Page 22 of Pack Reject

He took his laptop to his bedroom frequently, but mine was never moved. Normally, it was hooked up to monitors, speakers, all sorts of backups. Dad was paranoid about saving information remotely, so we switched out the removable hard drive backups every other day.

But those were gone too. I slid open the topmost drawer, suspicion lighting up my nerves. The paper files where Dad kept all of our regular receipts after I’d scanned them in sat empty. Sure, he’d talked about getting rid of those files a few times, going fully paperless, but he’d been joking. Dad was old school and didn’t trust our information not to get hacked. I opened drawer after drawer, finding... nothing.

Had he done this in case one of the other packs got into the office to spy on our pack workings? Did he have a feeling the other Alphas were going to come looking around, once they saw the state of our unranked wolves? As they should.

Maybe he’d taken them to his bedroom. I jogged down the hallway, surprised to find that door unlocked. My instincts told me it was a trap. But it was also an opportunity.

I took a deep breath and stepped inside, searching through the room for either the laptops or the contents of the filing cabinets, and finally crossing to his closet. All of his clothes carried his stench—a combination of cigar smoke, sour laundry, and menthol. Holding my breath, I found the boxes our laptops had come in, and lifted them down.

They were empty, of course, but behind them was an old shoebox with my name written on it in Dad’s handwriting. Baby pictures? Dad wasn’t at all sentimental.

I opened it carefully, keeping an ear on the hallway outside. There were half a dozen photos of a baby I assumed was me in the hospital when I was born, and some of a French country home, but mostly the box was filled with receipts, handwritten ones. I went through them slowly. My French was rusty, but not completely forgotten.

There were a few from hospitals in France, some to an investigator, and a copy of a check made out to Genevieve Fleuron.

Ice surged in my veins. That was my old nanny’s name, the one who had cared for me from the day my parents died until my uncle’s car accident. Alpha Callaway had paid her ten thousand dollars for something, almost two decades before, the same month I came to Southern. I kept flipping through the receipts, my nose itching like it had done years ago, when I scented prey on a hunt.

I found nothing else.

But then, as I lifted the box back up to the shelf, I saw a scrap of paper stuck to the bottom of the cardboard. I pried it loose with one fingernail. It wasn’t a receipt, but a scrap of what looked like an invoice for thirty thousand dollars. There were rusty, old stains on it that could have been blood, though the scent had dissipated.

The feminine handwriting was hard to decipher, and the ink was faded, but I made out the phrase mate bond severance and the words Florida and Coven.

Witches?

At the bottom, it was dated twenty years ago, and signed by someone named V. Flock... beside another name I knew too well.

Alpha Calvin Callaway.

Holy shit. Suddenly, all the rumors I’d overheard around the older Enforcers, the whispers about Dad having a true mate who had died, made sense. Had he found his, and then killed her? Even attempting to sever a mate bond was utterly taboo. What had he done to her? And why?

I stuffed the paper into my back pocket and curled the one up from Genevieve in my fist. With anger coursing through my veins, I moved toward the door... but it was blocked. A wave of Alpha power, directed at me, weakened my knees.

“What the hell are you doing here, son? Stealing from me?” Death shone in his eyes. My death. I’d never seen that look directed at me, but I knew what it meant.

I faked shock. “Steal what, your socks? I was looking for my laptop.” His posture relaxed slightly until I said, “But I found a receipt.”

“What receipt?” His eyes flashed silver, like lightning.

“The one to my old nanny in France,” I ground out. I wouldn’t tell him about the invoice in my back pocket from the coven. “You paid her off, didn’t you? To send me here.”

He stayed still for a moment, then gave a short laugh. “Sure did. Those Council assholes wouldn’t foster their kids with me, so I bought myself a foster. Had a nice time with that nanny of yours a few years prior, and she owed me for not telling her mate about it.”

I was disgusted, but tried not to show it. Instead, I let rage color my voice. “Did you kill my uncle?”

Dad tried to look shocked, but I’d known him for too long. He was faking it. And the way he danced around the truth with his answer confirmed that. “Would I do a thing like that? That would be criminal.” He frowned at whatever emotions flickered on my face. “Don’t act like it ended up hurting you none. You were just one of many over there. You’re Alpha Heir here. That’s nothing to spit at.”

“Alpha Heir,” I said, emboldened by the memory of Flor’s courage. “But you keep me busy doing shit any Enforcer can do. I need to know what’s really happening in this pack if I’m going to run it someday.”

“That’s a big if,” Dad drawled, crossing his arms over his burly chest. “So that’s what you were doing, poking around the past few days on my laptop? Trying to dig up our dirt so you could take over?”

Ah. He’d confiscated the computers to see if I’d hidden anything on them. Probably given them to Trevor Blackside, who liked to tell everyone he was a hacker, though I wasn’t sure he knew anything about computers other than how to find his favorite porn sites. Of course, everything I’d found had been backed up in files only I had access to, and downloaded onto a tiny portable drive that the Council already had.

“Take over? Fuck, no. That’s the last thing I want.” Dad heard the truth in my words and relaxed a little. “I just wanted to know what the hell was our play. I wondered if some of the Enforcers were skimming. The monthly accounts weren’t adding up.”

“Now, son, those men earned that money,” he said, his arm coming around me. It took everything I had not to flinch. “We might not have followed standard protocol for disbursement, but that’s not so bad.” Technically, it was illegal, since it skewed the numbers we would report to the Council. He finished, “And I’ve been giving the men that extra for a year now. You just noticed?”

I grunted. I’d known for a while, and had been trying to get what information I could to the Council. But his Alpha commands had kept me from sharing. That is, until Finnick and Glen were close enough to hand the evidence to. “Guess I’m not as observant as I should be.”

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