We’d all learned how to manage Ryker’s unyielding nature. He’d gotten better once he’d moved past his teenage years and was more willing to be flexible about some things, and while he had no interest in politics, he was still an extremely useful addition to our pack. We would have taken him in and kept him regardless, but Ryker’s ruthlessness as a fighter turned out to be quite the boon. Once he’d come of age, challenges to our leadership had gone down significantly before dwindling to fewer than half a dozen per year and then vanishing entirely.
I was grateful for that. It was impossible to survive in Lunaria without being a killer, but having to slaughter other Velesians year after year had weighed on me, and battles for dominance were always to the death.
The Moroi were all about underhandedness and bargains. Velesians were brutal and direct. I might dislike killing my own kind, but I’d take that over what Samara was dealing with. Based on my understanding of current Moroi politics, which was pretty good thanks to Bastian’s spying, the Blood Sovereign spent a significant portion of their time dealing with what I deemed pointless political bullshit.
Last month, Samara and her mates had been dragged into a disagreement between two Houses because, apparently, two barely twenty-year-olds had been engaged in a passionate love affair that’d ended badly. Something about the girl falling in love with the older brother? I didn’t remember. Bastian had been greatly amused by all of it, because of course he had been.
Nothing made him happier than other people’s misery.
He and Warrick were perfect for each other. Not that they would ever admit it or try to work through their bullshit.
I glanced up at the stubborn feline shifter. Bastian wore an amused smile and lounged against the stone with one leg dangling. Everything about the position was a lie.
He was pissed off.
At Warrick for not being here, at Ryker for running off into the woods to hunt down Rynn after we’d told him not to, and at Gavril for calling Rynn a spy.
Which she absolutely was. The only question was if she was a willing one or not. I was leaning towards not. Rynn was a terrible liar and whatever she felt was written all over her face.
But that didn’t change the fact that she’d always be loyal to her pack. She’d tell them things we never would. Perhaps harmless information, or maybe something we didn’t want anyone outside of the Alphas to know. I couldn’t blame her for it. My loyalty would always be to Bastian, Warrick, and Ryker before anyone else. Including her.
Still, this could have been handled better. Gavril had caught us off guard with the whole Selene business. And of course Rynn had reappeared at the worst possible moment.
“I can feel you staring at me. You know I hate being stared at.” Bastian sighed, pulling his gaze from the woods to meet mine.
“You love being stared at.” I scoffed.
“I love being admired,” he corrected. “It’s not every day that people see someone as gorgeous as myself.”
“Remember that time Ryker cut all your hair off while you were sleeping?” I smiled. “You were less gorgeous then.”
“Let’s not speak of those unfortunate weeks.” He sniffed. “Say whatever’s on your mind, Cade.”
“Just thinking that maybe we should have made things more clear to Rynn about where she stood with us.” I thought about the cold distance in her voice before she’d dashed off into the woods. “I think she’s genuinely upset over Gavril calling her a spy and us not disputing it.”
“Well, it’s true, so if we argued otherwise, we would have just prolonged lying to her. Besides, Rynn’s a clever and pragmatic person. She’ll get over it and chalk this up to a life lesson.” Bastian shrugged. “I’m still not entirely sure the past few months of her being more agreeable and trying to fit in haven’t been an act. She had to have thought it was odd that pack bonds weren’t forming. Maybe she wanted us to believe she was happily accepting her place here so we’d start sharing more important information with her.” His mouth curved up into a smirk. “She’s going to be even more pissed when she finds out I’ve been reading all her correspondence.”
“Which has been full of benign shit,” I pointed out. “Nothing of importance.”
She’d been telling her father and uncle what she’d been working on here. Trade deals and whatnot. It was information they wouldn’t have been privy to if Rynn hadn’t been here, but it wasn’t like we had specifically told her not to share any of it, and it really didn’t matter because they would have learned about any new trade deals once all the parties involved had signed off. Now they were just learning about deals as they were in progress instead of after the fact.
Rynn hadn’t given them any information that we truly didn’t want them to have . . . mostly because we made sure she didn’t have anything like that to give them.
Oddly enough, Rynn never talked about anything personal in her letters. How she felt about any of us. What it was like living somewhere new. Everything was succinct and to the point.
They never asked about her either.
“Maybe she has some other way of sending them messages we haven’t found yet and these messages are a decoy,” Bastian suggested.
There was one problem with this theory though. “You really think Rynn managed to find a way to do that in all the months Warrick was here and breathing down her neck?”
“Probably not.” Bastian chuckled. “There’s also the fact that Rynn makes for a shit spy. She lacks the finesse it requires.”
“You mean she lacks your capacity to bullshit,” I said dryly. While Velesians tended to be a straightforward lot, some were more devious than others, and none more so than Bastian. When Warrick was particularly pissed off at him, he frequently told the ailuran that he acted more like a Moroi than a Velesian.
Which only resulted in Bastian claiming that maybe all the Moroi he’d fucked lately had rubbed off on him, and that usually led to yet another wall being knocked out in our home.
“Look, what’s done is done.” Bastian leapt down, easily landing on his feet from the ten-foot drop. “Our dear Rynn was the one who publicly declared she didn’t want to join our pack and undermined a nearly decade-long pact with the Narchis Order, and she’s made it perfectly clear that she’s far more loyal to Samara than to us. We have no reason to trust her. Gavril simply said out loud what we were all thinking.”
