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“Probably,” Justine agreed, a certain deadness to her tone.
I didn’t know of the times she talked about. I would have been already in the rancher’s care, not knowing what my mother had been or what I would eventually become. But I could see that there had been a blazing fire in Justine once upon a time. And she had extinguished it to save shifters on all sides of the pack wars.
That wouldn’t happen again. I owed Mallory, I was already completely in love with Mosa, and I had a deep respect for Justine’s sacrifices.
“So how do we use what we know?” I asked before our strategy meeting became mired in painful memories.
“Tell the bitch he’s going to have her killed,” Mosa snarled. “If we’re lucky, she’ll kill Henric, Mammad, and Pohl while we are still on the road. It will at least be one more thing to pre-occupy Henric as he tries to mount a response.”
“I could send her the recording,” Clover suggested.
Justine shook her head. “She might run without wreaking any havoc if we do. We can’t give her space or time to contemplate…to calculate. She needs to hear it at the same time others are hearing it, she needs to be surrounded by them…”
Closing her eyes, she drew a deep breath before continuing. “She needs to be humiliated in front of the leap. She needs to feel real fear from all the claws and fangs and guns around her, surrounded by those she has endangered with her recklessness. That’s when she will be most dangerous to Henric—if she lives that long.”
Clover nodded, her teeth ravaging her bottom lip as she rapidly flipped through screens on her phone. “There’s a security briefing at the ungodly hour of 0600 in the meeting hall, but getting everyone to hear it and not be preoccupied that their phone is suddenly playing…”
Too excited not to squeeze my hand in a death grip, Mosa piped up.
“There’s an intercom system for the meeting hall. And I know the passcode.”
CHAPTER33
MALLORY
With a little more thanan hour before Henric’s early morning meeting, I pushed my bike through the woods outside the leap’s compound and attempted to order my thoughts instead of feeding off the conflicting flurry of emotions battering my mate. She was about to make war on people she had sacrificed so much to protect. Even worse, the one person she wanted to protect most of all, our daughter, wasn’t safely locked away, but an active participant in our attack against that damn leopard Justine had been forced to marry to end a war.
“Have you lost your touch?” I challenged her in a voice meant to direct her thoughts away from where they had lingered for most of the ride to the leap’s territory. “The Justine Acevedo I knew wouldn’t be throwing her alpha energy around or her damn pheromones. You can still shoot, right?”
I felt the first tendril of an angry push of her energy before it snapped back as she fought to contain her emotions.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.”
“Asshole,” she whispered.
“You don’t want Mosa on this mission,” I continued, my tone gentling once more.
“Don’t want you here, either,” she whispered harshly. “It all could have ended if…if…”
“We had let you die? Is that the line of delusional bullshit running through your head?”
Her silence was an admission, but I couldn’t just stop.
“Hell, from everything Mosa’s told me about the video appearing in her work files, Henric knew exactly who I was and where I was. I bet, if Clover took the time to dig back through his communications—”
Fuck! Why hadn’t we done that! Stopping, I rested the bike against a massive oak, pulled out my phone and called the little she-wolf. Arms crossed and her gaze burning holes in my flesh, Justine listened as Clover answered and I started talking a hundred miles a minute.
“Can you get in this Mammad fucker’s voicemails?” I asked, a torrent of fresh adrenaline rushing through me after too many long days in a row. “Or get Garland on that? Henric has to have left Mammad other messages, sensitive ones that Mammad hasn’t deleted because lackeys like that always want an insurance policy.”
A littlea-ha!gasp left my mate.
She grabbed my phone and rattled off a list of names and approximate time periods for Clover to focus on. She also told Clover to scan for any voicemails or other sound recordings left on Kitka’s phone by Henric that referenced Mammad or a Xander, this time with a very specific time frame.
Before I could retrieve my phone, Clover hung up. Justine returned the device, and I resumed pushing my bike through the woods.
“Sorry about just grabbing the phone,” Justine said after a few minutes, her tone one I knew usually accompanied a slight blush to her dark cheeks. Not that I could see it at five in the morning with the sky blotted out by the trees. “I was just thinking of a few other events where Henric probably had a hand but kept it quiet. Xander was a male who…uhm…”
“Didn’t plan on raising any cubs,” I offered, the euphemism an old one in a society where birthrates were always a concern and marriages frequently arranged to ensure a specific ratio of alpha and beta shifters. “And I’m guessing Mammad also doesn’t plan to raise any.”
