Page 148 of The Wolves of Forest Grove

“I’ll try,” Sam replied, and then after a second. “I will. I promise.”

“Something isn’t right,” I muttered at the next pause, gaze flitting to Clay’s stony expression. “She sounds...scared.”

“You think someone’s forcing her to do this?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, but she doesn’t sound like the Sam I know.”

He nodded like he agreed, but his cheekbones flared as he clenched his teeth. “Doesn’t matter,” he decided. “I don’t give a fuck if someone’s forcing her. If she were in some sort of trouble, she should have told us. She should have told me.”

He was right, so I didn’t say anything else, falling back into silence as Sam cleared her throat on the other end of the receiver.

“Okay,” she said in a sad whisper. “I’ll try to come back tomorrow after I find out more.”

Clay’s hand lifted to the door handle of the Chevelle, and I snatched his arm, holding him in place. This was not the time to fly off the goddamned handle. If he killed her, he would be sacrificing a beautiful opportunity to play this to our advantage. He was just too pissed off to see that.

“I love y—” her words were cut short and through the phone we could hear the blaring sound of a dead line wailing on the other end of her call before the solemn click of the receiver silenced it.

The door of the payphone booth clattered open and shut again, and I hit the side button on Clay’s phone to turn it off, mind racing with possibilities.

Clay tugged on his arm, trying to wrench it free of my grip. “If we leave now, we can catch up to her,” he seethed. “Looks like Jared’s going to get his wish after all.”

I shuddered at the reminder of what Jared had wanted to do to get information from Sam but composed myself again. “I have a better idea,” I told him, meeting his gaze with a rock solid resolve.

He cocked his head at me, and I licked my lips, trying to put together how best to say this so that he would go for it.

“Allie, spit it out or I’m going after her.”

“Okay,” I hissed, releasing his arm to sit back in my seat and reorganize the chaos in my skull.

“We can use this. She’s definitely guilty, but we still have no idea who it is she’s working with.

We don’t know where the shifters who were taken are.

And we don’t know when they will strike next other than the fact that they may try to intervene with another meat order. ”

I could see the gears turning behind his eyes now, too, shifting his focus away from blind rage and toward more useful thinking.

“What are you suggesting then? We just let her get away with this? Let her keep feeding whoever the fuck was on the other end of that call information that could hurt us in the hope that the next time they talk we’ll be able to figure out more?”

No. He wasn’t seeing the opportunity here.

“No. I’m suggesting we feed her information that would be useful to us. Like, say, a false lead about when and where the meat order is being picked up.”

His brow rose. “So that we can actually get it to camp,” he supplied, catching on.

“Yes, but also so that we can be the ones lying in wait when they walk right into the trap we set for them.”

“A Trojan horse?”

“A motherfucking Trojan horse,” I agreed with a wide grin and his brows drew together, eyes lit from within with the spark of his wolf and something like wicked delight.

“We take them out,” he supplied, chewing his bottom lip as he considered my plan and removing his hand from the door handle of the car, making me sag a little in relief that he wasn’t beyond reasoning. “Make them pay for what they’ve done.”

“All but one,” I amended. “To find out who is behind these attacks and why.”

“Sam will—”

“No.” I interrupted. “We need Sam to think we don’t know she’s against us for as long as possible. So long as she thinks she hasn’t been found out, we can use her.”

I leveled my gaze on him, thinking that he might challenge me on this, but after a beat of tense silence, his head bobbed in a grudging nod.

“Fine.”

“You think you can face her? Pretend shit’s all good?”

His jaw clenched. “Not like I have a choice.”

I brushed a hand down the length of his arm reassuringly until he looked at me. His dark hair swept low over his glowing eyes, making them appear even brighter amid the shadows.

“We’ll have blood for this,” I promised him. “When this is all over, whatever you want to do about Sam, I’ll support you.”

I didn’t add the other bit I was thinking, not wanting to voice it aloud. If he wanted her dead after we set things straight and brought home the missing pieces of our makeshift family, then I would deliver the killing blow.

I wouldn’t let him be the one to do it. If there was anything I’d learned from killing Ryland, it was that that shit never left you.

I still had trouble dealing with the fact that I was the cause of the death of my sibling.

..and I’d unconsciously killed her in the fucking womb. Absorbed her into me.

This would be worse. Sam was his little sister. He’d grown with her as a child. Cared for her. Protected her. Killed for her.

He couldn’t be the one to do it.

His lips pressed into a hard line at the unspoken promise in my gaze before he stuffed his phone back into his pocket and faced forward. “Let’s get out of here.”

He didn’t have to tell me twice.