Page 36 of The Alpha’s Unclaimed Mate

“Not yet. I’ll have to.” I look out at the dark seam of trees. “Wolfsbane was wiped out generations ago. We salted the ground where it grew. For a vial of it to turn up on my land, somebody is growing it again, and we have to know who. If hunters have a supply of this, we have a problem bigger than one sick kid.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Pull every suspicious death you can reach. Inside the pack, outside it, the city, two or three towns out in every direction.” I tick it off. “I want missing shifters too. Any pack that’s filed a wolf gone missing or found one dead, I want it.”

“Why missing?” His brow creases. “Dead I follow. Why missing?”

I look at him, and I remember he never sat through a day of alpha training, that this was always meant to be my burden and not his. “Because hunters don’t kill the old way anymore, Adrian. The open culls draw too much notice now. We’re registered as humans, taxed as humans, buried as humans, and a human corpse gets an autopsy, a file, a detective asking why a healthy young man’s heart stopped. A person who simply vanishes gets a few weeks of looking and a closed folder. No body, no questions that lead anywhere. They’ve stopped making us bleed. Now they just make us disappear.”

He takes that in without a word for a long moment. I watch the cold understanding reach him, the same one that came over me when I first worked it out, that we’ve been counting our dead and never thought to count the ones who simply stopped coming home.

“You think the hunters are using wolfsbane to put shifters down,” he says at last.

“What else would anyone want it for?” I hold his eyes. “Look into it. I’ll tell my uncle tonight.”

He nods once and melts back into the trees, sure-footed in the dark, and I’m left alone with the cold, the wet, the dark hulk of a vial-shaped problem.

I stay where I am a while longer, thinking of the conversation I have to have. Ten years ago I handed my uncle the seat and swore to myself I’d stay out of the running of his pack. He’s a good alpha. The pack is steady under him, and an alpha-born meddling in another alpha’s territory is the surest way to crack a pack in two. Even with Bella’s life in it, he won’t like me stepping in.

He loves me, that much I’ve never doubted. After our parents died, he raised what was left of me and asked for nothing back. But love and the seat are two different things. When a blood-born starts asking questions on his land, a sitting alpha’s first instinct is to close ranks and guard his hold on the pack. I’ll have to bring this to him gently, as a worry I need his help with, or he’ll hear a challenge in it whether I mean one or not.

I tip my head back to the wet black canopy and breathe in the cold. The grief that lives in these particular woods tries to surface: Daniel and Hannah, the house I won’t enter, and for once, I’m grateful to have a fresh problem to crowd it out. None of it fits together yet, and every piece of it points back toward someone close enough to reach my land.

His instincts will go territorial before they go soft, blood or no blood. I’ll have to walk into it slowly, hands open, and pray the love wins out over the alpha.

I doubt it will be that simple. Nothing about this is.

Chapter Eight

Marc

My uncle’s house sits on the north edge of pack territory, bigger than mine by half.

His estate stands behind a gated perimeter, manned around the clock as pack law requires. The guard waves me through without checking. I’ve been coming here all my life. I park on the wide paved drive and climb the front steps. The door opens before I can knock.

Calder, the housekeeper, gives me a nod. “Mr. Steele, Master Nathaniel wasn’t expecting you. Is this a family call or business?”

“Family,” I tell him.

He smiles. “He’ll be pleased to see you.”

He won’t be, but I follow Calder down the long hall lined with pack photographs, three generations of them, and stop outside the study door. I knock once, then push it open.

My uncle is behind his desk with a tumbler of whiskey and a set of ledgers spread wide. He looks up and rises, already smiling.

“Marcus.” He sets down his pen. “What a surprise. Is everything all right? I heard Bella wasn’t well.”

“Something happened,” I say. “I need to talk to you in private.”

He nods and crosses to the door, pulling it shut. Then he waves me toward a chair at the side of the room and takes the other one himself, leaning back with his hands on the arms.

“Tell me,” he murmurs.

I lean forward, forearms on my thighs. “A few days ago, Bella stumbled across an open vial in the woods. She went down before I reached her. Somebody left it where she could find it, and she inhaled the fumes. She’s been very sick since, and she’s only just recovered.”

He lifts his hands off the chair arms.

“I should have come sooner,” I admit because he’s frowning. “But you had the inter-pack meetings, and I was focused on her. I didn’t want to pull you out when she was already being cared for.”