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Chapter 2
Greg shouldered the body and carried it into the pack living room. The huge space fell silent as he dumped it somewhat dramatically on the floor. ‘Greg!’ I chastened. ‘Not on the carpet! You know it’ll stain, and we don’t have Mrs Dawes to remove the marks!’
He grunted, obligingly lifted the body again and plonked it effortlessly on the table. I resisted the urge to point out that we ate there.
‘Someone killed Larsden,’ I said into the shocked silence. ‘Does anyone want to own up? We won’t be mad if you tell the truth,’ I said in a singsong voice, parroting a parenting line used the world over.
Nobody moved. There were no tears, wails or gnashing of teeth, even amongst the Council members. I looked at them sitting primly together, a united front against me. They were exchanging glances, but nobody looked guilty or upset.
I casually swept my gaze around the rest of the room. David and Daniella were playing cards. Ethan, Archie, Elena and Thea were sitting together, the latter nursing a cup of tea. The two women shrank a little under my gaze; Thea was the most shrinking violet I’d ever met, but Elena wasn’t and my radar beeped a little louder.
I turned to Andrew Kearns, the man who acted as spokesman for the Council. ‘What do you want to do with the body?’
‘I’ll make arrangements to return it to his pack,’ he said coolly.
‘Excellent. And which pack was that?’
‘Larsden was the second in the Cheshire pack.’
Fuck: the Cheshire pack was Jimmy Rain’s crew. The last time I’d encountered Rain, he’d been fighting my alpha; he had cheated and coated his claws with a foul poison to slowly kill Lord Samuel even as they fought. Rain had limped off the battlefield certain of his victory over Lord Samuel, but – at Lord Samuel’s behest – Esme had sliced his throat. And now his second had been killed on my watch.
Things weren’t about to get turbulent: they were about to get downright dicey.
Kearns approached me and dropped his voice so it wouldn’t be overheard. ‘This doesn’t look good, my Queen.’
No shit. I didn’t say that aloud, but it took an effort. Queens don’t say ‘shit’; they say ‘excrement’ or some such shit. My new title came with responsibility and a fancier vocabulary.
‘I advise that you find the killer and dispose of them swiftly,’ he continued. ‘We wouldn’t want anyone to perceive you as weak or incompetent. Another death on your lands? Well…’ Even an idiot couldn’t miss the threat in his words, and I was no idiot.
I gave him a tight smile, hoping he saw the edge in it. ‘How fickle would they be to bow to me one day and think me weak the next? Only a fool would be so unwise.’
‘Indeed,’ he murmured. ‘Indeed. But few have claimed that werewolves are wise. We are a hot-headed species where only the strong flourish.’
‘Luckily I am the strongest of all,’ I said with the calm confidence my mother had imbued in me from a very early age. ‘I will make my investigations and I will find the culprit.’
‘And then?’ Kearns pressed.
‘And then I will deal with them appropriately.’ I chose my words carefully in case it was Elena who had murdered Larsden. He’d been no saint and I wasn’t going to promise his killer’s death if the situation didn’t warrant it.
The motivation behind Larsden’s death was important. If, as Kearns was implying, someone had killed him specifically to make me look bad, then I needed to take a firm stance. Anyone who tried to weaken me was my enemy and my ex, James, had taught me a harsh lesson about leaving my enemies alive.
Finley, the former lone wolf turned chef, burst into the room carrying a gargantuan tray of cookies. Noah followed him, similarly laden. Finley didn’t bat an eyelid at a corpse on the table. ‘Can someone move that?’ he asked impatiently, pointing with his foot.
Kearns nodded at Harden, one of the other Councillors, and the two of them carried off the body, hopefully to a car so someone could get trucking. Delivery for Mr Rain. Yep, this was going to be absolutely fine.
Elena grabbed some disinfectant spray and hastily wiped down the table before the men deposited cookies. No one wanted a side of death germs with their snack. When the table was clean and the cookies were down, the horde descended – even the Devon pack started to come forward and take one each. They kept eyeing me, expecting me to lash out at any minute, and I guessed that dumping a dead body on the floor hadn’t helped their fear of me. I grimaced internally. That was my mistake; I wasn’t used to thinking about how my actions would affect such a traumatised pack.
If I could, I’d revive Beckett Frost so I could kill him all over again. I hated how his pack flinched when they accidentally made eye contact with me. It was going to take a long while to build a healthier alpha–pack relationship with them, but I was determined to do it.
With all the guests staying at the mansion, the place felt overly full. My battle core of thirteen weren’t willing to leave me with so many strangers in residence, so they were sleeping in guest quarters. The building was large, thank goodness, but even so we were flirting with full capacity.
I moved around the room casually asking questions, trying to determine if anyone had come in earlier dripping with blood, for example. It didn’t help that I didn’t have a time of death to work with. There were downsides to not calling in the Connection, the Other world’s version of the police. If I’d called in the body, no doubt Larsden would have been on his way to the pathologist by now and my friend, Inspector Steve Marley, would have been opening a file. Instead I just had me – but at least the Connection wasn’t breathing down my neck. I had enough to be getting on with without adding that complication.
The Werewolf Council had named me Queen, but apparently that was a nomination and not a done deal. I had to travel to something called ‘the seat of power’ and walk out with a crown. That didn’t sound like a hard task, yet the way the Council members exchanged awkward glances every time they said ‘seat of power’ made me feel they weren’t being fully open about the obstacles I would face.
Even with the fresh aroma of cookies permeating the room, everyone was tense. The members of the Devon pack cast nervous glances my way every time I moved.
They’ve been bitten too much, Esme muttered darkly.
