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He called Veronica next.
“I am almost home,” he told her. “We’re coming in hot. I need you to be there. I need your help with something, Ronnie.”
“I will be there when you get there,” Veronica answered. “Tell me what you need from me now?”
“I need you to call the enforcers,” he told Ronnie flatly and firmly. “I will call a few before I get there. But I need you to call as many as you can think of.”
“This is serious. I feel it through the phone, between your words,” Veronica told him. “What’s going on? Is Sara okay?”
“I am not going to talk about it until I can talk to my enforcers. And you are going to help me rally them. I will call Carlos. There is a certain … population of my enforcers I want you to focus on. Call them first.”
“Okay. Tell me more about them,” Veronica answered. Her voice was almost somber. Xavier could tell she was trying to sound that way so he could rest assured she was being serious.
“As I said, I’ll call Carlos. He and some of the pack helped me, but we need to call a meeting at the house. There’s pack business that needs to be dealt with. I want you to call the enforcers who are most … loose. Hot-headed. Prone to violence. Hair-trigger temperament. Call the most merciless and violent enforcers you know.”
Veronica was silent for a minute. “On it.”
The SUV pulled up the drive and parked. “I’m hanging up now, Ronnie,” he told Veronica.
Holy hell, it felt wonderful to carry Sara into the house and to her room. Holding her in his arms was a mixed blessing. The task momentarily distracted him from his rage and then exacerbated it more.
“Where are you going?” Sara asked after he set her on the bed.
“Nowhere, babe,” he answered. This was the truth too. “I will be right on the other side of this wall.”
“The whole drive back, you were on the phone.”
“You know why,” he told her. “Because of what happened, and I can’t even say what happened, isn’t going to happen again. There need to be consequences for the responsible parties.”
“You are putting things gently,” she told him.
“I promise I will be on the other side of this wall. I have a meeting with my enforcers. Ronnie will be here if she’s not already. Annie is on the way.”
Xavier leaned over and kissed Sara, and hugged her. This made his blood boil even hotter. Images of the crash, the tree, the kidnapping, the rescue. He was bursting at the seams. It was hard just to focus. The wolf inside was snarling, pacing, ready to come out. Nothing would inspire his wolf to quietly accept the bloodlust and bloodletting of those who ran him into that tree and subsequently abducted his Sara and the baby in her belly.
The meeting of enforcers gathered quickly. Veronica and Carlos were a big help. Enforcers guarded all the doors. The healer would soon be here. It was time to start.
Xavier’s challenge would be channeling his personal venom into a workable and successful plan for identifying who ran him into a tree. Why had the perpetrators chosen to do that? Where were these scums of the Earth right now, and how could he track them?
“First, thank you for coming on such short notice,” he told those gathered for the meeting. There were nods and murmurs of encouragement. He inhaled sharply before he continued speaking. “I need your help.”
Xavier waited a moment after saying this. This gave the room a buffer of silence, so pack members could settle in and really be present.
“The good news is, I got to see a picture of our new arrival, who will be here in a few months. I got to hear the heart beating. This was very surreal. The bad news is that we were enjoying our drive home, and somebody ran me off the road into a tree. Deliberately.”
Xavier let another moment of silence settle in with the group. He scented the tempers rising.
“Being left unconscious at the steering wheel, or maybe left for dead, my attackers went after their real target. What they were really after. Our Sara and the baby in her belly. The baby whose heartbeat was strong and so real.”
Two of the enforcers stood and moved closer. Xavier let this movement settle before continuing.
“Here are the brass tacks,” Xavier continued. “Who did this? Why’d they do this? More specifically, why’d they target Sara and my baby? And the most important question is, where are they now?”
Hands went up among the enforcers. Xavier pointed at a pack member to let them know to ask their question.
“These were shifters that did this?”
“Oh. I am certain. While rescuing Sara, a shifter was killed whom I am pretty sure was someone’s alpha. Others were also put down. I want them all dead.”
