“Wrong answer.”
“It’s true,” he stammered out. “H-he hired my brothers and me to do a job. We didn’t ask questions. We needed the money.”
“Money for what?”
“We were kicked out of our pack. We needed to find a place to relocate. Start a new pack.”
“Who’s your old pack?” I demanded, the tip of the knife still in his chest.
“The Southeast pack. The alpha down there accused us of stealing.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. He looked like the type that would steal from his pack.
“How the hell do you not know who hired you to attack my woman?” I growled.
“We stayed in motels not too far from your mate’s house. One day my brother woke up to an envelope pushed underneath our door and a letter that said if we watched this bitch—ahh!” he bellowed when I slapped the taste out of his mouth.
“My mate. She’s not some fucking bitch.”
“Your mate. The note asked us to scare her one night. We did, and the next morning we woke up to a couple of thousand dollars in our motel room, waiting for us. A few weeks later, we got instructions to kill her. We staked her out for a few days, and when she went on a walk with that damn dog, we saw our chance.”
He peered up at me with wide, frightened eyes. “I swear, we didn’t know she was the mate of an alpha.”
“Do I look like a fool to you?”
He looked everywhere but at me. Again, I grabbed his face. “You knew after that first night. I marked her home.”
Any wolf within a five-mile radius of Reese’s home would’ve known I had marked her as mine. My scent was all over that damn property. I’d made sure of it. Even weeks later, my smell would’ve remained in the air.
This son of a bitch was a liar, and he dared to do it right in my face. I knew then that his alpha had good reason to dismiss him and his brothers from their pack.
“Where’s Montgomery? Is he working with you?” I asked.
“Who?” He peered around, this time, the furrow that appeared in his brows was believable.
“Montgomery,” I asked again to make sure.
“I don’t know any Montgomery. I swear. All the note asked us to do was to frighten the bi—your mate.”
“Two seconds ago, you said it told you to kill her.” My voice came out deceptively low as I stood to my full height.
His eyes widened, and he shook his head frantically. “Y-yeah, that’s what they hired us to do, but we never would’ve done it,” he babbled.
More lies.
“You’re all dismissed,” I threw over my shoulder. “Wait for me upstairs.” My betas didn’t need to see this. They’d been with me since I’d taken over as alpha, and they, too, had been through wars and raids the same as I had.
But I had brought peace, and wouldn’t drag them into the world of darkness that I planned for this fucker, unless I had to.
“Chael,”Chance called through our ability to speak into one another’s minds.
I kept my eyes trained on my captive. “Go upstairs, Chance. Now!”
He didn’t say anything further. I listened for their footsteps to grow farther and farther away.
“I-I didn’t do anything to your mate…” Those were his last words as I used the silver knife to carve into his chest. He shrieked and yelled something indiscernible. Even the blood that splattered across my face didn’t stop me from literally ripping his heart out of his body.
I squeezed the still beating muscle in my palm, crushing it before tossing it onto his lifeless body. I unhooked him from the chains and dragged his body over to the far corner, where a fire blazed inside the fireplace.
