No one commented when I stood and walked back to the chair, taking a seat as if the past few minutes hadn’t taken place.
“Shall we get started?” I asked, folding my arms across my chest and trying to appear relaxed.
Clay inserted himself into the conversation by speaking first, “Who asked you to deliver a package to Franklin?”
“Do you guys not use Hermes at all? You know I can’t reveal the name of the person who contracted our services unless you’re the recipient. Your alpha refused to sign in Franklin’s stead so you don’t get to know that information.”
It was pretty much what I’d told the alpha earlier.
“What’s in the package?” Declan asked.
“Again, that’s privileged information.”
Brax watched me carefully, as if he was considering a particularly interesting puzzle. I gave him calm eyes. It was the look I used to give my Staff Sergeant when he’d caught me doing something I wasn’t technically supposed to.
“Tell me what you know of Liam’s interest in all of this.”
Sondra jolted.
Liam. It took me a moment, but I recalled he was the vampire who’d practically kidnapped me. The one who broke several of my ribs and nearly killed me. He was also the one standing over the body at Lou’s, but I hadn’t known his name to give Brax back then. How did he know about him now?
“Not sure who you mean,” I said, without taking my eyes off Brax’s.
He gave me a chiding look. “Lying doesn’t really work with werewolves. We can smell deception.”
It wasn’t difficult to believe him. Given the stress indicators, such as pheromones and the like, that a person gave off when telling a lie, it would be easy for his nose to sniff such deceptions out.
“If that’s the case, why did you put me in that cage?” I asked, outraged when I realized he’d known I was telling the truth about Hermes and the package the entire time. He could have signed for the damn thing, and I would have been able to avoid this entire nightmare.
He shrugged. “Our noses aren’t foolproof. You could have been a sociopath or someone skilled in keeping your stress signals under control. Vampires have always been particularly good at that.”
“You all thought I was human.”
He ignored that.
“Back to my question. What is Liam’s interest in our matters?”
“I don’t know. I only met the guy tonight and last night at your bar. It’s not like he told me his every thought in that time.”
“He was at the bar?” Sondra asked.
“Yeah. He’s the vampire who was standing over the body.” I couldn’t bring myself to identify the lump of parts I’d seen as Franklin Wade. Having never met the guy while he was alive, it was a lot easier to disassociate the dismembered parts from anything that had once been living.
“Could this have been an assassination?” Declan asked.
“We’ve been having trouble with the vampires straying onto our territory over the last few months,” Clay said.
“I doubt it,” I chimed in. “Sounded like they had a few people killed over the past few months too. It also wouldn’t explain the wolf that attacked us earlier. More likely, whatever did the killings over the summer is responsible for Franklin and the guy the vampires just lost.”
My voice trailed off as I noticed I was the subject of four intense stares, each looking at me like I’d grown a second head.
“And you know this how?” a voice asked from the doorway.
Victor stepped inside and lurked against the wall. That was the only word I had for it. He used his size and scowling face to try to intimidate me.
I raised an eyebrow. He’d have to work a lot harder than that. I’d been scowled at by some of the best. Drill Sergeant Richards used to be able to drop an entire platoon with just a shift of expression. Compared to them, this pretty boy was a cake walk.
“I listened. Oh, and I used deductive reasoning,” I said.
