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Kai raised a brow as she rubbed at her cheek as if trying to wipe the color away. This was the most flustered she’d been all morning.
“She’s doing as well as she can, but Ameera won’t ask for help or say anything even if you can clearly see it, and I try not to push her.” Something struck Kai then, remembering how often Ameera had found herself at the sanctuary as they’d grown. Sometimes, they’d thought she’d been dramatic with all the mending she needed—the boys may have been rough with her in sparring, but she was just as tough. “You two were close, weren’t you? I’d imagine after all the time she’d spent here.”
A smile, a frown, and another tighter smile crossed Olyvia’s face before she waved a hand. “Yeah, but it’s been a while. We haven’t really spoken since she became a warrior.”
“Warrior general now,” Kai said, pride infusing his voice. It could have been a little suggestion as if to pitch her to the healer. Ameera may have killed him for it, not being the biggest fan ofpeopleherself, but he offered, “You should reach out to her.”
Olyvia had since risen and moved to begin cleaning a spot on the table that was already tidy. “I’m sure she’s busy. I’ve heard she’s been shadowing your council.”
Goddess, word spreads fast around here.
Continuing to tout his friend, Kai said, “I want her to be my beta.”
Olyvia halted and turned, her wide eyes blinking. “That’s…what an honor.”
Kai shrugged. “She deserves it.”
Something flashed in the healer’s eyes before they guttered, and without the bane in his system yet, Kai could sense pride melded with something like remorse. “She does.”
CHAPTER20
KAI
The next day, Kai was grateful for the bane flowing through his system because the battling personalities within the council chamber may have sent him spiraling, weaseling into minds, and ripping away words for some peace and silence to think. They needed to determine what would happen next.
The news of Eli’s death had ripped through the continent with a ferocity that would’ve impressed Kai if it hadn’t caused him such a migraine. Within a couple of days, since they’d discovered his body, the story had made it to the leader of every kingdom and had even littered the newspapers of their people in some packs.
A warrior was dead in Deimos.Murdered. And not just any warrior—ageneralhere to protect them from the rogues when “they couldn’t protect themselves”. Eli was a hero to some, a martyr.
In reality, he was an unlucky bastard, and Kai appreciated whatever the general had been hoping to do in going against Cassius’s wishes to find Callan, despite any ill will he’d had towards either of them in the past. He’d ensured his body, cooling beneath the hall, had been cleaned, prepared, and patched up with respect for his beta father’s retrieval.
But Eli wasn’t the only elite fighter who’d been dealt a poor fate on Deimos’s grounds…another was missing. And that news, the greatest source of this headache, had been held onto until now. He should’ve suspected, with Cassius’s conniving ass being involved, that there was a cover-up happening, or at least that the Alpha was biding his time to hit with a hard blow with the second warrior’s fate.
It was all so perfectly calculated—so fucking infuriatingly, perfectly calculated—Kai almost paused to admire how much of a prick the Alpha was.He had half a mind to storm the Imperial Hall and rip through his mind to learn the truth about it all—the barest, rawest truths—but if Cassius did knoweverything, then he’d be prepared for Kai, and Kai would just end up with a blade in his chest, his family watching and not far behind.
He glanced to his right, where Isla sat, from where he sat on the council room’s dais, behind a crescent-shaped desk, watching Sol, as their Head of Laws and Afalin, and their Head of Pack Relations battle about their scouts. Though she looked stunning, every bit the queen in the room with her subtle adornment and navy dress that draped over her body perfectly, her stare was vacant, lost.
She was fighting so hard to keep herself together, but each reality-sinking day, since they’d pulled Eli from the water, had taken its toll. He could see it, feel it. She barely spoke. Wouldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. And she was always…cold.Physicallycold, particularly when her wolf rose to the surface. That was something to address another day with Olyvia.
Isla put on a brave face in front of others, in front of him, but he knew her. He’d seen and loved that fire in her eyes too much not to notice it guttering, and it terrified him. She’d told him in fragments about the girl she’d been before. How deep into a darkness she’d fallen. He’d be damned if he let her become another in his long line of ghosts.
Shifting his attention to his right, he looked at Ameera. Though she hadn’t formally been announced as the beta yet and technically still hadn’t accepted, Kai had asked her to take this seat today.
In his council room, he made the rules.Anyone who opposed may find themselves under the same scrutiny and dealt the same fate as the four council members Kai had stripped of their positions after the challenge, those who seemed too loyal to his father’s ways and were replaced with others of his choosing.
“Our scouts did not return,” Reuben, the High Commander of the Guard, said. “With all that’s occurring now, sending in any more would be inadvisable. We’ve caught two more of Locke’s spies in rogue lands. Neither talked, despite our best efforts, before they were discarded.”
“What do you do with the bodies?” Nia, his new Head of Coin, asked.
“Burning them makes it easier to pin on rogues,” Reuben answered.
“Why don’t you just bring them in? Give them aproper interrogationhere.”
“Because that workedsowell with those rogues,” Afalin mused.
They hadn’t gleaned much at all from the rogues, but now that Kai knew of the witch, he wondered how much she and her abilities with memories and enchantments came into play with how little information they possessed.
“Rogues are a different breed,” Reuben said. “They have no one to answer to. They just want chaos and destruction. It’s a hive mentality.”
