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ELI
Remus’ Safe House
Travis County, Texas
Remus and I were working together later that afternoon over a video chat, trying to sort through some of the documents Agent Foxrun had sent us when his phone rang. “Give me one second,” he rumbled.
“No problem,” I replied, flicking open a new tab as he muted his end of the line. I understood. Business never stopped, especially when your business was large enough that the majority of your customer base was human. The only reason my meetings and client calls had been fairly limited up until this point was because I only had a few clients in America thus far. Silverstreak Motors, on the other hand, was a well-established brand, and sometimes someone just needed the boss.
When Remus returned a few moments later, he looked ready to tear someone’s head off. I raised both brows. “That bad?” I asked. “If you need to head into the office to handle it, no worries. I’ve got this.”
“It wasn’t the office,” he bit out, staring down at his phone. I was surprised the device didn’t burst spontaneously into flames with the heat in his eyes. “It was Joel.”
I stared at him blankly for a moment. “Who?”
Remus scowled and shook his head. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Sometimes I forget you don’t know the wolves of Silverstreak. Joel is a guard at the holding facility in Oklahoma. He keeps an eye on things since Bane and I are usually here in Texas.”
The first part of that caught me off-guard, and honestly…I wasn’t sure how to take that. On the one paw, I wanted to be offended that someone might mistake me as anything but a Longbow wolf, but on the other paw…some part of me was a bit pleased that I wasn’t viewed as some outsider. That I had proven to be useful enough, at least, that Remus just assumed I knew more than I did. It meant I was independent, someone who could be trusted. And that’s what I wanted, but…
I shook my head. Now wasnotthe time for the storm of emotion involved with my family. “Why was Joel calling you?” I asked, a weight already sinking into my gut. It certainly wasn’t anything good — not if Remus was looking like he was ready to commit murder with his gaze alone.
“Billy is dead.”
“What?” I sucked in a sharp breath. “He hadn’t even been there for twenty-four hours! What the fuck happened?”
Remus shrugged, somehow managing to look even more enraged than he did moments before. “Good question,” he ground out. “Joel returned for his shift this morning and found the two shifters on duty drugged. All the security cameras were turned off. Billy was dead inside the room he was being held in.”
Oh shit.
“Shit,” I said, my brain not providing anything helpful. “Drugged? Are you serious?”
Remus offered me an angry grimace. “It’s not as impossible as you might think,” he answered in a tone that said “ask me how I know.” I tucked that information away for later, when one of our only leads hadn’t just been murdered. “He got the local doctor out there, and the guards will recover, but Billy is most certainly deceased.” He shook his head and stood. “Excuse me. I need to call Bane and get him out there immediately.”
“Of course,” I replied, rubbing my face. Suddenly, research seemed futile. While Remus had a terse conversation with his beta, I stared at the back door. Iris had taken Bella outside to play after lunch. The little girl had been so well-behaved during the conference call, but we couldn’t expect her to amuse herself all morning and all afternoon. She was still a kid, after all. I wanted to tell Iris all this, to share my disbelief with her, but it could wait. Bella could have a few minutes of peace.
Remus came back to the screen, looking no less irritated than he had before. “Bane will be there to handle the rest of the investigation,” he muttered. “Joel will keep everything on lockdown until then. I think I’ll call Seff and see if he can recover anything useful from the security system. I rather doubt it, if whoever it was turned everything off, but Seff has surprised me before.”
I rubbed my face, my elbows on the table. “How many wolves have access to the holding facility?” I asked.
“There’s about twenty in rotation,” Remus grumbled. “But certainly not all on at once.”
“Remus, I hate to say it,” I muttered, still rubbing at my temples. “But I think there’s a traitor in your pack, and it’s clearly not Ryan Sanders.” Unless the man had developed the ability to work technology and murder people from beyond the grave, and as far as I knew, the dead generally stayed dead.
Remus snarled softly, and I could practically feel his anger even through the screen. “I can’t believe this,” he hissed, shaking his head. “Who the hell would betray their own pack? Their entire species?”
I shook my head, unable to imagine what it must feel like to know one of your own pack members was selling you out. “I don’t know,” I answered honestly, but Iris had mentioned there were several shifters working as guards in the government facility where she’d been held. Clearly, there was a type, no matter how much we didn’t want to believe in it. “But if it’s any consolation, it means we have one more lead.” It probably wasn’t much of one, given Billy had been a lead. “They might know where Ashley’s being held, too.”
Remus nodded again. “I need to take care of this,” he said, looking regretful. “I’ll call you back later, okay?”
“No problem,” I said, waving him off. “Iris and I will be here.”
Iris and Bellacame in a bit later. Bella had worn herself out playing in the Texas sun, and once Iris had tucked her in for her afternoon nap, she came back downstairs and sat heavily at the table. “Man, if I could have a quarter of the energy that kid has,” she said, smiling wryly. “I’d be unstoppable.”
I chuckled softly. “You’re already a force of nature,” I noted. “You might be too powerful if you had that much energy.”
Iris snorted, but she was smiling. After studying me for a moment, she cocked her head. “What’s wrong?”
Part of me wanted to ask how she knew, but the rest of me was too impatient to share what Remus had told me. “Billy was killed in Remus’ holding cell,” I muttered softly, not wanting Bella to overhear us even if she was in her room. I might have been the sort of kid who eavesdropped. Maybe. “Someone drugged the guards on duty and turned off the cameras.”
