Page 97 of Glitched Fates & Stolen Mates

Though I’d have to wait to see him. Until lunchtime. Like a normal person.

I glanced at my phone. Only two hours and forty-five minutes until I could legitimately suggest lunch without looking completely mental.

My calendar reminder chimed: Dale’s Pack Meeting - 10:00 a.m. I deleted it with probably unnecessary violence. Dale had cancelled yesterday. Fine by me. I had more important things to do anyway.

Well, more secret things to do.

The guilt sat in my stomach like a lead weight. This was explicitly against Seb’s instructions. Seb, my boss and best friend. The man who’d seen something in me all those years ago, who’d given me a place here, at Killigrew Street. A new home.

Seb, who trusted me completely. And here I was conducting my own private investigation behind his back.

But… White’s order to stop digging into Greywatch made no sense.

I’d told Rory we had to respect Seb’s decision to follow White’s orders.

Yet I couldn’t let it go.

Not with that chip still buried in my skull.

Not after they hurt Rory earlier this year.

Not after Cara, and the other countless wolves who died in combat.

Not when there were still answers out there, still people who might have information.

After we found out about my father being alive, I’d spent months avoiding an obvious line of enquiry—contacting anyone I knew from Scotland. Too many painful memories, too many bridges I’d burned when I left. But desperate times called for desperate measures, and I couldn’t help but suspect that Moira had recruited widely from the Highland packs. Someone, somewhere, had to know something useful.

That morning’s calls turned out to be the usual mix of hostility and dead ends. Wolves that knew my pack, who still saw me as Malcolm’s boy who’d run off like a disobedient brat. A few who hung up the moment I mentioned Moira’s name. Others who claimed they’d never heard of her at all, voices too quick and careful to be telling the truth.

Frustration burned within me as I crossed names off my paper list I kept hidden in the weapons room.

It didn’t help that I was mostly operating off scraps. Third-hand information from gossips who half remembered stories about young wolves going off somewhere, never to return. Or returning changed.

That was what I was ultimately looking for: someone who was ex-Greywatch like me, but someone with much more recent experience. Someone who might be able to give us a physical location of a base. Or something.

By eleven forty-five, I’d had enough.

The soft clatter of Felix’s keyboard drifted through his lair door, punctuated by the occasional frustrated sigh. I found myself lingering outside, checking my watch every thirty seconds like some lovesick teenager.

Eleven fifty-four. Was it too early for lunch? Would I look desperate if I knocked now?

I slapped myself. I was wasting precious alone-with-Felix seconds standing here like an idiot.

I knocked.

“Hello?” Felix’s voice, a high-pitched squeak.

“It’s me.”

The keyboard clatter stopped. “Come in.”

Felix swung around on his chair as I entered, offering me a shy smile that made my heart lurch. And then it just about stopped when I clocked he was wearing my glasses. His glasses. Those thin black frames that somehow made his eyes look impossibly larger.

Fuck. They were supposed to help with his eye strain, not give me a bloody coronary.

“Lunch?” I asked.

“Okay,” he said, voice dropping to a low murmur.