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Chapter 107
Killian
It wasn’t a normal fire,” Lucas whispered, his voice hollow. The minute I’d left the food mart, I called Declan. Together, we checked in on my brothers and got all of them to my house. Roan and Cade joined us, taking up a silent spot in the kitchen. Mom came, mostly because Lucas was a wreck. The kid smelled like smoke and looked more broken than I’d ever seen him. His voice cracked as he said, “I could hear the kids screaming.”
The Ingram’s house had been set on fire late in the night. Both parents, their grandma, and three kids under twelve had been trapped inside. We all felt their loss deeply. Their family had been one of the first in the pack. They went back generations with our family.
“We couldn’t do a fucking thing,” he continued. Mom sat next to him, rubbing his back in an attempt to comfort him. I knew enough to know none of it would fucking matter. The kid would be haunted for life. Some things just stuck with you forever. “The windows wouldn’t break, the doors wouldn’t open, and it was like the water didn’t even touch the flames. Not until…”
He didn’t have to fucking say it. I turned away, running a hand over my face as rage surged inside me. This had to fucking end.
“What do we do?” Finn asked quietly. The poor kid looked as fucking lost as I felt.
“We have to…” I faltered. What the hell were we supposed to do? What could we do? Nowhere was safe. “We need to evacuate the pack.”
“That’s over half the town,” Sam pointed out. “Cedar Harbor can’t run without us here.”
“They’re not fucking safe here!”
“And it’ll financially destroy the entire town,” Declan cut in. “There’s nothing for anyone to fall back on. Most won’t go. They’d rather face the potential of being killed than completely dismantle the entire security of their family.”
“What if I—”
“You can’t single-handedly fund an entire town, honey,” he said over Raven. “We don’t even know how long this is going to last.”
“Not long,” I muttered. How they looked at me only made my stomach turn worse. “She has a fucking plan. I don’t know what that is, but she’s planning something. This is just the beginning.”
“We need to kill her,” Genevieve said. I turned and so did everyone in the room. There wasn’t an ounce of hesitation on my sweet wife’s face after saying those words. Instead, she shrugged. “I don’t like it, but what other option do we have? She’s systematically executing our pack. She won’t stop until we’re all gone. Even the most cautious predator will kill another predator if it’s a threat.”
“But we don’t know a thing about her,” Cade commented from his spot on the kitchen counter. “You can’t do shit if you don’t know shit. So, the question becomes, how do we figure out shit?”
“Think outside the box,” Nolan replied. “Don’t ask me what that means, but I just know that what we’re doing isn’t working. We can’t conceivably evacuate half the town or even the whole thing. That’d do more harm than good.”
I paced, my mind racing nearly as fast as my fucking heart. This wasn’t the time to stall on how the fuck to do this. We needed all the information we could get and fast.
“Fuck.” I knew who I needed to call. I asked Genevieve, “Can I use your computer?”
“Okay.” She nodded and hurried upstairs.
It took twenty minutes of finessing to get situated with the laptop and the flimsy file I had put together on Sadie. It took another five minutes to have my family shut the fuck up. And then, it took me ten minutes to remember my fucking password for the damn video chat site I used.
After that, I was about ready to start throwing shit, considering it took another ten minutes to get my contact to answer. I just wasn’t expecting him to answer in a fucking Wookie costume.
“Agent Crawford,” I greeted with a grin. “Did I interrupt something?”
“It’s Star Wars day,” Agent Grant Crawford informed me seriously as he pulled off the fuzzy hood. “Lizzie’s never seen them. She’s finally showing interest, so we’re making a whole day of it. I even made snacks.”
“Did making them involve buying them premade from the store?” I teased.
“Don’t you tell my daughter that,” he warned, but that giant ass smile on his face didn’t match his threat.
“How is my favorite muffin thief?” I asked.
“She’s doing okay,” Grant replied honestly. Grant and I met when his daughter had been taken and I inserted myself into the case. He thought his daughter had been taken by a serial killer. She had, but that serial killer was also a fucking troll with a goddamn attitude problem. Despite how many times Grant tried to get rid of me, I stuck around. In the end, we rescued Lizzie, but neither of them were quite the same. Their world wouldn’t be after what they saw and learned. “I pulled her from school, and my mom moved in to help homeschool her. She’s not sleeping well. We have to have every light on in the house for her to be able to sleep a few hours. The night terrors are bad, and she’s anxious all the time. Her doctor gave her a low dose anti-anxiety to try taking some of the edge off.”
“Did you look into that therapist I recommended?”
“Yeah, Isla’s been great.” He nodded. After meeting Isla, I made sure to give her Grant’s information. Lizzie needed someone to talk to who knew how to handle trauma and who understood our world. “Lizzie likes her, so I think it’ll be good. I don’t know what you did or said, but Isla told me all her fees are waived, so thank you.”
