“It should never have been at risk. I should’ve checked your office better. I should’ve realized that someone could get in with wolfsbane during the camera outage. I?—“
“You’re not infallible, Maverick. You can’t protect me from everything.”
“Like hell I can’t.”
“We’re going to find the killer, okay? Harper said Sutton is on it, and she’s an assassin herself, so she’s good at figuring these things out. Right?”
His silence wasn’t comforting.
“Right?” I repeated.
“There’s a chance. But she’s not a detective, and she doesn’t have any leads yet.”
Oh.
Damn.
“I don’t really care about the company at this point. It’s not worth your life. We could dissemble it and be fine,” Maverick said, running his fingers through my damp hair and pulling it away from my neck.
“You can’t do that. It’s incredibly successful, and the team is really good. We’re on our way to making everything compliant with the laws, and?—“
“I wasn’t kidding about you not going back to work, Bloom. You’re not stepping foot in that office again until the killer’s dead. You are their target. We were right about that.”
“If I was their target, then why did they kill Celeste?”
“The working theory is that another wolf pack bribed a vampire to turn a human in the office, and that turned vampire was trained to drain the office’s higher-ups whenever their hunger flared beyond control. Turned vampires are hard to find and impossible to control, as I’m sure you were taught.”
My stomach tightened. “Yeah. Turned vampires are the devil that caused a war and destroyed our population.”
“They did. If Cassidy hears our theory, her packwillget involved. They don’t fuck around with turned vampires. No one does.”
“You never told me why she hates us so much.”
Maverick let out a long breath. “It’s not good.”
“I survived a brush with death. I can handle a story.”
His hand slid under my hoodie, slowly stroking my hip. “Cassidy had a family with a guy in her pack. They weren’t mated, but they had been friends for a century, and agreed to coparent. Twodaughters and a son. They were teenagers. Still kids. A vampire turned someone in her city, and he devolved. Her kids and their dad were there. Wrong place, wrong time. All four of them, dead in minutes. None of them were fighters. Most of us weren’t, back then. She went to the Alpha of Alphas, who was an old friend.”
“The one whose place you took?” I asked
“Yeah. The one I killed. She got him to start the war. Instead of reducing the number of turned vampires, his war made them explode. They were everywhere. Unstable killing machines. They didn’t even care about drinking the blood at one point—they just wanted to smell it. Murdering humans just tosmelltheir blood.” He shook his head.
My eyes closed.
My throat swelled.
That was what Harper could become, and I was helping her hide. Giving her Maverick’s blood, too.
But how could I not?
I knew I should turn her in. I should ask Maverick to put her in one of his cages while we checked if drinking werewolf blood would work.
But if I told him, there was a 99% chance he would kill her.
I’d never be able to look him in the eyes again. Hell, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to breathe again, knowing I was the reason she was gone. He’d probably put me in a cage too, for hiding what she was and what she’d done.
God, I wished I could go back in time and forget about the fucking paperwork for one night. If I’d stopped her from getting together with Velour, If I’d been there for her...
