“Are you trying to take Dad for all he’s worth?”El asked out loud as she slowly entered the room, closing the door behind her and turning the lock if only to make sure that she was actually alone and no one else would follow her.
She frowned at all the filing cabinets, not really sure what to make of it.Obviously, if Annabel was putting this much effort into the divorce, then she was actually hurt.Either that or she just wanted revenge, which, to be honest, at the end of the day, El could understand.It had to be humiliating to be left the way that she was.
But still, something about it all didn’t feel right.Annabel wasn’t exactly the type to lock secrets away or anything like that.Especially not if she was currently in the process of trying to get revenge on someone, which she most definitely was, concerning her ex-husband.If this was all for her divorce, then she would have taken multiple photos of it and sent it not only to Joseph but to El as well, if only so that she could force her younger daughter to get the point across to her ex-husband about how badly things were going to go.Annabel liked to weaponize El growing up, and while she hadn't understood it when she was a child, she did now, knowing that what she stood for and infidelity in what was otherwise an OK marriage had irritated Annabel.
But… again.
Past or no past, all of this was strange.It really was nothing like the Annabel that she knew.
The Annabel she knew would grab the back of your head and rub your nose in something like this, but she hadn't so much as hinted at having turned her daughter's old room into her own personal legal library.
Curious, El made the choice to approach one of the filing cabinets, relieved to find that, at the very least, it was unlocked.She pulled open one of the drawers with ease, surprised to find that it was full.Shaking her head to herself, and not sure if the room even belonged to Annabel or maybe to her attorney or something instead, El reached inside the drawer, pulling one of the thick files out and flipping it open in her hand, only to see a rather unfamiliar face staring back at her.
“Baxter Turner?”El read out loud, having never heard the name leave her mother's mouth before, but knowing that that didn't mean much, not when someone is as well connected as Annabel was.The only thing was, however, the information that she saw next to the man's photograph didn't make sense either.Why did Annabel need to know his blood type, his job, his income, his coworkers, and his friends?It was strange, to say the least.An ordinary woman like Annabel would have no interest in something like this, a profile of what looked to be a lower-middle-class white man.He was not someone who would run in anything close to the same circles as Annabel if his occupation of being a professional dog trainer was to be believed.But then again, Annabel did keep dogs on the property.El nodded to herself as she flipped to the next page within the file, only for her eyes to narrow further.
Information about the man's address was listed there, detailing the city that he lived in as well as the street, what his house looked like, and then, curiously enough, floor plans for every floor of his house.Why on earth would Annabel need something like that?El flipped another page.
A layout of his workplace.A map of his doctor’s office.Photos of his wife, as well as a few unfamiliar symbols listed after her name.
And then, finally, she flipped to the final page, seeing something that made her eyes open wide and her breath catch the back of her throat.A single sheet of paper that said confirmed shifter and then listed him as belonging to the Timberwolves of Massachusetts.
“Why on Earth would Annabel have files on shifters?”El whispered to herself, hardly believing what she was seeing at that point and growing more confused by the moment.She reached for another file, flipping it open and revealing another face, as well as another story.This one was a lynx shifter from Montana, and he was a children's doctor.“But, Annabel is a human,” El trailed off, staring down at the photo of the man and willing it all to make sense.
She had scented that her mother was a human, that she didn’t have any shifter blood in her nor any shifter relatives near her, and yet, her mother appeared to be aware that shifters were real.
Maybe that was because of her father?
No, El realized with a shake of her head.Her parents weren’t close enough for that, were they?Her father had made that clear by going to such extraordinary lengths to hide her mother's identity, and El was pretty certain that if Annabel knew who her mother was, she would have hunted her down to the ends of the earth to make her sign some sort of non-disclosure agreement.Something was going on; that much was clear.Something was going on, and she really didn't like it.
Almost as much as she didn't like the sound of footsteps that she heard outside of the room, the footsteps that drew her eyes to the door and the switched-on light switch, which El made a mad dash to turn off but was not quick enough with.
The lights flipped off, but someone’s alarm had already been raised.She could hear people murmuring on the other side of the door.“Wait, what was that?”Not a good sign, not a good sign by far.
El panicked.Not exactly sure what was going on, but more than certain that the last thing she wanted to do was be caught in a room at her mother's house filled with filing cabinets about shifters.Her eyes scanned the room, her mind going blank.
But the nice thing about her mother being only in the middle of divorce proceedings?Until they were done, it was very unlikely that Annabel was going to do any substantial work to the house that would increase its value.Therefore, El’s room had remained largely the same, the only real changes being the color of the walls and the furniture within it.
Using that knowledge, El let her eyes drift along the wall until…
“Yes,” she whispered to herself as she located a familiar set of shuttered doors, just barely managing to sprint within them and pull the shutters shut before the doorknob clicked unlocked.
But even then, she knew she wasn’t safe.
“We’re just going to check,” one of the footmen El had seen earlier in the day insisted, dismissing his colleague’s reluctance as he strolled into the room, unaware that just feet away, the mother and former daughter of the house’s owner stood, her eyes desperately scanning along the walls of her room until…
There it was.
“You know that we have to be on high alert,” the same footman insisted, speaking to his companion as El trailed her hand across the wall and found the slightest lift in the painted plaster, wrenching it open with her fingers in a move that was thankfully muffled by the other man’s loud groan.“The pride isn’t stupid.They wouldn’t let their matriarch go anywhere without thoroughly inspecting it,” the footman said, his words causing El to freeze for a moment, just one before her senses kicked in and all but yanked her into the small, secretive storage door located at the back of her room.
The one that only her father knew about, largely on account of the fact that, upon doing a survey of his children, he had decided that El was the least likely to tell Annabel if he was hiding anything in her room, which was, in his case, bank statements.
Hundreds and hundreds of dusty bank statements, all shoved into paper boxes and out of the way.
They were relics of a time long gone by when Joseph had to hide his affairs and do his best not to anger Annabel enough that she would use the infidelity clause in their prenuptial agreement against him.Joseph was smart enough to realize that if Annabel caught even a whiff of how much he was spending on his mistresses, then she would take him to court and back, using it against him in the divorce that they would undoubtedly have in the future.Therefore, he had decided to hide away the evidence of his many affairs in his daughter's room, knowing that Annabel would never be close enough to El to even bother entering the place and that El would never love her mother enough to tell her the truth of what her father was doing.
Time and time again, whenever she knew that Annabel was upset at her, she had hidden away in that closet amongst all the papers, waiting for the woman's temper to wane and for her to return to normalcy.To be honest, El had pretty much forgotten those days, the ones when she was just a child who pretty much lived in fear day and night.But now she remembered it with a sting, wondering how she could have ever begun to trust her mother or even get her hopes up regarding Annabel when she had proven time and time again that she was a monster.This was just the icing on the cake.
“The last thing we need is for the pride to get their hands on these files,” the footman sighed, obviously feeling relieved that they hadn’t located anyone within the room.“If they knew that we were around…” he said, “then, hunting as we know it would be done for good.”
