I thought back to the emails and leaflets I’d received about Sombertooth before I applied to come here.
“Didn’t you say that Sombertooth never did marketing because the waiting list was so long and there was no need?” I asked my mate.
He nodded.
“Consider this. The professor sent those, wanting me to be a student here. But why? Why would he want the child of the woman he wanted to mate—the woman he may have killed—to come here. And he mentored me during the first semester.”
I scribbled notes on the board.
Phelan’s phone beeped, and we all jumped. Eira squawked, and I picked her up.
“We have another visitor, one who isn’t on the approved list.”
“The professor.” Bardoul was hiding behind a wall of cushions.
“Nope.” My mate shared a glance with me.
“Oh no. What does he want?”
“To share some brotherly love?”
“Atticus,” everyone chorused.
I had Phelan tell the guard to keep Atticus here. If he wanted to see me or Phelan, he’d create a ruckus if we refused. “Tell him ten minutes.”
“I hate waiting,” Atticus yelled from outside the door.
“Keep shouting and I’ll make you stay there longer.” I wasn’t bringing him in when we had grasped what we thought was a possible truth. “Or I’ll bring out my wolf.”
I want to see him.
No, you don’t. Not now.
“Fine.”
Thoughts were swirling in my head, and I tried to pluck them out and arrange them into a cohesive story, but they were playing games with me.
“I’m going to ramble.” I beckoned everyone into the bedroom so Atticus couldn’t hear me. “And what I say might be word salad, but just listen until I’m finished.”
I tried to put myself in the position of a spurned mate. I couldn’t and would never contemplate murder as a solution, but I did my best. The sticking point was the satchel he’d given me that supposedly belonged to Rawlins but that we’d proven was Charlie’s. Why would he give that to me?
The professor thought of Charlie as a possession so she belonged to him. It wasn’t guilt, that I was certain of. But perhaps it was more of what he’d wanted to accomplish. It waserasure. He’d killed her, and he handed back the bag under another man’s name, denying her history.
He stripped my mother of her identity, and as her adopted son, he was asserting his dominance and keeping me uninformed. Even after killing her, he decided what part of her survived, which was very little.
Everyone was sitting on the floor in a circle, looking more and more shellshocked as I related what I was thinking.
“But you foiled him by first mating a shifter from a powerful family, giving you status in the shifter community.” Jack was fiddling with one of Eira’s toys. “You had a child, and the final humiliation for the professor was you finding your very powerful wolf.”
“The professor wanted to own what was left of Charlie’s story and deny you any right to it, but it didn’t end the way he envisaged.”
Atticus was sure to be beating the door down in a minute, but I had one last question.
“How did the professor know about the ring?” I pulled the four pieces from my pocket. The engraving was too faded to read. “He knew I was human and I had to wear it.”
“Maybe the person outside the door can help you with that,” Phelan said. “His uncle was good friends with the professor.”
Shit, what if I had Atticus and his folks to thank for the ring that shielded me? Their last contact with me until we met after Eira’s birth was when I was a few days old.
