Page 14

14

AREN

“S omeone is killing all the men close to Kat,” I say.

My enforcers look at me, then turn to Kat, who is sitting in the chair beside me in my office.

Emilio clears his throat. “So, uh, this meeting is a goodbye before someone takes you out? Where’s the cake?”

Kat turns her head aside, though not before I catch one corner of her mouth lift in a tiny smile.

I’m getting sick of those beautiful smiles.

Everyone gets one.

Even Finan was on the receiving end of one of those smiles.

Everyone. But. Me.

Why?

What do I have to do to get my mate to smile at me?

“No one is taking me out,” I bite out. “This meeting is to get to the bottom of who it is and take them out.”

“So, who’d you piss off?” Cruz sits back in his seat and crosses his arms as he scrutinizes Kat from across the table.

“I can’t think of anyone. I try to keep my head down,” she says.

They all study her, and I don’t mind it.

But Troy…

Troy’s attention, I do mind.

He called her beautiful not too long ago.

He must feel the intensity of my stare because he glances at me and promptly transfers his interested stare from Kat to the table.

My wolf is mollified. And so am I.

I catch Finan’s eye. He’s watching me, blank-faced. There’s not a hint of a smile in his eyes, but he saw what I did, and he’s laughing at me.

“I thought there was constant drama on campus,” Joy says. “You know, crazy sex, people throwing up out of windows, and screaming arguments at dawn.”

Emilio snorts. “You watch too much TV, baby.”

“There was no drama on campus,” Kat says. “Just everyone focused on studying and graduating.”

It’s a strange feeling to have my mate sitting beside me like this.

I never imagined it would ever happen.

My enforcers are surprisingly accepting of her, even though they are dominant shifters themselves, which usually leads to a struggle for dominance. But not this time. Kat is a powerful wolf—more dominant than they are. It’s in the way she carries herself and how she holds my gaze—and theirs.

Cruz grins at her. “Ah, there’s always drama on campus. Has to be with that many students living side by side. Let me guess? You were the early to bed, graduating top of her class, got all papers written and submitted two weeks before they were due, huh?”

A line forms between her brows. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“You were studious,” Joy says, watching her closely. “So you probably slept through all the drama on campus.”

“Boring,” Emilio says with a grin. “She means boring.”

“My mate is not boring,” I growl as Kat rolls her eyes and mutters that she can fight her own battles.

“Down, boy,” Joy adds with a grin. “Just having a bit of fun. No harm meant.”

“ Down, bo y?” I echo mildly.

Emilio slings his arm around her and drops a kiss on the top of her head. “You have a death wish, baby. Have I ever told you that before?”

She grins up at him. “Only every single day.”

They move to kiss each other and I mutter a curse. “ Focus .”

If they start, they won’t be stopping anytime soon, and this meeting is important.

“Yeah, get a room,” Wes mutters.

“We have one,” Joy says sweetly. “We’re just waiting for you to leave it.”

A growl soon refocuses all attention on me and everyone sits up in their seat.

I point at Kat. “She’s the priority here. We need to find out who is leaving a trail of bodies around her and stop it.”

“I thought you were going to play bait,” Kat reminds me.

“And I will, if it comes to it. There has to be a better way than?—”

“Staking you out like a sacrifice, hoping to lure the killer?” she offers sweetly.

My eyes narrow. “That sounded suspiciously thought out. No.”

Joy laughs. “Are we going to strip you first or…”

“Nope,” Emilio adds, “We need to put him in a sacrificial white dress. Or a toga. Hair down, of course. It can be blowing in the wind, or from a fan that one of us points in his face.”

Everyone laughs. Even Kat.

“So you haven’t pissed anyone off,” Troy says thoughtfully.

Kat shakes her head. “Can’t… Oh .”

“That was a suspicious oh,” I say.

She shakes her head. “The thing I’m thinking about was before college and I had a different name then.”

Curious eyes narrow on her.

What she told me came after she had just had the shock of her life from her dad’s sudden appearance. It’s her decision if she wants to share her old name with them. Not me.

“You don’t need to know the ins and outs of it,” I say, glancing at my curious enforcers. “We just need to know who might have a vendetta.”

“Another ex,” she says.

I don’t realize I’m growling until Finan clears his throat.

“And is this one still alive?” I ask calmly.

My enforcers' raised eyebrows suggest I need to work harder at sounding calm. Or maybe I’m just not a calm person.

I used to sneak into my dad’s enforcer-only meetings when I was still a pup and he was Alpha.

He must have always known I was hiding under the table or had tucked myself behind one of the drapes, barely breathing, so I wouldn’t rustle the fabric and give myself away, but he never snarled at me to get out. I learned how he led, and the importance of having enforcers I trusted around me, and listening to their thoughts and ideas instead of relying only on my own.

He was calmness personified when he needed to be. I could have learned so much more from him and I would have if I hadn’t lost him as early as I did.

“He is. I wondered if he was the one behind it, but he’s married, living clear across the country,” Kat says.

“What makes you think he would be behind this?” Joy tilts her head and rubs it against Emilio’s shoulder, like a cat. Mates are tactile, and those two need no excuse to touch each other at any opportunity.

It annoyed me before. Now I want Kat to lean against my side like that. Take my hand and squeeze. But I’m under no illusion that if I tried to take my mate’s hand, I’d have her claws buried in my neck before I knew what was happening.

Trust has to come first.

So does forgiveness.

Kat clears her throat and says to Joy, “Years ago, he did something pretty shitty and made my senior year absolute hell on earth. Not enough to kill him for, but deserving of revenge. I waited until prom night, when he was absolutely shit faced. When he was walking home, I shifted and chased him. Scared him so badly, he pissed himself and ran into a lamppost, knocking himself out. He had a massive bruise on his face that no amount of concealer could hide when he walked the stage for graduation. I loved every minute of it.”

For two seconds, it’s pin-drop silent, then everyone in the room throws their head back, howling with laughter.

And I know in that moment, Kat has won over every single one of my enforcers.

"How can you be so sure it wasn’t him?” Finan asks, still smiling slightly, and there is satisfaction in his smile.

He’s a diplomat, but he’s also a dominant shifter. Someone hurts you, you hurt them back. That’s something all my enforcers can agree with.

She shrugs. “He confronted me about the large dog I’d sicced on him a couple of days later when I was packing up to leave for college,” she explains. “I told him fosters?—”

Her eyes darting to me, and I get the sense she said something she’d have rather I didn’t know. I meet her gaze steadily. I won’t pretend not to have heard something if that’s what she wants. That just isn’t me.

Fosters?

Does she mean…

Ah . Foster care. How could she have wound up in foster care?

She pulls her gaze from mine and continues on as if she hadn’t stopped. “Anyway, I made it clear there was no way I could have been behind it since I didn’t have a large dog. I guess he figured no one had an ax to grind with him like I did. That was years ago. I moved cities, changed names, and I haven’t seen him again.”

“But you checked to find out where he was?” I ask, mentally compiling a list of questions I have for her when it’s just us later.

She nods. “When the murders started, I couldn’t believe there was another shifter on campus. I figured it was my ex causing trouble.”

My wolf growls softly, annoyed that she was alone all that time. No one to watch her back. No pack. What I know of foster care is from TV shows. Kids pulled from home to home to live with someone new, or in homes with other kids where they didn’t eat enough or had ripped clothes. It had never seemed good for any child.

And you snatched her up, stuck her in a cage, and nearly killed her.

The guilt doesn’t feel good. In fact, it feels worse than it did before. The more I learn about her, the more guilty I feel because she didn’t deserve any of what I did to her.

“How’d you track him down?” Joy asks.

“Easy. Some people live their entire lives on the internet. He was all over social media. He was engaged. There was some drama a while later when a girl said he’d gotten her pregnant, and that broke his engagement. He remarried, though, lives in Florida, and I imagine he’s busy cheating still.”

Joy whistles as she sits back in her seat. “Shit. I thought I was a messy bitch. This guy takes the cake.”

I look at Kat and struggle to envision what she saw in this guy who betrayed her so badly. Had he been handsome? Should I do some internet searching of my own?

“So if I wasn’t an ex, then maybe a teacher?” Cruz asks.

Kat shakes her head. “Can’t imagine it would be. And if it were, I’d have caught their scent.”

“Yeah,” Wes confirms. “And Cruz and me would never have … uh…”

“Kidnapped me and stuffed me in the trunk of your car?” Kat helpfully offers.

He winces, looking sheepish. “Yeah. That. Sorry about that.”

“Yeah, me too,” Cruz adds with a small smile.

I wait for Kat to throw their apologies back in their faces.

She shrugs. “I get it. You were doing what you were told.”

I sit up in my seat.

What.

The.

Fuck.

“That’s it ?” I demand.

They all look at me.

“What’s it?” Cruz asks.

I open my mouth to tell them the unfairness of Kat accepting their apology just like that, but I have to beg ?

I’m not about to get into that right now. That’s a conversation for later, when it’s just my mate and me. “So there were no other scents belonging to shifters except Kat on campus?”

Cruz nods. “Just her.”

Everyone looks at each other. “So whoever it is must be masking their scent.”

“With scent blockers like hunters?” Joy suggests.

“More like perfume and cologne,” Wes grumbles, swiping a hand over his nose. “All those scents packed into one campus. Thousands of students… it was overwhelming, to say the least.”

I look at Kat. “And for you?”

She shrugs. “I got used to it.”

They all stare at her, their expressions a mix of disbelief and admiration as well. Living in close quarters with thousands of students can’t have been easy. Not for a week, a month, or in her case, four years.

“Impressive.” I nod.

A hint of pink touches her cheeks as she crosses her arms. “No, it wasn’t.”

“Take the damn compliment, woman,” I grumble.

“Call me woman again and you won’t like what I do.” Her eyes narrow.

Joy sighs. “Uh, I miss the honeymoon period.”

Kat and I turn to face her. “Honeymoon period?” we say in unison.

Emilio smiles down at Joy. “Don’t you remember how much we fought before we got together?”

I turn to look at Kat. She turns to look at me.