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Nolan leaned against my desk, arms crossed. “You mean because your sister despises my presence?”
“Don’t be so dramatic, I don’t despise you.” A half-truth. That wasn’t the word I usually used to describe how I felt about him.
“Oh?” His eyes shifted to look at me. “What would you call it, then?”
I wasn’t in a mood that this conversation would end well, my defiant impulses clawing to the surface. I stared down at my fingers, hoping for a brief moment to see my talons lengthen from my fingertips or feel the sharpened shift of my eyes glowing gold, but nothing; I stayed completely human.
I squashed down the impulse to jump at his challenge, biting back my fighting words. “Did you know that Ollie was my brother when you met me?” I asked, changing the subject.
“I guessed,” he sighed. “I knew he had a younger sister around your age, you both had a father who’s on the High Faction, and you have the same eye color and last name. Though technically it was never confirmed, I sort of just assumed.”
“And you never thought to mention it to me?” I flicked my hands out in a sarcastic gesture.
“I wanted to see if you could piece it together.” A wicked gleam shone in his dark green eyes. “I was also curious just how much Ollie had told you about me.”
“Not enough for me to know that his idiotic friend Carragan was my new boss!” I let the words fly, even though they weren’t completely true; when Ollie had talked about him in the past, the last word I had ever used to describe him was idiotic.
When Ollie would come and visit me on breaks from training, he always used to regale tales to me about all the mischievous things him and his friend Carragan had gotten into during their Omega training. I remembered laughing at it as a teen, thinking that my older brother was the coolest and that his friend sounded like the funniest person around…so much so that I had begged Ollie to bring him for a visit.
“Idiotic?” Nolan’s jaw dropped. “Half the ideas were your brother’s, and he’s been an Alpha for longer than I have!”
“Well, I see you two have really bonded over the past week and a half.” Ollie cleared his throat, taking a step forward as if to break us apart even though a desk separated us. “Come on, Kas, Nolan’s a good guy. I bet if you two stopped butting heads for a minute, you’d actually work well together.”
I gave him an unamused stare. “Oh, yeah?”
“You both have the weirdest ability to weave together clues.” Ollie let out a whistle. “Him and I worked a few smaller cases together before we were transferred. His instincts are sharp, just like yours.”
I let out a huffing breath through my nose, mostly because I had no other response. Ollie didn’t have to tell me that, because, unfortunately, I had already noticed. The more I read Elliot’s files and researched through Nolan’s notes and the theories he had written on the case board, the more I had to pretend I wasn’t impressed with how well he blended creativity with sharp instincts.
He was good. He was great, actually, and that fact made my throat tighten. He was a man who, under normal circumstances, I could admire. Yet admitting that felt like a betrayal against my own self, and after everything, I just couldn’t do it.
“Keep saying things like that,” Nolan smirked at my silence. “Maybe she’ll finally put away her claws now that she knows I’m old friends with you.”
“That certainly helped me last time,”I said sardonically to Ollie, his sapphire eyes widening, face paling, body shrinking away at the jab. My gut twisted a bit—I didn’t want him to feel guilty at all, it wasn’t his fault that my last Alpha had been best friends with Caleb.
And Caleb had chosen him over me.
My fingers tightened over my left bicep, burning against my palm at the reminder of what was branded there.
“I didn’t come in here just to bug you or to see Ollie again.” Nolan turned back to me, his spine straightening from a joking friend to an Alpha right before my eyes. “We got a call on the Comms.”
“And?”
His eyes darkened. “Elliot’s latest victim has been found.”
Chapter Fourteen
Our lectracycles blared through the streets as we raced into the town center of Kelna.
The hour-and-a-half journey seemed much longer as we made our way to the crime scene. Kelna was a quaint town right on the border of Adro Territory; five miles northeast and this case would have been investigated under a completely different Faction.
Crowds were already forming in the town center, people standing on the carved, circular water fountain that was the centerpiece of the area, encircled by colorful buildings with different business signs hanging above them. Chattering increased as we slowly wove our cycles closer to the building, people whispering behind their hands as if we couldn’t hear them even over the rumbling engines.
“The Guard…”
“I can’t believe they’re here!”
“Was someone attacked?”
