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He watched her face for a long moment, before nodding. “Local. Got it.”
Damn him.
She knew she wasn’t easy to read. Her pack lieutenants and packmates all said as much and she’d never had an enemy who could predict her, which made the ease with which he was doing so all the more disconcerting.
“Last name?” he asked.
She stared at him, refusing to answer. Maybe he had been bluffing about the information in the folder.
He leaned against the chair back like he had all the time in the world. “Look. You’re going to have be to a little bit more forthcoming if you want to get out of here any time soon.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I don’t know that. Not until you talk to me.”
“If you wanted me to be more forthcoming, maybe you shouldn’t have herded me around like a sheep dog with that revolver of yours.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t run like a sheep dog, I wouldn’t have had to.”
“Would you have run if you were me?” She lifted a brow.
He didn’t say anything, but for a second, she thought she saw a hint of understanding in his eyes. However, brief. “This isn’t about me.”
“Isn’t it?” She leaned forward. “You hunters roll into this city like you own this place, like you have jurisdiction when your kind hasn’t set foot here in nearly a decade.”
“Fair enough.” He ran his fingers through his auburn hair and pursed his lips as he nodded. “But we do have jurisdiction. Thanks to the treaty your kind signed. A mutual agreement, if I remember right.”
An agreement he had helped negotiate. She knew that much.
“That agreement is with the Grey Wolves. Not my pack.”
He nodded. “Ah, I see. That’s what this is about. Your pack’s status as ‘independent.’” He made air quotes with his fingers around independent, and she couldn’t help the snarl that tore from her throat in response.
He didn’t know a thing about her or her kind. “Independent means exactly that.” Her wolf eyes flared.
“Right. So you mean to tell me that when Maverick Grey calls you don’t pick up phone?”
Maverick Grey: the leader of the Grey Wolves. She didn’t resent the Grey Wolves for their cooperation with the Execution Underground. In fact, she respected it.
Of course, she would pick up the phone if she’d been anywhere near powerful enough to be on Maverick Grey’s radar. She’d be a fool not to. But that didn’t mean she wanted to subject herself and her own pack to one size fits all leadership.
But apparently, to the humans of the Execution Underground, an agreement with the Wolves of the West meant an agreement with them all. As if her kind, her species were a monolith, rather than living, breathing, diverse creatures whose existence was as valid, complex, and varied as their own.
When she didn’t answer, he gulped another swig of coffee. “That’s what I thought.”
He said it with such smug satisfaction she could have bitten off his face, if she wouldn’t have had the repercussions against her pack to deal with.
All she was. Everything she had. She did for them.
The wolves, the family she loved.
Even dealing with this asshole.
He must have sensed he’d pushed her too far, because he threw his hands up in a sign of surrender. “Alright. So you don’t think we have jurisdiction here. I get that. But explain to me why I shouldn’t be suspicious of a she-wolf sniffing around a string of dead human bodies?”
Emphasis on the word human. She didn’t miss that. “Because it’s our jurisdiction, not yours. We’re working toward the same end goal.”
Maybe that’s where she could lead this. Build common ground.
