They were in a large pen, with high stone walls, open to the snow. With the snow still falling, it took her a moment to see the white adult sitting in a corner watching her, or the other adult that came out of the cavelike structure attached to the pen to guard her pups. The mother picked up one of the pups by its nape and carried it into the den. Hendrik yelled at her and she dropped it, but that wouldn’t stop her for long.
“She’s going to hide them all, isn’t she?” Alana said with disappointment. “I was hoping to meet them.”
“That’s probably not a good idea,” Christoph cautioned next to her.
But Hendrik grinned. “Sure she can. Give me a few minutes to shoo the adults into the den and close the gate on it. They tolerate me, since I feed them occasionally.”
“The adults aren’t tame?”
“They are, but only for Geoffrey. I don’t have his patience.”
“Neither do I,” Ella said. “I let him bring one of the pups into the house sometimes. They are adorable at this age. But as soon as they start chewing on the furniture, they go back to the pack.”
It didn’t take long for Hendrik to get the two adults locked into the den and open the outer gate for Alana to come inside the pen. Despite the cold and the falling snow, she spent a delightful hour playing with the baby wolves. Christoph had warned her to keep her gloves on. Good advice. Their sharp little teeth were catching on her gloves and would have shredded her fingers. But they were just being playful. It was hilarious when she threw snowballs for them. They would chase after each one, then dig around in the snow trying to find the ball that had broken apart as soon as it landed. The mother growled menacingly from the other side of the fence for quite some time, but Hendrik talked to her reassuringly and she finally lay down. She wouldn’t take those golden eyes off Alana though.
Behind the gate, Ella noticed Christoph’s tender smile as they watched Alana’s antics. “So you do like her, eh?”
Without taking his eyes off Alana, he replied, “What isn’t to like? She fascinates me.”
“Then you aren’t just her escort?”
“Don’t read more into this than there is, Mother. Besides, she doesn’t want to stay in Lubinia. Like your mother, she wants to return to England.”
“I stayed for a man,” she reminded him.
He put his arm around her shoulder. “And I’m glad you did, or I wouldn’t be here. But there is another reason for you not to get those motherly hopes up. Aside from the fact that she doesn’t exactly think kindly of me—”
Ella immediately scoffed, “Women adore you. What did you do to discourage her good opinion of you?”
“Perhaps someday I can explain if you are still curious, just not now.”
“There’s something else, isn’t there?”
He nodded solemnly. “I may have to kill the man who raised her. And she loves him like a daughter would.”
Watching the palace gates, Leonard recognized the guard he’d seen at the warehouse the other night. Now the man was walking toward the city. Leonard had followed the hooded man who’d assumed leadership of this clandestine group the other night, but the man had merely gone to an inn to sleep, and Leonard hadn’t gotten back to the inn early enough the next morning to see the man’s departure. The hooded man hadn’t returned to that inn last night, but Leonard planned to check it again tonight. In the meantime, he hoped to learn something interesting by following the guard.
The man wasn’t in uniform today and appeared quite nervous. He kept glancing behind him as if he expected someone from the palace to give chase, but he seemed to relax once the palace was no longer within view. Leonard followed on horseback, slowly. When he saw the guard slip into a cobbler shop and flip the sign on the door from OPEN TO CLOSED, he tied off his horse several shops down the street and waited. A moment later the cobbler left without locking the door and walked away.
Was this their new meeting place? Leonard checked for a back entrance and found one. It wasn’t locked and led directly into the back room where the cobbler worked his trade. It was early in the day. It could take hours for the guard’s contact to show up, and the back room offered no place to hide in case the man wandered back there.
He debated whether to get information out of the guard the old-fashioned way, but he resisted the impulse. The guard had worked for Aldo, and from what he’d overheard, even Aldo hadn’t known whom he was really working for, so Leonard didn’t think he’d get any useful information from the guard. Besides, it was the hooded man he wanted, and all he had was his distinctive gravelly voice to go by.
An hour passed. The guard began to snore in the front room. Leonard glanced around the wall he was hiding behind for a view of the shop’s front room and saw the man had settled into a comfortable chair. With a sigh, he resumed his position flat against the wall and continued to wait.
After another twenty minutes the front door opened and closed, and he heard the distinctive voice he was hoping for. “Wake up, eh.”
“Sorry,” the guard mumbled. “I didn’t know how long you would be.”
“Did Rainier follow his orders?”
“He tried to, but he failed.”
“Good.”
“Good?!” the guard exclaimed. “Did you want him to get caught?”
“No, but that was a hasty decision our employer soon regretted, so don’t try to succeed where Rainier failed. They may have other plans for her now. Was he caught?”
