“And your girl, Emma,” Antony said, looking at the young woman still standing in the doorway after letting the alpha in.
A number of accusing gazes turned to her, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop with the chill of it. Even Ned’s gaze narrowed, studious. She straightened, her brow furrowing, eyes shining.
“Now hold on a minute,” I said, as if I could do anything to deflect their attention. “Why her?”
“She said they approached her,” Antony said. “This evening, at the conference.”
“Would she have told you about it if she was actually working for them?”
Detached, objective Ben said, “She’d have had to say something because you saw her. If she didn’t you would have.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Ben, you were there, you saw her—did she look like she was being subverted?”
“No, she didn’t. I’m just being the lawyer.”
I turned to Ned. “I don’t think it was her. You’re looking at the outsider for a suspect. It’s what everyone does.”
“It wasn’t me, I swear to you, Ned.” Emma was shaking her head.
“It could have been me,” I said. There, that distracted them. They all turned their gazes on me, and the attention felt like a physical blow. “I wouldn’t have had to tell them—they’d have just needed to follow me. I go everywhere, talk to everyone. Geez, I’ve been tracked, stalked, and pestered this whole conference. They could have had someone standing next to me and I wouldn’t have known.”
“Well,” Caleb said. He drained the last of his tea and set it aside. “I’ve got one of their injured wolves trussed up in the van outside if you’d like to have a go at him. He’s probably not awake yet, but it shouldn’t be too much longer. He ought to be able to tell you.”
Ned raised a brow. “And why didn’t you say this earlier?”
Caleb’s smile showed teeth. “Wanted to see you lot squirm.”
Marid laughed.
Caleb stood and moved to the door. “Ben, Kitty. Care to help?”
Not really, but wolves were the muscle. Even he had that habit. I glanced at Ben, who raised an eyebrow—an uncommitted look. He was leaving the decision to me.
“Let’s go,” I muttered, leveraging myself from the chair yet again.
“I’ll get the door,” Emma said and started to leave with us.
“Maybe you’d better stay here with your Master, love,” Caleb said. His tone was flat, his gaze a wall revealing nothing. No sympathy, no accusation, nothing for her to react against. Frowning, she stepped back.
She
The trio of us went outside, where one of Caleb’s wolves opened the back door of a dark SUV.
A naked man, a white guy in his twenties, lay on the bare, carpetless floor of the vehicle. He was one of the werewolves Ned had disabled with a snap of his neck. Now, he seemed to be sleeping. Healing, I gathered, though I didn’t want to know how long it took—or how much pain it involved—to heal from a broken spine. I’d cracked my pelvis in a fall a little while back and that was bad enough. It had taken a full night to heal. The man’s hands and feet were tied with plastic zip ties, as if they expected him to wake up and fight.
I couldn’t smell a touch of blood, either on the man or in the back of the car. They really had known how to clean up. I couldn’t help but be impressed. Back in Colorado, in the years when the pack had a lot of infighting— before I took over—there’d been bodies. Usually, they got dumped down one of the countless caves and abandoned mine shafts scattered in the foothills outside of Denver. Occasionally, there’d be a body in the city needing to disappear. I didn’t know if my pack could clean up a fight of this scale. We hadn’t had any fatal fights for a long time. I worked hard to keep it that way.
“Right, let’s get him inside,” Caleb said.
“What are you going to do with him?” I asked.
“Crack him like a nut,” Caleb said.
I looked at Ben again. Like I kept waiting for a different response from him.
The henchwolf cut the zip tie at the prisoner’s hands, and Caleb grabbed one of the arms. He called to Ben, who took hold of the other. They each hauled an arm over their shoulders, lifting him off the ground. I didn’t have much to do but watch. Maybe call a warning if the guy started waking up.
We returned to the parlor, where Caleb and Ben dumped their burden in the middle of the floor. The man groaned. Alive and awake. My hackles rose, a tightening down my back.
Emma had retreated to another chair near the fireplace, between Ned and Marid. She looked small and young, slouching in on herself. I wondered what they’d been saying to her, if they’d been conducting their own early interrogation. Antony stood farther off; he looked like he’d been pacing.
Caleb gripped the man’s hair and yanked back, showing his face to the room. “Wake up, you.”
I couldn’t decide if I wanted this to be successful or not. If this guy did know what had set our enemies on us, was I ready to hear the answer? It didn’t matter if I was ready or not.
Ben moved close to me, our arms brushing. “Torturing him isn’t going to work. He’ll know we have to kill him one way or the other.”
Didn’t mean it was going to be pretty.
“I don’t know if I can watch this,” I said to Ben.
“Will you lose face with these guys if you don’t?”
“Yeah, probably.” And I wanted to be here when he talked. I’d stay. I thought of saying something about how this was going to mess up Ned’s very nice, very expensive carpet. Likely, Ned didn’t much care.
Still propping his head up, Caleb slapped his captive across his face a couple of times. Not hard, just noisy and startling.
He flinched suddenly, batting at Caleb with his freed hands, but when he tried to scramble back, to put himself in a position to fight, his still-bound feet tripped him and he crashed to the floor, flopping.
Caleb let him struggle a moment before grabbing an arm and twisting it back. The werewolf cried out in frustration and bared his teeth.
“Settle down, there,” Caleb hissed in his ear. “There’s nothing you can do, so you might as well let it all go.”
The man gave a wordless moan and kept thrashing, or trying to, anyway.
“Ned,” Caleb said. “It’s your turn, I think.”
Oh—on the other hand, this wasn’t going to be messy after all.
Ned rose from his chair, adjusted his coat, brushed imaginary dust off its hem, and arranged himself as if about to step on stage. He commanded attention; no one would ever guess that he’d been injured. I expected him to launch into a soliloquy.
Instead, he knelt before the captive, seeming to regard him with scientific curiosity as the man flailed in a panic. Finally, Ned took hold of the man’s chin. Making a deep-throated noise of denial, the werewolf squeezed his eyes shut, straining to turn away. Ned merely closed his hands around either side of the man’s face, put thumbs over his eyelids, and pried them open.
“Hush,” Ned breathed. “There, now. Don’t fret. It’ll all be over soon.”
The werewolf froze. Slowly, his muscles relaxed—tension actually seemed to seep out of his body. His jaw hung open and his eyelids drooped as he met Ned’s gaze, and fell into it.
“That was a splendid little offensive you and your friends mounted in the park just now.”
“No,” the man said, chuckling sadly. His accented voice—he might have been German—was haunted, dreamy. “It was a mess. Rushed.”
“Oh?” Ned feigned curiosity.
“We were just supposed to be watching … sur-surveillance.” He sighed, tried to shake his head, but Ned wouldn’t let him break his gaze.
“Watching who?”
