Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71314 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71314 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
I know exactly where to go.
And I know just what to do.
CHAPTER 7
Gray
I tracked my mate after finding her missing from my place. I just didn’t track her fast enough.
It was one thing to know where Callie was when she had a routine and a pattern that almost never shifted. Now she’s become almost entirely erratic, absolutely unpredictable.
Now I am looking at a warehouse door that looks like it’s been peeled open like a tin can, and a bloody scene that is yet to be remediated. One of the New York wolves is dead. Very dead. The others are shaken in a way that is quite amusing in a dark sort of way. We are predators. We are not used to prey fighting back. We are certainly not used to prey winning.
“My mate did this?”
“Your little fucking human monster did this,” Karl snorts, laughing. Of course he is here with me. I didn’t have time to lose him while looking for her anyway, and catching up with her was more important than getting rid of him.
“She shot Adam.” That piece of information is volunteered by the wolf responsible for the underground hunters. He’s not quite an alpha, but he has the blood. Just like I do. Just like Karl does. There are too many potential alphas here. It feels crowded.
“No. I don’t believe it. She didn’t shoot anybody,” I say. “She’s a researcher. She looks up information on the internet. She goes to the library and checks out old newspapers. Sometimes she goes for a drive and asks people questions. She’s a quiet, mousy little…”
Even as I’m talking I know I’m wrong. She’s not quiet or mousy. She uses that as her facade, but underneath it all she is focused in a way even our best hunters often are not. I am deliberately forgetting the way she pulled a gun on me, and seemed quite intent on using it.
“She took two other humans with her. That means instead of having one loose end you refused to tie up, we now have three.” Karl claps my back hard. “Good work, little brother. The New York alpha will be thrilled, I’m sure. I know Dad will be thrilled.”
“Fuck off, Karl,” I growl. “There were a lot of mistakes made along the way in order for this to happen, and you know it.”
“You were the first domino to fall.”
“She was going to give up looking for us,” I say. “And we kill as a last resort only. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Wrong, little brother. You kill as a last resort only.”
I turn to my idiot brother, who does not know he is an idiot, as idiots often don’t. I need to ensure that he actually understands what is at stake here, and what is going to happen if he does the very stupid thing I know he wants to do. When we were pups, Karl would break my toys as soon as he realized that I liked them. Callie could end up being another toy to break in the eyes of my fraternal bully if I don’t ram the facts through his thick skull.
“She’s the heiress to a major fortune. If she dies there will be heat the likes of which none of us have ever seen. Do you realize that? She’s young, she’s beautiful. She has a social media account where she only ever posted one picture of a wolf in Yellowstone, and that has over three million followers. Trust me, if she dies, every journalist from here to the West Coast will be on the story. There will be more true crime podcasts than you can believe, and they’ll all get wind of her obsession with werewolves. And boom, instantly, we have hundreds of people seriously looking. She cannot die. She is not expendable.”
“Now that’s actually a good argument,” he says. “Pity it took you so long to make it.”
“I need to find my mate. Don’t talk to me again, Karl, and stay the fuck out of my way.”
“Feisty,” he laughs.
I leave the warehouse alone, and angry.
This should never have happened. Callie should never have been put in this position. I should have left before she found me. But I didn’t. I stayed even though the time to go had long come and go. Then I let her find me. I knew there would be some kind of consequence for staying. Fuck.
“Fuck.”
I hit the steering wheel of my van with the palm of my hand and curse. This is getting messy, and it is all my fault.
I cannot imagine the fear Calista must have felt when she was taken from my place, or what she was going through when she was forced to shoot someone. She’s a lovely girl, not the type to go around shooting the very species she has been searching for, for years.