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He grunts, and the sound could mean anything from your boss’s right in grounding you to good honey beer.
We sit in silence. I don’t do silence. Some marshals find it effective in getting people to talk. But Stone’s not a person—he’s a bear, and bears are stubborn. He stares at the picture of Sadie’s family home as if it holds the key to unlocking this case and I’ve missed it.
“Any great insights?” I ask. It’s a dick question, but I’ve had a rough couple of days when all I wanted was to get back to where Sadie and I left off in her garden.
“They destroyed her garden?” he asks, thumping his thick fingers against a photo that shows her plants ripped out, the neat rows obliterated.
“Yeah.”
“Whose blood is that staining what’s left of it?”
The memory of all that blood turns my stomach sour. “My brother’s. Possibly some of Sadie’s family or even the killers since there was a lot of blood. The human police refused to test it since my brother Lowell was the most obvious suspect.”
“What about the marshals?”
“Not their jurisdiction with one dead shifter and four dead humans. Plus Sadie missing from the scene. The press turned the story into a morbid sideshow, and the marshals didn’t want any part in it.”
He shoots me a grumpy look. “And you stayed with the marshals despite how they handled your brother’s case?”
“They’re my best shot at finding the real killers. I worked night and day to solve every case they gave me until they trusted me with the shifter murders.”
“Fat lot of good that’s done you. You have a Huntress watching the cabin to make sure the marshals’ pet doesn’t go anywhere, and you’re no closer to finding out the truth about your brother’s death. Or my mate’s. The cub our pack lost. Or the dozens of other dead shifters.”
Screw this guy. “You don’t know me or the work I’ve done. I’ve helped a lot of people and stopped several other deaths over the years. Not everything’s tied up in this case.”
“But it is for your mate. You lost your brother. She lost everything.”
“I know that. I was there.”
“You’re doing a really shitty job of showing that you remember what your mate went through.”
“Our mating bond’s not completed.”
“And who’s fault is that?” He takes another sip of the beer I bought as if he’s not lobbing verbal grenades.
“She didn’t want me.” I hate sounding whiny. Even more, I hate feeling this fucking pathetic.
“You haven’t given her a reason to say yes to your mating bond. She’s a woman whose life was stolen, whose family was brutally murdered, who took a chance on coming here for revenge, who got tossed into a strange world that has become even stranger. Then you come along after years and talk about being mates when you hadn’t done anything to seal the bond in the years you had to have known.”
“She was a kid.” I’m practically shouting to my shifter hearing.
“And then she wasn’t. Yet you didn’t do anything. So why should she commit to mate with someone who’s maybe half in, someone who puts the marshals over her, someone who’ll take off into a burning building.”
“You helped. So did the mountain lion. Pot, kettle.”
He shrugs. “We have completed mating bonds, and we think before we go in. I’m not saying you chose wrong when it saved those kids, but you didn’t stop to let Sadie in on the choice. You just took off.”
“Because she would’ve stopped me. She tried.”
“You have to act like a mate if you want to keep her.”
“And let those kids die?”
He shakes his head but doesn’t bother answering my question. “Where’d you go after the fire? When she was upset? We took our mates home to comfort them. What about you?”
Unease creeps through along my spine, settling in my gut like a stone. “Captain Zaleski needed me.”
“So did your mate.”
