Chapter Twenty-Four
Trent
Son of a bitch.
Trent stared at his cell phone but knew that wouldn’t do a damned thing except drive him stir crazy. Because it wouldn’t change the facts:
Peyton was missing.
And they had no idea where he was, who took him…
Or if he was even still alive.
There was so much to do, and all Trent could think of was remembering how grave Peyton looked all those years ago while standing over Dewi’s bassinet in the hospital when they weren’t even sure if she’d survive.
How his younger brother had aged decades in the space of hours between them discovering their parents’ bodies and that moment.
All while Trent silently wished he would never be named Pack Alpha because he wasn’t certain he could handle the weighty responsibility required of the position.
Hoping he hadn’t looked too eager taking a knee to Peyton in front of the pack because at the time he didn’t want people thinking it’d been an easy decision for him to make.
Two and a half decades later, he would make that same decision in a fraction of the time, and back then it’d been pretty damned fast to start with.
I need to talk to Duncan and Badger before I talk to Gillian and Dewi.
Which would, no doubt, piss both women off, but this was a much larger issue than one missing person, a missing mate and brother.
This was their Pack Alpha who was missing.
He looked up at the sky, where the dark purple of early dawn slowly bled into the black, star-speckled vista. The urge to throw his head back and howl in anger and frustration rolled through him, but he held it at bay.
Barely.
Despite being dressed only in his boxers, he didn’t feel the damp chill as he stepped off his back porch, crossed the backyard in his bare feet, and headed toward Badger’s cabin, where he softly rapped one time on the front door, not wanting Dewi to hear from her cabin.
It took less than ten seconds for the grizzled old shifter to fling open his door, his one blue eye narrowing when he saw Trent. “Aye,” he softly said, backing out of the way for Trent to step inside. “From the look on yer face, I’m guessin’ it’s bad news.”
“Yes.”
Badger held up a hand, and Trent realized he held his own cell. “Let’s get Duncan in here, then. I suspect ye don’t want to have to tell this more than once.”
Badger
Two minutes later, the three men sat around the small table in the cabin’s front room with the coffeemaker burbling on the counter behind them as Trent related his phone call with Trevor to the two Primes.
Duncan sat with his elbows on the table and his head propped in his hands. “I knew I should have pressured him to let me go,” he said. “This is a disaster.”
“I’d even said I’d go,” Trent said.
Badger slowly shook his head. “Stop wi’ that, both of ye. This likely woulda happened no matter who it was. Thank the feckin’ Goddess Dewi has the wee one, or ye both know she woulda been the one over there doin’ this.”
“How do I even tell Dewi?” Trent asked. “Fuck, how do I tell Gillian?”
Badger sighed. “Straightforward like. Gillian’s not a fragile wildflower—she’s an attorney and the Pack Alpha’s mate. She likely knows things we’ll need to enact immediately. Logistics.”
“And Dewi?” Duncan observed as he stood and walked over to pour himself a mug of coffee. “We’ll have to tie her up to keep her here. I doubt you and I combined are strong enough to keep her from leaving.”
“But Ken is,” Badger said.
