“And because I won’t hesitate to blow someone’s feckin’ head off regardless of who they are.”
He finally nodded. “Dewi has killed. She’s a ruthless fighter. But I can’t be certain she wouldn’t get bogged down by who someone is if blood has to be taken and we’ve been betrayed. Likewise, I don’t know if she’d keep her cool and not kill someone if we need them alive and interrogated. I need someone who doesn’t have the emotional attachments in case it turns out someone closer to us than we realize is involved.”
“Ye know, I often wonder if I’d paid attention to me mam and done better in maths if I couldn’t have gotten a desk job in some office somewhere.”
“And?”
She shrugged and broke contact with him. “And unfortunately,” she whispered, “I’m still shite at maths.”
Several hours later.
Well, that went not quite as horribly as I’d expected. At least no one got disemboweled.
Although it’d been close there for a moment, in the beginning.
Peyton collapsed on the bed in the guest room and stared at the ceiling. Dewi hadn’t killed Aisling.
Yet.
And once Dewi had coffee and a nap—and food—and made her second appearance of the morning to actually talk to them, she seemed to have come to grips with the fact that Aisling was now part of their team and their newest Enforcer.
Thank the Goddess.
Although what he hadn’t expected was Ken bursting into the kitchen, naked and with a gun in hand. The man was a far cry from the timid guy Peyton had first met a year ago.
Nature versus nurture, indeed.
Now that Peyton knew more about Ken’s true lineage, it wasn’t a shocker. Had Ken been raised among shifters, no telling what his life might have been like.
And there was yet another mystery Peyton wished they could devote more time to unraveling, but it wasn’t their priority. Finding Faegan Lewis and anyone rendering him assistance topped that list. The more Peyton learned, the more convinced he felt that the situation shared threads with the rogue shifter shopping secrets, the missing shifters, and the potential secret research being conducted on shifters. There were too many coincidences, too many commonalities.
The fastest way to shine a light on the problem and solve it would be exposing the truth to the world about what they were—and that would lead to an entirely new and dangerous set of problems.
Peyton sided with the majority of their small secret committee and believed the best way to handle this was quietly and without attracting attention, all while installing more of their own people in positions of power so they could be better protected if the existence of shifters was exposed to the world. As it was, the Targhees currently had sixteen US senators, nearly fifty congressional representatives, and ten state governors who were either packmates or otherwise beholden to them. Then there were the hundreds of state and local-level officials throughout the country.
Other packs around the world were doing the same thing with differing degrees of success. It was another reason Peyton moved as many of their packmates as possible from South and Central America, because of the rapidly changing political climates and growing drug cartel problems there.
The Targhees had money and influence to spare in the United States and Canada—and now the UK, with the addition of the Staffordshire Pack and others to their ranks—but spreading their resources that thin among three continents was a losing strategy. Especially when Peyton didn’t know if they might be forced to close ranks for protection.
Peyton had no interest in holding public office, but there were plans in the works to help prop up a future presidential candidate of their exclusive committee’s choosing.
That couldn’t happen until they dealt with this latest threat. They were all in agreement that Faegan Lewis had to be killed. If he were captured, he’d spill his guts in a second to save his hide and to hell with everyone else.
And Peyton couldn’t let Dewi know about a lot of what he knew because she would defy him.
Worse, she’d rat him out to Gillian, who would put her foot down about him leaving Idaho, much less the continent, to attend to this business.
Obviously, it was tempting to draw his loved ones close, let the rest of the world burn itself out, and take care of only his own, but that wasn’t a realistic option.
Taking care of his own meant eliminating this global threat once and for all. It wasn’t merely an existential threat to them as shifters—it was potentially a threat to the entire world if someone successfully created a super-army of beings with the strengths of shifters.
Only with the goal of taking over and conquering the world.
And the only way to eliminate that threat was hands-on.
And head-on.
Chapter Six
