By the end, I could see Gray and Knox’s faces turning red; their fierce glares could make a corpse bury itself deeper to get away. Thian, on the other hand, grinned like a fool. He loved his job as the enforcer of our club and took his position very seriously and had some fun doing it, too.
Knox was seething when he spoke through clenched teeth, “Eric was involved ten years ago?”
“Yeah. Looks that way. She only remembered the name Rod, her dealer, and one other name, Enrique. They were wearing our cuts when they killed her brother,” I said.
“I should have killed that motherfucker back then,” Thian snapped.
I couldn’t agree more, but we didn’t have any reason to kill him back then, we do now. “Tonight was weird. They didn’t move, didn’t flinch when I came barreling through the door. Not even a growl. They just stared at me. Then there was a whistling sound, and they left. Dogg and Kite went after them but lost them. I didn’t want them to be caught in a trap, and to prevent that, I had them head back. There is a dead body in the kitchen of the apartment. Not sure if we can find out anything from it, but maybe. He didn’t shift back to human when he died. He’s still a wolf. The body should be here any minute since I called in reinforcements and asked someone to bring another van to collect the wolf.”
“That doesn’t sound normal,” Thian said, shaking his head.
“It’s not,” Knox agreed.
“Brothers, I have a feeling this is going to get worse before this gets better,” I stated what I had felt since tonight went from bad to weird.
Gray ran a hand over his face. “Sadly, you are probably right, but we’ll be waiting for them.”
“Hell yeah, we will!” Thian exclaimed.
Instead of waiting, we called church for all members as soon as the body arrived and passed on all of the information we had. Everyone was shocked and pissed off, but they were ready. This fight was just beginning, and in the end, the Dark Leopards MC would come out on top. No one fucked with us. First order of business, we needed more information from our prisoner.
374
Verity
Siam and I sat in awkward silence. This wasn’t us. We could normally find something to talk about, and if we couldn’t, the quietness never felt oppressive. Everything had changed.
“Are you like your brother?” I finally asked.
“Yes. Our mother came to the States when she was a kid from Russia. She was a snow leopard shifter. She named Dimitri for her father and me for her childhood friend. With that kind of start, you would think she actually cared for us. Nope. Our father wasn’t any better. There were a few times when they would disappear for a few days to go on binges of drugs and alcohol, but they always came back. We moved from place to place, scraping together enough money to get by. Until we were thirteen. They abandoned us, taking everything with them while we were in school. We came home, and they were gone. Dimitri tried to keep me calm and said they would come back, but even he knew the truth of it. This time had been different. Foster care took us, separated us. Dimitri wound up in a bad situation and ran away. He has the ability to blend with his surroundings, which meant, they never found him.” This was the most I’d ever heard Siam talk about her childhood.
“How did you find each other again?” I wondered out loud.
Sighing, she stood up from the chair she’d been sitting in and moved around the room, picking up a few items and setting them down again. A few minutes later, she sat next to me on the bed. “We have the ability to mind speak. If you don’t have a phone or are in animal form, it’s very easy to communicate. We can do this with anyone we bond with. Dimitri is my twin, but I can also hear the thoughts from the men in the club if they need me. There was an incident where I was taken, and they wanted to be able to communicate with me without having to go through Dimitri. After we were separated, I was angry and hurt. He promised he wouldn’t leave me. We were thirteen, so of course, it was a promise he could not keep. I shut off my thoughts to him, blocked him completely. I had no idea how bad it was for him. In some ways, our parents were better. He ran away after only a few months. At thirteen, you can’t get a job, can’t rent an apartment, and you don’t have a lot of options.”
I sucked in a breath. “What happened?”
“He lived on the streets.”
“But he would have frozen to death!”
“Snow leopards can survive in cold temps up to negative forty below. Maybe colder. I wouldn’t try it, though. Our fur keeps us warm. Not to mention, in human form, we are a little warmer than normal. We are an animal that was built for the cold, and winter has always been our favorite season.” Siam got up again and stared at a picture of her and Snow. “I know I hurt him when I blocked him. It hurt me too. As twins, we’ve been together since conception, and when we were separated, it was like we lost part of ourselves. I put the nail in the coffin when I shut him out. When he was fifteen, he tried to pick the pocket of Knox. He’s the president of this chapter of the Dark Leopards. Knox put him to work
