The Alliance,I suddenly remembered. Chael told me about the Alliance and the members’ names on the council.
My last thought before falling into darkness was that I needed to tell Chael who was behind everything.
CHAPTER28
Chael
Before getting out of my truck, I reached for my phone to see if Reese had responded to my last text. She had called and sent me a text a few hours earlier but then said she would talk to me about whatever was on her mind once I got back home. But as I stared at the phone in my hand, a wave of guilt and fear moved through me.
I knew what the guilt was about. I’d lied to Reese and most of my pack. I wasn’t in Arizona. Initially, I intended to go to Arizona to finally try to get some answers regarding the situation with my foreman out there. But then, a phone call from my cousins the night before diverted my attention.
That was how I ended up on a long dirt road in a Colorado forest about an hour north of my cousins’ pack.
The call had come from Ronan. Not only had Montgomery started to remember parts of his kidnapping but also, someone from their pack had found a couple of dead bodies nearby. Montgomery recognized the scent from one of the bodies as Pines.
I climbed out of my truck, directly behind Ronan’s vehicle. Chance approached from behind as I’d had him come with me on this trip.
Eager desire to find out what the hell happened to Montgomery and if the body they smelled out here in the middle of nowhere truly was Pines. If that was the case, many other questions flooded my mind. Montgomery’s memories might be the key to answering at least some of them. The nagging feeling that whoever was behind all of this was tied to the Alliance.
I just hadn’t been able to put my finger on it yet.
In the two months since I stopped paying my pack taxes to the Alliance, I’d received countless calls and summons to get to their headquarters. I ignored them all. I couldn’t figure out why or who within the Alliance had it out for my pack and me. Sure, some members still held my father and past Nightwolf generations against us for crimes committed, but we’d been peaceful for fifty years. And prosperous enough to provide a considerable amount of money to the Alliance through taxes.
That should’ve been incentive enough to keep us in their good graces.
I pushed all those queries aside and focused on the men who stood before me. Seeing Ronan, Montgomery, and Noah standing side by side, it struck me how much they looked alike. They weren’t identical triplets, but there was no denying that the men were related.
I should’ve picked up on it sooner. That might have saved Montgomery from going through whatever happened to him in Pines’s basement.
“One of our pack was out here for a run yesterday,” Ronan started after we all greeted one another. “He found an abandoned cabin. About two miles away from here.”
I sniffed at the air. The unmistakable scent of decaying flesh was in the air. I looked over at my brother and could tell by the look on his face that he smelled it.
“Yeah, smelled it as soon as we got out here,” Noah added.
“That son of a bitch,” Montgomery commented, his voice tight with anger. “I should’ve fucking murdered him in that basement.” I was wrong. That wasn’t anger in his voice. It was barely restrained rage.
“It’s best if we shift to go out there,” Ronan explained. “If anyone sees us, they won’t connect us to the bodies.”
The five of us quickly shifted into our wolves. The lining of trees and forest that surrounded much of the mountain’s base hid us from the view of others. The odor of dead flesh grew stronger with each step. I followed my cousins but also sniffed at the ground, trying to detect any other scents that could tell us what happened.
We soon came upon a dilapidated structure a few yards off the main trail. The scent was undeniable then. Even a human was likely to have smelled the corpses this building held.
I followed closely behind Ronan as he trailed up the wooden porch stairs and through the front door that barely hung on to the doorframe. He jutted his snout toward the room’s far corner. The two decaying bodies lay on top of a dark-blue tarp.
The potent smell of death singed my nose fur as I inhaled. A growl rose in my throat when I recognized the scent of Richard, my foreman from Arizona. He’d been missing for weeks since I got that call from my Arizona beta, telling me that someone had destroyed our site.
Pines’s body didn’t display any evident signs of the cause of death. But Richard’s cause of death was apparent. He had a massive hole in his shirt that allowed me to see the gaping wound at the center of his chest. The burn marks around the wound told me that the weapon that caused it was likely silver. He looked like he’d put up a good fight before he died.
“Richard,”Chance said through our ability to speak without words. “Looks like he’s been out here longer.”
“Whoever Pines was working with probably tried to take Richard to use him the same way they did Montgomery,”I added.
Chance’s wolf snorted in agreement.
Before analyzing more of the scene, growling sounded behind me. I looked over my shoulder to see Montgomery, in his gray-and-white wolf, his eyes glowing as he snarled at the sight of the two bodies. He appeared ready to pounce, but there wasn’t anything to attack.
Ronan made a sound at the back of his throat, somehow snapping Montgomery out of his daze. He gave the scene one final snarling glare before exiting the cabin.
