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I turned to face him. Dagger was my beta and the only shifter who could bother me at any time of the day. The others had to make an appointment, or there would be hell to pay.
“I have bad news.”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Inigo is dead.”
“What?” I asked with a frown. “How?”
“I don’t know that yet. He probably stuck his nose in someone’s business where it didn’t belong, and it caught up with him. You know what he could be like. He was a loose cannon on a good day. You started working him out for a reason.”
“How did I not know about his death?”
“You know now,” Dagger said, sitting down on the rustic furniture in front of the fireplace that crackled happily.
I sipped my bourbon, pissed off. I knew everything that went on in my city. I had eyes and ears all over the place, and everyone reported back to me on the daily. If someone died and I didn’t know about it, that was bad news. That meant something slipped through. If something like that could slip through, a sly demon with murderous intentions could slip through, too.
“Where was he stationed?” I asked.
“On the outskirts,” Dagger said. “I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, but I don’t think this is personal.”
“Everything is personal,” I said, downing my drink.
Dagger didn’t answer me. I knew he didn’t agree, but he also knew better than to cross me.
Fuck, something had slipped through the cracks, and now one of pack members was dead. How had this happened?
I ran my city with a hell of a lot more control than most other alphas did, but that was my prerogative. The other alphas didn’t have a demon after them to end the bloodline, an axe hanging over their heads. No one would get it, but I didn’t expect them to.
They ran shit the way they liked it, and I did the same.
“Hey, bro,” Cal said, walking in, and I groaned. He dropped himself on the couch next to Dagger, throwing his arms out wide over the backrest, feet up on my coffee table.
He was a bear shifter like the late alpha had been, but he didn’t carry himself like one. Too pussy for that, in my opinion. He should have been a cat shifter instead… ahousecat.
“Get your feet off my furniture,” I growled.
“Ourfurniture,” he pointed out. “Dad left us both the place, remember?”
I grumbled. Hauser Holt, the previous alpha, wasn’t my blood father. He’d taken me in when my family—all lion shifters—had been brutally murdered when my real dad had fucked with the wrong people.
Coming after theirpound of fleshhad resulted in him and my mom being slaughtered brutally in front of me. If Hauser hadn’t come onto the scene when he had, I would have been dead, too. The alpha of Portland at the time had been kind enough to take me in, and now that he was dead, the mantle had passed to me.
Calhoun Holt was his son by blood, but the good-for-nothing piece-of-shit mooching asshole didn’t have what it took to be alpha. For that, he had to get off his ass and actually do something, and he preferred it when everyone else did the work and treated him like he was worth something.
Was he pissed off that he wasn’t alpha? Hell yeah.
Was he going to do something about it? Probably not—that would require effort, and until now, he hadn’t done much about his position other than whine about it like a little bitch from time to time.
Bless Hauser for making the right choice.
I’d had a very good relationship with him, and I hated that he was gone.
The arrangement Hauser had left behind was fine by me. As alpha, I could make sure that I was safe, and that the demon who’d killed my parents and wanted to finish the job wouldn’t get around to doing it.
“It’s the last day of the auction,” Cal said.
“What?” I looked at him, irritated.
