“Thinking Chael Nightwolf answers to anyone.” I wiped my eyes for emphasis. “We go along with the Alliance because it benefits my pack to work with you all. Up until the point it doesn’t….” I trailed off, letting my comment hang in the air.
My father might be gone but I was still his son and he taught me that Nightwolves didn’t bow to anyone.
Rufus frowned, and a few other shifters squawked their disagreement, but I didn’t budge. The Alliance was helpful and, at one point in history, had been necessary to bring peace among all of the different types of shifters. But with them constantly throwing my father’s failures in my face and bringing up my pack’s past, I was just about over their nonsense.
“What were you doing on that human’s property?” Lupine snarled.
“Where did you get the video?” I had questions of my own.
“It was sent to us,” Rufus answered.
“Anonymously?” My brows dipped in curiosity. I glanced over at Chance, who was studying each member of the Alliance carefully. Though his expression remained impassive, I knew his mind was working overtime.
Chance wasn’t the type to reveal that he knew anything until he wanted you to know.
“That’s for us to know,” Lupine answered. He did most of the talking since he was addressing us wolf shifters. Most of the other shifters remained silent or nodded in agreement with Lupine. The reverse would be true if a different group of shifters stood in my place.
“You still haven’t answered why you were there in the first place?”
“We needed to run,” I lied.
Lupine frowned, obviously not believing me. “What are you still doing in Texas anyway? Don’t you have work to take care of?”
I swallowed down my anger. As much as I hated it, Lupine was correct. I hadn’t been home to New Mexico in weeks, and I had work to take care of in other parts of the West where my pack resided.
But I couldn’t leave my mate. Not after finally finding her and then learning that she was possibly entering into a dangerous situation with this nursing home case. My hands were tied from all angles.
“Is this about those cousins of yours?”
I stiffened at the mention of my distant cousins. The Alliance knew about my relationship with the Townsends, and while they didn’t entirely approve, they didn’t disturb me about it as long as the Townsends kept quiet. That had never been a problem.
“This has nothing to do with them.” The Alliance would go after them if they believed my cousins were a threat to the secrecy of our world.
“We will keep our eye on you, Chael,” Lupine warned. “That human has nothing at all to do with our world and if we—”
“Are you certain of that?” I interrupted.
His gaze shifted to the others in the room and then back to me. He appeared more doubtful, but the expression soon passed. “We have checked him out, and he has nothing to do with us.”
“Then how would someone, obviously with access to that security footage, send it to the Alliance?”
My anger threatened to bubble up again when he appeared stumped.
“We’re looking into what this doctor may or may not know about us,” Rufus answered. “But so far, we know that he doesn’t know much.”
“Are you sure about that?”
His cheeks puffed out, and a few of the other Alliance members shifted in their chairs, throwing looks between one another.
“Why would you suspect he knows about our world?”
I shrugged. “It should be obvious.” My hands squeezed into fists at my side as I refrained from telling them all what I thought about them. They all had sat in here on their proverbial thrones, unaware of what took place outside of these walls. They behaved as if they knew, but they were disassociated from pack life for so long they had no idea. Their senses were dull.
“That doctor’s home is located in Central Texas. Wolves do not exist in Texas, not freely, they don’t,” I amended.
“Thanks to the humans,” one of the bear shifters grunted.
“So then,” I continued, ignoring him, “why would the good doctor need a wolf trap outside of his house?”
