Page 3 of Ascendant King

“Is everything okay?” I pulled out my phone and checked, but I didn’t have any unread texts.

“Yeah, everything is good. It’s just the usual. She wants to know how you want to handle things in case you’re out of range later tonight.” Gabe shrugged. “It’s hard out there for a?—”

“Gabe, at the point where you start quoting an early 2000s movie in business meetings, I’m cutting off your Netflix subscription.” I arched an eyebrow, holding in a sigh.

A feeling of overwhelm and exhaustion washed over me. I held it in, letting nothing show on my face. I didn’t want my pack to know how tired I was, how much the new position weighed on me. That would be showing too much weakness, too much of my own issues coming through.

Instead, I dialed Heather.

“Boss,” she greeted. “No emergency. If Gabe told you it was an emergency, he was lying.”

“I didn’t say it was an emergency,” Gabe grumbled, leaning against the wall, arms crossed sullenly.

“What’s up?” I asked instead.

“Nia says we might not be able to reach you, so she wanted your preemptive input on a few things.” Heather sounded like she was hedging, which made me wonder if the phone call was actually more of an emergency than she was letting on.

Wandering over to the windows, I looked out at the coast. We’d retaken some specific House Bartlett properties that weren’t tied to the main compound near Los Santos. Cade said they’d remained mostly unused since his parents’ deaths. All it had taken to get in was Cade’s blood—still good enough to get through the wards.

The views were panoramic, showing vistas of the ocean on this side of the house and coastal Big Sur forests on the other. We were at the house for those expansive forests.

“Hit me,” I said.

“Someone popped up in the Mission selling Thorn.” Heather’s voice was slightly more distant—she’d put me on speaker.

Starting to answer, I paused. This one was a big problem. More of a problem than I thought. “Can you confirm if it’s real?”

“Nia says that it is,” Heather said after a pause.

If we took the dealer out, we might never find out who he worked for. But if we didn’t squash him, it showed weakness; it showed that we didn’t have the ironclad control of Los Santos’s drug scene that we needed to control everything else.

“You have one day to follow him. If he doesn’t lead you back to his supplier, then grab him and see if he’ll talk or if his phone tells you anything.” It wasn’t a perfect solution, but I was more and more beginning to understand Declan, beginning to see how decisions rippled and everything had to be brutal and fast.

“Okay,” Heather said, the pause before her words indicating that she was watching Nia for her reaction. “Moving back to Reaper is going fine, but Nia says the numbers feel too normal.”

“Too normal?” I asked.

“Given that we lost most of our regular users when Thorn stole their wolves.” Heather’s voice didn’t shake; she didn’t say anything that gave away her own feelings.

But I knew them because they mirrored mine. Wolves who’d been on Thorn had lost their wolves. Some managed to stumble toward a normal life, a normal existence, but even three months later, others were still in long-term care, gone catatonic from the loss of something so integral to who they were. Their magic, their wolves, were gone, and I knew exactly what that felt like, exactly what it was to lose myself.

“Who’s buying it?” I asked.

“I can find out,” Heather said immediately.

“Start keeping records,” I said. “Tag some deliveries if you have to.”

“Can do.” Heather cleared her throat. “Was there any word on the antidote?”

“Nothing new.” I squinted as the sun moved lower, reflecting on the water. “Give what we have left to Tabitha, and let her pass it out how she wants. Anything new on the streets?”

“We had a tussle with House Morrison, but they backed off when they saw our numbers.” Heather paused. “Nia says they’re planning something.”

“Yeah.” I pursed my lips. This would be as good a chance as any to see if Isaac was as good as his word when it came to forgiving and forgetting, if taking off the chains had been the right choice. “See if Isaac has any luck with the tracking spells. Nothing from House Bartlett?”

“No sign of them,” Heather said. “Rhys said they haven’t seen anything either, even with you and Cade out of the city.”

“Keep an eye on the territory we took back. If they’re going to try to take anything?—”