“I’m still here,” I answered.
“Lucien wants to talk to you both. Can you put it on speaker?”
“Of course.”
She passed the phone to Lucien, and we quickly filled him in on our findings on clowder land. I glanced toward the randommetal object, still burning brightly with the two different signatures, despite the destruction that had been done to it.
I wished my skill for observing the magical signatures could tell me what the heck those signaturesdidinstead of just that they existed. Although, it was proving more useful than anything else so far in finding this trail.
“I wonder if that’s one of the magical devices that Petró ordered from Sandrine?” Lucien mused aloud. “There’s someone here who might know. How far away are you?”
Valens rattled off the GPS location.
“Excellent. Divert here, please. I’d like to have him look at it.”
Valens shot me a confused look. “Who’s there that you think can tell us what it is?”
“Alajos.”
“As you wish, Alpha.” Valens’s sudden switch to a formal tone had me beyond curious, but I waited for the call to disconnect before I turned the full force of it on him.
“Who’s Alajos, and why do you sound like Lucien just put ground glass in your meatloaf?”
Valens chuckled darkly. “In short? A pack troublemaker. He’s not powerful enough to have made it into Petró’s top five for the pack. But if there was a list of Petró’s true right-hand men—cronies, if that’s a word you like to use—Alajos would have been right there at the top. They were always partying and getting into trouble together, but more than that, Alajos was always in on Petró’s schemes. It’s part of the reason he was kicked out of the pack after Lucien took over.”
“Ahh, one of the lost boys.”
“That’s a good description.”
I remembered a small group of pack members being exiled immediately after the takeover. But I hadn’t been involved with it because Galyna and I were assigned to the females, and frankly, I didn’t give two shits about pack politics.
“If he was exiled, how is he there now?”
“Excellent question. Either Jerica—his also-troublemaking sister—called him, or something’s changed.”
For the rest of the ride, we exchanged idle chitchat, but I could feel Valens’s tension climbing the closer we got to pack lands, as the chatter slowly died off to thick silence.
When he parked the SUV in front of the pack mansion, the stress was thick enough to be palpable between us.
“You okay?” I asked as we sat for a beat longer than necessary. Seeing this guy again was clearly bothering him.
“I will be. Let’s just get this over with.”
“Okay. But if you need backup, or, you know, an alibi, I’m your girl.”
His eyes met mine, and his callused palm came up to cup my cheek. “Yes, you are. But I could get used to hearing you say it.”
A ghost of a smile, and then he was out, coming around to open my door for me. Meanwhile, blood rushed in my ears as I tried to recover from the devastatingly simple touch. Damn him, such a small touch, a small smile, three little words shouldn’t be able to work me up so quickly.
But was it a fated-mates thing or a heat thing? And how was I ever supposed to separate the two?
The questions had to wait, because right now, we had to go deal with a disenfranchised troublemaker.
We found Lucien, Olivia, Galyna, Jerica, and a man who was Jerica’s spitting image sitting in the mansion’s library. Though, he wore his blonde hair spiked, while hers rested in perfectly styled waves over her shoulders. The spite in his eyes, though? That was pure Jerica. Heavy walnut bookshelves lined each of the long walls, packed to the brim with books of every shape, size, and color. An oversized fireplace was on the far wall, unlit at the moment. They all seemed tense on the antique couches in the center of the room, at odds with the calm surroundings.
Personally, I loved whiling away an afternoon in a great library. Granted, I couldn’t remember the last time I’dhada free afternoon for personal reading. It didn’t seem like I’d be getting one any time soon either, with the way things were going.
Once we’d arrived, Lucien cleared his throat and addressed Alajos. “I understand that you’d like to petition to rejoin the pack, Alajos, but your exile was final. Your sister’s place in the pack was spared because we don’t believe in condemning people solely on family association. But you took direct actions against the high alpha, committed property destruction, and were one of the main instigators in the slander against Pack Blackwater.”
