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FORTY-FOUR

Gabriel

CURRAN BATTED MY hand away before I could grab the unmarked envelope from the pile of post.

“Get off,” he growled. “Christ, Blondie—how are you still alive? Onyx, get me a pair of gloves, a mask, and some goggles. The rest of you, outside now.”

“What?” Elijah asked, wide-eyed. “Why?”

“He thinks it might be dangerous,” Emma said grimly. “Anthrax, or poison or something.”

“Is that a tactic your family is prone to using?” I asked, mentally kicking myself when I saw her flinch in response to the wordsyour family.

“No,” Curran said, answering for her. “It ain’t. Though I can’t help noticing you’re all still in the house. Get. Out.”

He didn’t truly sound all that alarmed, but I exercised the better part of valor and ushered the omegas out of the back door leading into the garden. When it was safely closed behind us, Elijah rounded on me.

“Is he seriously going to fuck around with a poisoned envelope?” he demanded.

I swallowed a sigh. “He’s just being overcautious.”

The door opened and closed, disgorging Onyx, who raised an eyebrow at me. “You want me to tell him you said that?”

“If you like,” I said.

We both knew that Curran was still beating himself up after failing to step in front of me while I was being shot at in Greece. Alpha healing meant that the bullet wound was well on the way to recovery, though it was stillbloodysore when I moved it wrong. By contrast, it appeared my loyal bodyguard’s sensibilities wouldn’t recover nearly so quickly.

“I expect it’s fine,” Onyx said, leaning back against the damp white wall of the house with crossed arms. “Good trick getting mail into this place without using the postal system, though.”

That was a fair point, and one that would probably alarm Kensington Palace security if they got wind of it.

“Let’s wait to see what it actually is before deciding how worried we should be about it,” I replied.

We cooled our heels for about ten minutes before Curran came out, an N95 mask hanging around his neck and goggles pushed up to his forehead.

“No anthrax, then?” I asked mildly.

He grunted in irritation at my lack of appropriate gravity. “Nah. In fact, you’re gonna want to see this. Someone’s been busy, and no mistake.”

Back inside, I stared in disbelief at the small pile of documents, photographs, and lists of names sitting on the dining room table, courtesy of Clarabelle Allen and her cronies within the Huntwell syndicate.

“How,” I breathed, scanning page after page of damning evidence linking Tommy Huntwell to the disappearance of more than a dozen young girls—mostly omegas—from roughly the same time period when Theresa had been taken.

I felt blindly behind me for a chair, pulling it forward and sinking into it as my head spun.

“I need to speak to my solicitors’ office,” I said blankly.

“Good stuff, then?” Curran asked, tweaking one of the pages off the pile so he could read it.

“That’s... putting it mildly,” I replied. “Good god. How could she have possibly acquired access to all this?”

Emma was sitting hunched in another of the antique wooden chairs. “It’s why I called her here. She was right in the middle of it all, back when my father was in charge of the syndicate. Tommy and Cade are monsters. I knew there had to be people who wouldn’t be thrilled about Tommy t-taking over. And I figured Nana Allen would know who those people are.”