “Why else would Jessa hover over that girl every time I’m within ten feet of her? She doesn’t want me knowing something.”
He has no answer for that. After a beat, he offers, “You want me on it?”
“No. You’ve got dead kids in the ground somewhere and a syndicate to outsmart.” I shake my head. “I’ll handle my own end of this.”