Page 215 of Claimed By the Rival Alpha

The silence broke when Grant collected the papers and tapped them into a neat pile. He was the oldest member of the pack, and from his solemn expression, he understood the stakes more than Edward and Dana.

“You don’t look surprised,” Tavi pointed out to Grant. “Were you all aware of this already?”

“Yes,” he said. “The tax account you are talking about is over five years old. We’ve known that money was missing as early assevenyears ago.”

“Why wasn’t I informed of this?” Bryn demanded. A reasonable question.

“It’s the way things have been for decades.”

“That’s not good enough. Every alpha—even interim ones—should be informed of the pack’s affairs. It’s ridiculous to keep something a secret just because you’ve gotten complacent.”

Grant inclined his head to take her point.

Bryn’s shoulders lost some of their stiffness. We were finally getting somewhere, and she didn’t need to keep herself as rigid.

“So the account is at least seven years old,” she said. “Did you confront Gregor about this?”

“We did. Alpha Gregor claimed he would handle it, but the money continued to disappear.”

Encouraged by Grant’s willingness to talk, Councilman Ross said, “We waited a little while for Gregor to put a stop to thepayments, but he never did. The only thing he seemed to do was lessen the amounts withdrawn from each account.”

“Do you think he was the one hoarding it or someone else?” Bryn asked.

“We suspected Troy was squirreling the money away,” Councilman Colby said. “We figured that was why Alpha Gregor didn’t stop the withdrawals. We tried to stop it ourselves, but he wouldn’t stand for it. He demanded we stop looking into it and prioritized his son over his pack.”

He let that silence sit for a few moments. Bryn, Tavi, and I weren’t the least surprised by Gregor’s selfishness, but we gave the council some time to mourn the man who had been their alpha.

“The day before he died, I spoke to Alpha Gregor,” Grant finally said. “I asked him to tell me the truth behind the missing money. Even after he made me promise I wouldn’t reveal anything to anyone outside of the council, he wouldn’t give me any details about the account or what it was for; all he told me was that Troy was doing what he had to do to ensure the pack’s future. I don’t have any proof of this, but I got the impression that Gregor was the one who advised Troy to take the money and hide it.”

I frowned. That speculation only raised more questions. Gregor had been the alpha and a tyrant who no doubt used money however he wanted. Why would he cover up that money was being moved around? And why would he let Troy, of all fucking people, take that money? Gregor had known his son was a loose cannon, so why give him access to such a huge amount of money?

Bryn was on the same page. “Troy wasn’t exactly the most stable or rational man. Why would Gregor let him do that?”

Grant shook his head. “We have no idea. I can only imagine his love for his son was greater than his rational mind.”

I said nothing to that. From what Bryn had told me, I doubted very much that “love” was why Gregor had let Troy do what he wanted. It would make more sense if Gregor had thought Troy was the only person capable of carrying out their sinister plans.

“As Colby said,” Grant continued, “we brought up the issue multiple times, but we were shot down every time. And when Troy became alpha, it was too dangerous to try to get information out of him. As a council, we couldn’t go against our alpha.”

“Do you have any idea how much money was in the account?” Tavi asked.

Edward sighed. Now that most of his fellow council members had revealed this information, he was apparently no longer interested in bullshitting us. “We suspected it was in the hundreds of thousands. But we don’t know where the account is, nor do we have any way of finding out an exact amount. We’ve never seen a statement from that tax account, which leads us to believe it might not be a wolf account.”

“Wait…you think he’s got a bank account in the human world?” Bryn asked.

She sounded as shocked as I felt. The Kings had always believed that humans were beneath wolves. According to Bryn, only Kings’ men were allowed to go into human towns, and they only ever went to get gifts for a female wolf they liked or to have sex with human women. The idea that the Redwolfs, who hatedhumans the most, had a financial account with a human bank was preposterous. Would Gregor have been desperate enough to hide this money in a human account? If so, we had even more reason to be alarmed.

“We’ve been trying to find the account for years,” Edward said. “We pulled every string we could, but it was nowhere to be found. The only way an account could be hidden so well is if it belonged to a human bank.”

“But I thought we couldn’t transfer money from a wolf account to a human account?” Bryn said.

“No, it’s possible,” I replied. “But you have to withdraw the cash from the pack’s bank, then go to a human town and deposit the cash into an account there.”

“Well, Troy would have had plenty of time to do that—he went into Colville all the time.” Bryn frowned, chewing on the inside of her cheek. “If they were stealing money, why did they record the missing money in the ledger?”

“Alphas have to keep track of every penny that moves in and out of pack accounts,” Ross explained. “It’s an ancient law to which alphas are bound. Hundreds of years ago, alphas and the lucky few in their inner circle were treated like royalty. Back then, they claimed there wasn’t enough money for the entire pack to survive while spending lavishly on themselves. Packs revolted against their alphas. Riots and infighting made life unbearably difficult, so to bring peace, a new law was created. All money had to be marked in the ledgers to keep the alpha accountable. If an alpha doesn’t keep detailed ledgers, they risk being executed.”

“But there is a loophole,” Grant added. “The law doesn’t expressly state that alphas have to disclose which account themoney is going into; just that it has to be noted that it’s gone somewhere. That’s why our hands were tied.”