“My dad,” I whispered. “Even if Xen no longer has a hold over me, he still made a pact with Haylen Frost.” I knew from Rys’s grimace that we wouldn’t be getting out of that so easily. “Is there anything we can do?”
“As much as I wish otherwise,” he said, expression fierce. “The old pack law Xen invoked is still valid. We don’t use those laws anymore because they’re barbaric, but unfortunately, no one thought to change them. Instead, they were simply phased out.”
“So I have to marry Myla?” My voice caught and I had to stop a second to swallow past the lump in my throat. “I have to bond with her?” The words were little more than a whisper, like maybe if I didn’t say them loudly, they wouldn’t be true.
Rys glanced at Elliot, eyes narrowing. “You say you knew nothing about this?” There was an edge to his voice, one that made both me and Elliot sit up straighter.
“No.” Elliot glanced at me, regret written all over his face. “I’m sorry, Jake. I should’ve carried on pushing for answers when I saw him looking through those old pack laws.”
I laughed bitterly. “Pretty sure this was the last outcome you would’ve predicted.”
“True. But then again…” He reached for his phone as we all watched him. After finding whatever it was he was looking for, he handed his phone to Rys. “These are our pack accounts.” He looked to me again. “It’s why I wanted to see Max.”
Rys’s frown deepened as he read what was on the screen, scrolling through to the next and the one after that. Finally he looked at Elliot. “Where the fuck has all the money gone?” He gave Elliot’s phone back to him.
“That’s what I was trying to find out when I turned up at Jake’s house and discovered Xen trying to kill Max.”
Rys’s growl thundered around the hallway, leaving goosebumps along my skin. “Where is he now?”
“I don’t know.” Elliot held out his hands. “He told me to clean up his mess and then left. I haven’t had chance to go look for him, and to be honest, I’m not sure I want to.” He let his head fall back against the wall. “Because what the fuck do I say when I find him?”
Silence settled around us, leaving me with nothing to focus on, so the steady throb in my leg made itself known. I hissed as I tried to change position and Rys’s gaze sharpened.
“It’s hurting?”
“Yeah,” I answered, seeing no point in lying. He could no doubt smell it all over me. “It’s taking a while to heal.”
Elliot stared at me like I was crazy. “Did you miss the part where your bones were visible?Of courseit’ll take a while to heal.”
“You should go rest,” Rys said. “There are plenty of guest rooms, or…” He left the rest unsaid, but the pull to join Max was getting harder to resist.
“I’ll join him in a second.” I tapped my thigh, hesitant to ask yet more of Rys and his pack. “You never answered me before,” I said, forcing the words out, because I doubted I was going to like the answer. “Is there anything I can do to get out of this pact and still keep my dad alive?”
Rys studied me and then Elliot. I could almost see his brain switching into lawyer mode. “A pact between alphas is binding.”
My stomach dropped and I sucked in a breath.
“But,” he added, “only if the pact was made in good faith.”
“Meaning?”
“If both participants entered into it honestly,” Rys said, and that tiny ember of hope inside me reignited. “From what you said, Haylen Frost entered into that pact believing your dad killed Faris. Yet neither you nor Max think that’s true?”
“No, we don’t.” Not now anyway. I shoved the guilt aside. “But we have no proof. Xen banned us from investigating and now any evidence is long gone.”
“Except for the security footage,” Gabriel explained. “Stella’s only keeps footage for a month tops, but Max had me check the businesses surrounding Stella’s to see if any of their cameras would’ve captured anything. Turns out some of them did, and fortunately they still have the footage from the last four months available. For now.” He glanced at me. “I didn’t know the exact night he was looking for at the time, but the date you’ve mentioned falls within that. We just need permission to ask to view it.”
Rys sighed. “And you’d need to go to DCI Thornton to obtain that, I assume?”
“Yes.” Gabriel winced. “And those businesses are human owned.”
“Fuck.” I scrubbed a hand over my eyes. “Frost already declared Faris’s death as pack business and declined an investigation. We’d need substantial proof of a crime to get her to open one now.”
Rys sat forward suddenly, making me jump. “Isn’t that why you were meeting with Axel tomorrow? In the hope he’d be able to read your minds?”
“No, we were hoping he’d be able to see what we were hiding so we could ask for help without Xen’s orders getting in the way.”
“But you were bringing your dad too, right?”
