“Request for genetic testing of El Forsythe-Drew,” Marcus read out loud, and immediately Shawn flinched, remembering one day when he had escorted the teenage girl to a medical facility and subjected her to a whole round of testing at her father's behest, the round of testing at that point supposedly checking her for a genetic illness that ran in her family.
Shawn, who had never really kept in touch with the boys’ bodyguards, didn't think anything of it at the time.He had actually assumed that it was more than likely that this was normal.Perhaps Annabel and Joseph were having all of the children tested in such a way.Now, it was becoming clear that that wasn't what was actually going on.
“It's about her DNA, isn't it?”Shawn asked, knowing in the back of his mind that Joseph had to have tested her a few times.Maybe, in his searches for his mate, he had decided to take a blood sample or two so that he would have some sort of genetic evidence to use to try and find Persia.That didn't seem all that unlikely, considering the fact that Joseph had recently confessed to him that he was a man possessed when his mate had gone missing.
“And the shifter portions of it, yeah,” Marcus said with a frown, knowing just as everyone else did just how hard it was to find a shifter-focused physician.
El’s father must have worked hard to find the one that he did, and yet…
“There's no shifter DNA in her,” Marcus read off, but they knew that that was fake.They had tested her before.They had proven that she had multiple strains of shifter DNA in her.There was no way that those hospital records could be true.And yet...they existed.
“… Annabel faked them,” Trip said after a moment, obviously coming to his own conclusions as he peered over Marcus’s shoulder at the documents.“Look, she had to sign off on them,” Trip said, pointing to the lower corner of the document where Joseph and Annabel's signatures were.“And I doubt that Joseph ever cared to mention exactly what they were for, but if she is a hunter, it's very obvious that she could assume.”
“And if she is a hunter and she is connected to their world wide web, then it’s very obvious that she could find a way to connect to other hunters and set it up…” Shawn said, his brows furrowing as he wondered the exact reason why she would do that, though.
If Annabel really were a hunter, wouldn’t she want El gone?
After all, Shawn considered as he looked down at that document with his mated brothers, even if Annabel didn’t know that El was the child prophecy, the one that was meant to bring the panthers and lions together via her child, wouldn't she still hate her just for the sheer fact that she was a shifter alone?Wouldn't she still wish to kill her?
Annabel had never been kind to El when she was growing up.That much was true, but… Well, she’d never been bloodthirsty before.She’d never so much as bothered to put a hit out on El, even though El was a pain in her ass, shifter or not.
It just didn’t make sense, not to Shawn.The thought of it alone made him scrunch his nose in thought, his eyes trailing around the office as if there would be some sort of answer there rather than a resonating silence that gave him little to no clue as to what to do.It appeared that he wouldn't know what Annabel's plans were, or if Annabel truly was a hunter or just associated with a few, until he got into her office.Otherwise, everything was just hearsay; theories garnered from circumstantial evidence but not evidence that was irrefutable.
He just hoped that whatever Annabel was planning, she wasn’t planning to do it that night.
Chapter17
Growing up, El’s grandfather once told her, ‘There are moments in life where you know that you are fucked.’
He'd said it brashly, and El’s grandmother looked on in disapproval, as a result, warning the man that in the future, he should do his best not to say something like that in front of his young, impressionable granddaughter.Little did her grandmother know at that moment.However, her grandfather was, in fact, completely and utterly right.There were, in fact, moments in this life in which you knew that you were completely and utterly fucked.
One such moment in this life just so happened to be when El was hiding in a small corner of her room, in the storage closet of it actually, listening to men rifling through the files that had recently taken up residence where she had once laid her head to go to sleep at night.Files that just so happened to detail the lives of shifters make it all too clear that they plan to do something bad to them.But, it wasn’t until the men got onto the topic of how much they hated shifters and wanted to kill them that El reached a whole new level of clarity and realized that whatever she was at that very moment, it was fucked with a capital f and she needed to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.
The only problem with the whole getting the hell out of there as quickly as possible is, however?Probably the dozens of people who are currently sitting around her mother's dining room table at that moment, conversing with her mate Ryan and pretending to talk business with him.
They were probably also thinking about how nice his head would look on their wall at that moment and trying to size up what kind of lion he was.Would he clash with the decor?One knew that a lion that was too gold technically clashed with greens and blues.You always needed to make sure that you found a lion that was a nice neutral caramel shade.
You know, when you were going around killing lion shifter hybrids who just so happened to have a pulse and a personality and a whole life out there waiting for them that most certainly wouldn’t like them to be dead and—
“Pull yourself together, El,” El swore to herself, hitting her cheeks with her hands as she waited for the scent of the two men to leave and their bodies to exit the room.Whatever the hell was going on in her mother's house, it wasn't good, and she didn't feel like staying much longer.Not if her mother had a bunch of files on how to kill shifters hanging out in her house.
The only problem was figuring out how the hell she was going to come up with an excuse for both her and Ryan to leave without mentioning the fact that she just so happened to overhear her mother’s servants talking about murdering people in what was once her childhood bedroom and was now a true crime podcast’s wet dream.
Yep, El was fucked.
She shook her head to herself as she heard the footsteps finally fading away, smelling the men as they grew more and more distant, and gave her an opportunity to climb out of the back of her closet.The young woman was distressed to find that as she got older, her knees were getting a little weaker and ached from having to crouch down so low.But, at the moment?That wasn't as pressing as everything else that was going on, and so instead, she just straightened, tried to take a deep breath, and attempted to make sense of her current situation.
Only to realize that there was no way to make sense of her current situation and that she did, in fact, for 19 years of her life lived with a potential murderer.Amazing.
“I hate to admit it,” El said to herself as she wiped the dirt off her legs and stood to inspect the room around her, “but Persia is looking pretty good right now.”
Was Persia a good mom?Definitely not.But was Persia also a potential murderer?Definitely not.Therefore, El supposed that it all weighed itself out.
Speaking of weighing things out, or rather, realizing the weight of the situation that you currently found yourself in that you definitely thought that you would never encounter in your lifetime—El decided to take a longer look at the room surrounding her, taking in all of the tall filing cabinets and noting the fact that they were most likely stocked to the brim with information concerning other shifters.If she was going to go back to Ryan and somehow convince him that this was actually going on, she needed proof.Or at least she needed proof for Ryan to show to other people so that other people who didn't happen to be mated to her at that moment would believe him.
The only problem was figuring out how the hell she was going to get said proof out of there.Because a big thick filing folder wasn't exactly convenient, and while El liked to believe that she was a quick shot, it would take more than several hours to clearly capture the contents of even one file in that room.Therefore, she had to come up with another way to get the evidence out of there without anyone realizing that she had it.
While her mother was an awful person, this wasn't exactly one of those situations where she could shove it down the front of her dress like she used to shove things when she was stealing them as a child.This was, unfortunately, not a designer tennis bracelet stolen from her mother's jewelry cabinet.
