"Hey," I say, staying close to Cliff.
Anton looks at me for a long moment, something shifting behind his eyes that I can't quite read. Then he looks at Cliff.
"I found something," he says. "Thought you'd want to hear it in person."
Cliff jerks his chin toward the bay doors, making it clear he wants to talk to him alone. Anton follows the pack alpha out of the shop, his hands still in his pockets. His eyes do one more sweep of the space before settling.
Raff wipes his hands on the shop towel. He doesn't move toward Anton, but he doesn't step back either. He simply stands at the workbench with his arms crossed and his gray eyes tracking every movement.
Perrin moves to my side, close enough that his arm brushes mine. A moment later I feel Adam step in right behind us, his presence warm and quiet at my back.
Anton stops in the middle of the shop floor and looks at Cliff. "The Cassville Care murders," he says, keeping his voice low and even. "I asked around."
I go still, listening.
"What did you find?" Cliff asks.
Anton shifts slightly, squaring his shoulders. "The official story was bullshit," he says simply. "It's pretty clear that someone paid to make it go away. Robbery was the easiest cover story."
"What makes you say that?" Raff asks.
Anton's eyes cut to me. They're filled with something I wasn't expecting. A deep, quiet sadness sits so plainly on his face that I have to look away from it. I fix my gaze on the concrete ground in front of me and hold very still.
"Because of the amount of violence," Anton says softly. "No one does…thatto rob a place."
Adam's arms come around me from behind, crossing over my stomach, pulling me back against his chest without a word. On my other side Perrin shifts, angling his body slightly in front of mine, like he can put himself between me and Anton’s words if he positions himself just right.
He can't. But I love him for trying.
"Who paid them off?" Raff asks, and I hear him move, his boots on the concrete floor, stepping a little closer to where I'm standing.
"That I don't know," Anton says. "But whoever it was, they had reach.”
"What else?" Cliff asks.
"Whoever did it wasn't a professional," Anton says. "The scene was messy. Clearly improvised. Someone who knew what they were doing would have made it look cleaner." He pauses. "This looked like panic."
Panic?
I think about the blood spray on that cardboard box in the prep room. The way it arced across the top like a cough or a sneeze.
How many other people have died because someone panicked?
"That's all you have?" Cliff asks. "We're looking for someone connected enough to buy a police investigation, but not connected enough to send a professional?"
"That's how I read it," Anton says.
I risk a glance at the alpha.
Anton is still looking right at me, and the expression on his face almost hurts to see. It's not pity. It's more like remorse. Like a man who feels bad for not having more to tell me.
It's a strange thing to see on Anton's face. It’s not like we really know each other.
I mean, I worked for him for six months, but we weren’t friends. He mostly just intimidated me. But he's looking at me right now like he feels personally responsible for what happened to me.
"So we're looking for someone young," Raff says quietly. "Or new. Someone who hadn't done it before and had the connections to call in a favor afterward to clean it up."
Anton says nothing, which is its own kind of answer.
