I brought her face back to me. “That was my fault. I should’ve communicated with you more clearly.” I was so damned used to running my pack and not having to consult too heavily with another on my actions that I’d forgotten the importance of it. My fuckup almost cost me my mate. “If there’s ever anything you doubt or have questions about, come to me. Don’t run off with Sera, and damn sure don’t ignore my calls.”
“Okay,” she said, sounding exasperated.
I was sure she was. I’d kept her ass up all night, calling out my name and apologizing to me for running away as she did. Her cries and pleading for me to take her were the only things that resolved the anger that burned in my chest ever since she’d taken off from the commune.
“Guess it’s not so bad that you put a tracker in my phone,” she mumbled. She pulled back. “Who was that guy? The wolf that saved Sera and me?”
“Montgomery. He works for a few of my sites. He’s been missing for weeks,” I admitted.
“So, he’s part of the pack?”
I shook my head. “He’s a lone wolf and has worked with my pack for about a year. Initially, I suspected that he was working with the Alliance and reported to them about you. But…”
“Then he wouldn’t have wound up in the basement,” Reese finished for me.
“Probably not,” I agreed. “But I still need to figure out how he got there. And what they did to him.”
“Pines said something about needing both human and shifter DNA.”
I listened as she told me about everything Pines said to her and the exchange between him and the thin man, dressed in black and wearing a mask. I tried to figure out who the masked shifter could be. His scent was unfamiliar to me. Not even Chance could pinpoint precisely where he was from, and my brother had the best nose in our pack and beyond.
There was a good chance that the masked shifter was using some type of potion or herb or something to discuss his true scent. I would have to ask Dr. Drake if there were concoctions that could do such a thing.
“The way he looked at Sera,” Reese said, recapturing my attention.
“Pines?”
“No.” She shook her head as she sat up to face me. “Montgomery. I thought he was dead. Like Charlotte…” She inhaled, her eyes misting over, but she quickly regrouped. “Then he sat up from the table as if he’d been on something and came out of a stupor. He looked disoriented, but when he looked over at Sera, it was like…”
“What?”
Her eyes caught mine, and she swallowed. “Like when you look at me. As if they were—”
“Mates,” I finished for her.
She nodded.
“I noticed how she clung to him throughout our entire drive.” Sera never took her eyes off Montgomery for more than a few seconds. Reese shared with me how Montgomery shifted and ripped apart the wolf that injured Sera and then licked her wound. Nothing that I wouldn’t have done for my mate.
“What about your cousins?” Reese questioned.
“You know about that?”
She laughed. “I overheard you talking to them. They’re angry with you for keeping their mate away from them. They think Sera’s their mate.”
“You were eavesdropping.”
I expected her to grant me another sheepish look, but she shrugged. “I was on my way to the bathroom. You all should’ve closed the door if you didn’t want anyone to overhear. Anyway, what about Sera? They think she’s their mate, but she and Montgomery looked pretty cozy, right?”
I pushed out a breath. “I don’t always know or understand the ways of Mother Moon and the gods.” I knew my cousins in Colorado would be pissed to learn that Sera had found another mate. But it didn’t make sense. I’d seen Sera when she was around my cousins for the first time. Try as she might, she was as drawn to them as they had been to her.
She might have reasons for keeping her distance, but I could’ve sworn they were fated mates.
“Is it possible to have mates from different packs?” Reese asked.
With a shake of my head, I replied, “I’ve never heard of something like that. Not from separate packs. Sure, there are, at times, multiple mates, but that happens when the mates are a unit, like my cousins who’re brothers.”
“Strange.” She shook her head. “We should go check on Sera and Montgomery.”
