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Dad’s brows lift, but he nods. “Good. Don’t get caught. We can’t afford to have you killed or imprisoned by fairies.”
“Obviously, Dad.” I reach over, unlocking the door. “You should get back to bed. You look like shit.”
“Thanks,” he says. “Back at you. But there’s one more thing you should think about before we talk again tomorrow, son.”
“And what’s that?” I ask, already dreading another mind-bending game of “figure out how seriously to take this conspiracy theory.” I might be forced to take it seriously. Mumbo jumbo or not, if enough people believe it, that alone could put my pack in danger.
And Willow…
What to do with her?
Does she know anything about this? My gut says she doesn’t, but I mean to put it to the test. Tonight. There’s too much at stake to rely on gut feelings.
“Your brother’s pack gift,” Dad says, bringing me back into the room.
The spike of pain in my chest twists again.
Fuck.
The thought hadn’t even entered my mind, but…
I can’t believe—don’t want to believe—Bane would send someone to die so he could steal shit that basically belongs to him anyway. But my big brother does have a very unique gift, one that was hard for him to control when he was a kid more interested in making mischief than keeping his pack safe.
Bane can set things on fire with his mind, and he doesn’t even have to be in the same space to do it. He could have torched that kid from twenty blocks away, maybe farther if his gift has grown in power with age.
“He wouldn’t,” I say, but I can hear the doubt in my voice. “That kid couldn’t have been more than sixteen.”
My father sighs and I swear I can see the weight of all this settle around his frail shoulders, weighing him down even further. “I’ve learned never to underestimate what people will do for power, son. And neither should you.”
Before I can respond, a roar loud enough to wake the dead shakes the walls.
They literally shake, making the framed pictures rattle.
A second later, I’m out the door, running for the cells.
Chapter 19
Willow
They say timing is everything.
And whoever “they” are, they’re probably right.
If I’d shown up at the North Star enforcer office at any other moment than right when the tiger shifter woke up in one of the holding cells in back, roaring and bending bars with his bare hands and throwing the entire place into chaos, maybe things wouldn’t have played out the way they did.
Maybe I would have been stopped at the door and escorted back to my room before I could get a look inside.
Maybe someone would have been manning the desk with all the security monitors behind it and shut them down when they saw me coming.
Or maybe I would have locked eyes with Maxim across the room and walked right past the screens without seeing the woman frozen on the monitor at the upper left corner, too mesmerized by his sex god magnetism.
But none of those things happen.
Instead, I peek through the door just as everyone is rushing to the back to contain the prisoner. A man shouts, “The fucker’s trying to rip the place apart, we need all hands,” and the last man in the entryway vanishes.
I step inside unobserved, with Diana not far behind me.
I walk right by the front desk, around the partition separating the small lobby from a bullpen full of desks, and past the station with the security cameras.
