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By the time Maxim and I make it around the table, she’s on the floor, wide-eyed and frothing at the mouth. Just a few seconds later, she’s gone still.
The guards burst through the doors not long after, but it’s too late.
Whatever poison Maggie took was swift and lethal.
God, the poor woman. She must not have felt she had any choice but to take her own life. She was in her eighties, but still…it’s a loss.
A pointless waste of life, and for what?
Power?
“I don’t understand.” I kneel on the floor beside the body, Maxim by my side as we wait for the enforcer detectives and the medics he called to arrive. “Why does everyone want power so damned much?”
“I don’t know,” he says softly. “I guess I want it because I feel I’m the least terrible choice? Though sometimes lately, I wonder…”
I glance up at him. “Of the up-and-coming generation of Alphas, you are absolutely the least terrible choice.” I’m about to take a risk and suggest he might be less terrible still with a trusted partner at his side, but before I can speak, the enforcers and medical staff arrive, filling the room.
Maxim and I move back and the medical team swoops in. Within just a few moments, a young woman with sad gray eyes looks up at us from beside Maggie and says what we already know, “It looks like poison. Something fast acting. There’s nothing we can do for her now.”
And nothing Maggie can do for Maxim or me.
She’s dead, and we’re left to decide where we go from here.
Or…Maxim’s left to decide.
He quickly makes it clear that he intends to keep calling the shots solo by ordering Hermione to have the tiger ready for questioning by the end of the day, ahead of schedule, and me escorted back to my rooms.
But at the last minute, just before my guards and I reach the door, Maxim barks from behind us, “Willow. Diana’s apartment. Ten p.m. I can meet you then if you’d like to know what we learn from the tiger and…if there’s any truth to what Maggie said about your sister.”
The tension in my chest easing, I nod. “Yes, please. Ten is fine. I’ll see you then.”
He nods and I turn to leave, silently plotting a little investigation of my own.
The kind a girl with a helpful pack gift can do with a little help from a trusted friend.
Chapter Twelve
Maxim
The tiger shifter is still groggy when Hermione and I arrive at his cell around seven that evening, but the caffeine in his IV is clearly doing its job.
He’s upright for the first time in days and has the focus and presence of mind to glare daggers into my forehead as I settle into a chair on the opposite side of the room from his simple bunk.
“There are two ways this can go,” I say, not wasting any time getting to the point.
I’ve already had a bomb go off in my territory and one of my highest clearance level wolves compromised. Maggie had access to just about every bit of intelligence in this tower and an unimpeachable record and character. If Kelley could turn her without anyone having a fucking clue, then the plan to take this tower—and whatever else Kelley has her eye on—is farther along than anyone assumed before today.
“Either you cooperate with the spell and I get the information I need,” I continue. “Or you fight the spell and take your chances with a heart attack.”
“Fuck you,” the tiger growls. “I’m not telling you shit, asshole.”
I smile. “All right. Sounds like you’re choosing door number two. But fair warning, if you do go into cardiac arrest, I’ll only call the doctor once, and I have two truth stones.”
His eyes flare slightly wider before narrowing again. “Might as well kill me now, then. Because you’re never letting me out of this cage. Not once I know you’re using fairy magic.”
“Not true,” I say, pulling the pouch Trix gave me from my coat pocket and opening the top. I let the stones inside spill out onto my palm. There are two blue and one a soft gray. “Two for truth and one for forgetting. Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll wipe your mind clean and set you free.”
“Free to betray my people,” he rumbles low in his throat. “Not a fucking chance.”
