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“Then I guess we go back.” She shrugged. “If it’s our best chance to finish the job your dad started.”
“I believe it is.” I kept my voice calm but confident. I couldn’t afford to waver.
“Okay.” She swallowed, her unease still obvious. “Let’s go then.”
“You’re ready?”
She nodded but took a long look around the condo, smoothing her hand over the counter as though she wouldn’t see any of it again. “We should just get it over with so we can come back.”
“Right.” I walked to the front door and opened it. “I just need to go and see if my coat was brought to Patrick’s condo. I’ll be right back. Then we can head out. I won’t be long, okay?” Certainly not long enough for Charmaine to change her mind.
Hopefully not long enough for me to change mine. Her words about using the resources surrounding us here had been heard, but…
But.
There was still that part of me that wanted to complete the work my dad had started all on my own. I wanted to make him proud, even now.
Even if that meant diving headfirst back into danger.
I started to close Charmaine’s door behind me.
“Hello, Jo. Going somewhere?”
I turned abruptly to find Girard and Brody approaching me. I started to shake my head, an easy half-truth already on the tip of my tongue.
Girard laughed. “We have orders, and you’re not to go anywhere without your security team.” He stepped in front of me and pushed the door to the condo open again. “Although we did wonder how long it would take you to do something stupid. Like try to retrieve Wes’s phone on your own.”
“We didn’t have to wait very long at all, did we?” Brody laughed as he slid a laptop out from where he’d been carrying it under his arm.
Girard reached into his pocket, then offered me Wes’s phone. “You don’t have to go anywhere at all, though. We’re already way ahead of you.”
My emotions caught between irritation and relief. I hadn’t wanted to lead Charmaine back into a dangerous situation. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t have, or that we wouldn’t have been all right and made it back safe.
“And if you want to see everything, we should make ourselves comfortable for a while.” Brody tapped the laptop lightly and took a seat at the dark wood dining table on the other side of the room from the kitchen.
After a moment, Charmaine joined him, and they both looked at me expectantly.
30
PATRICK
Ilooked at Davina and Jackson from across my desk. Well, Jackson wasn’t sitting nearby. He rarely did. He leaned against the bookcase instead, like he was inanimate as well.
“Sounds pretty boring,” he said. “Philanthropy over cutthroat takeovers? Are you sure about this?”
I nodded. “Yeah. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now." Had they really forgotten the last time I tried to have this discussion with them? Perhaps they’d believed I wasn’t serious. “As I’ve talked to you about before, when I look around Carwyn City, it makes me realize that there’s a lot of good we can do here outside of our pack. Wolf shifters don’t start and end with the Silver Claws.”
Davina snorted. “Other packs aren’t your responsibility, though. Their own alphas could do exactly what you do. Or the shifters could join us.”
I inclined my head. “They could,” I conceded. “And certainly I hope that some will. But greater pack numbers also mean more people to police. Not just care and provide for. I think we can provide food, housing, schooling…and not be responsible for keeping harmony or doling out justice all the time.”
Davina shook her head, but it was Jackson who spoke. “I don’t know, man. You’ve put in a lot of work to get to this point, right? The work that Apex does funds everything you do for Silver Claw. And what about Gold Moon? I thought we were going after that one next. There’s still something wrong there.” He changed his position and pushed his hand through his hair.
“Yeah, that’s definitely a situation that still isn’t resolved.” I picked up a pen from where it was lying on my desk and depressed the end a couple of times, watching the nib appear and disappear. “But it isn’t lost on me that I could be in the exact same situation that Jo’s in right now, facing attacks and threats on my life because of what Apex does.”
Davina snorted again but didn’t meet my eyes. “And why do you think that?”
“I’m serious. What Jo’s doing — investigating, trying to get to the bottom of corruption in a company — it’s all that we do. It’s all her father did, too, and he’s dead now.”
