Page 16 of Wishes in the Moonlight (Rocky Mountain Wolves #4)

~Troy~

I found Jasper at the internal security team’s office, the building located next to my own team’s headquarters just a short distance from the pack house.

Despite being so close to my workplace, I’d never been inside the two-storey, wood-framed building.

While my team’s office consisted of a large, open space, its walls lined with maps of the territory and team schedules, the internal security team felt almost corporate in comparison.

Each person had their own office, sharing the space with the interrogation rooms I’d thankfully never had a reason to be called into.

Jasper’s office had a window facing the pack house with a glimpse of the lake beyond, a pleasant view that emphasized his team’s role in protecting the internal functioning of the pack. “This is nice,” I complimented him as I took a seat at his sleek, black desk.

“It’s a recent upgrade,” he informed me wryly. “Getting on the Alpha’s good side comes with some perks.”

I could only imagine.

“What are her orders?” he went on to ask. When I called him a few minutes earlier, I said only that Amanda asked us to work together on something, leaving the details for a face-to-face conversation.

“We need to shut down all the pack’s access to the outside world. Phone lines, internet, everything. Make it seem like a technical malfunction. She said Beta Savannah can authorize it if necessary.”

Jasper’s nod confirmed he’d seen that coming.

“I was going to suggest it if she didn’t.

My team has a few satellite phones that we can’t disable as easily but we can track who accesses them.

I’ll leave them active for emergencies, and if anyone tries to use them for anything else, we’ll know about it. ”

He began to type into his computer while I waited, not feeling particularly helpful but not wanting to leave either since we still had a lot to talk about. Eventually, Jasper’s eyes drifted to me over the top of his computer screen and he gave me a sympathetic near-smile, closer to a grimace.

“I’m sorry about the conversation you walked in on earlier.”

With everything that had happened since, it took me a moment to realize what he meant, but soon, Savannah’s words came back to me. I still think Troy can go fuck himself.

The ‘still’ suggested it wasn’t the first time I’d been the subject of conversation, and though I wouldn’t have brought it up myself, since Jasper broached the subject, I decided to tentatively feel him out. “I guess the Alpha told you about the situation between us?”

“We were in the prison the day you told her that you were free to be together,” he reminded me, phrasing his response equally as carefully as I had my question. “She offered us a brief explanation this morning. That’s as far as it went.”

He obviously didn’t want me to think they’d been sitting around gossiping about me, but honestly, that bothered me less than the idea of Amanda keeping all her feelings about me, good or bad, bottled up with no one to share them with.

Keeping everything inside sucked.

I would know.

As if he could read my thoughts, or maybe just something in my expression, Jasper leaned a little closer to me over the desk.

“I didn’t really have a normal experience of finding my mate either.

I’m not sure how much you know, but I’d been kicked out of the pack and experimented on without my knowledge.

Part of my personality literally broke off to form a whole new persona.

I thought I was losing my mind. And in the middle of that, my mate appears.

It could have gone wrong in so many ways. ”

“It didn’t, though,” I pointed out. “You’re together.”

He nodded solemnly. “We fought hard for each other.”

I could read between the lines easily enough, especially considering what Savannah said that morning. “And I didn’t. That’s what you think.”

He held up his hands to deflect my words. “I don’t have nearly enough information to make any kind of judgement.”

“But it is what you think,” I pressed. “Your mate does too, obviously. And I don’t blame either of you. I don’t blame Amanda either. I understand why she’s angry with me, but I believe we can find a way to move past it now that she’s safe.”

Jasper’s eyebrows raised so sharply I could almost picture him in his wolf form, his ears twitching as he picked up the sound of something important. “What do you mean ‘safe’?”

I glanced around at the walls of his office, the space suddenly seeming more confined than before. “Do you mind if we take this meeting outside? Are you finished on there?”

I gestured at his computer and his gaze returned to it, typing a few more things on his keyboard before he stood up. “That should do it.”

Sure enough, as soon as he opened the door for us to exit, annoyed chatter greeted us. “Is your internet down too?” a man standing at his own office door asked Jasper.

“Yeah, the whole system just went down,” Jasper said, doing a good job of sounding like it had been completely unexpected for him too. “I’m going to head over to the pack house and talk to the IT team there. Hopefully it’ll be back up soon. We’ll just have to work offline in the meantime.”

More grumbling followed but Jasper ignored it, heading back out into the cool afternoon air, and I breathed deeply as the fresh air hit my face.

That was better. Being inside all day had never been for me, and even after my walk with Kalo earlier, there had still been a lot more sitting in offices than I usually endured.

We strolled together in companionable silence until we were outside of the pack’s admin district, far from any ears that might pick up on our conversation. Only the rustling of tree branches and the snap of twigs underfoot accompanied us.

“Why wouldn’t it have been safe for you and the Alpha to accept each other before now?” Jasper asked after taking one more look around to ensure we were entirely alone.

I’d never shared the details of my conversation with Alpha Warren with anyone, and I really didn’t know Jasper well at all, but something inside me urged me to speak the words out loud.

I was ready to do whatever it took to win Amanda’s trust, and if that meant putting my past decisions on full display, open for scrutiny, I would have to take the risk.

“I was on patrol the night Amanda turned 18. I knew the party was happening, like everyone in the pack did, but of course I wasn’t invited. I had no reason to expect to be, but all day, I felt like I should be there. Like something pulled me towards that place.”

Jasper nodded in understanding. “There’s no good reason I should have been at the edge of Ravenstone territory when Savannah arrived. Fate put me in that spot. I think gut feelings are often fate guiding us.”

“Could be.” Philosophical theorizing about fate had never been my concern, but I knew how I felt, and that night, I wanted to be there when she shifted for the first time.

It didn’t make any sense at the time, but in retrospect, the reason became clear.

“I ignored the instinct and went to work as I should. Not even an hour into my shift, the most beautiful wolf I’d ever seen appeared, and the bond hit me like a fucking lead weight.

It pulled me completely under. When she shifted and I saw who she was, I thought it had to be a trick.

I didn’t dare to hope. I was sure she’d reject me. ”

“But she didn’t.”

His words were quiet, non-judgmental, and I nodded in agreement. “She didn’t. She told me to come to the pack house in the morning and we’d speak to her father together to get his blessing.”

A frown creased Jasper’s face. “So what happened?”

I knew what he really meant: how did we get from that moment to where we were seven years later?

“I went to the pack house as soon as my shift ended. It was still early and Amanda wasn’t awake yet, but I couldn’t leave.

Walking away felt impossible. I asked if I could stay and wait for her, and the guard at the door agreed. An hour later, the Alpha called me in.”

My spine stiffened in response to the memories: the anticipation I felt walking down the hall, the confusion when I didn’t see Amanda in his office, and the cold, hard look in the older man’s eyes as I stood in front of him.

“Amanda was still asleep, but somehow, he’d guessed the situation.

Maybe I had a lovesick look about me, I don’t know.

He demanded to know what business I had with his daughter.

His Alpha authority compelled me to answer, and I didn’t really want to hide it anyway.

I told him we were mates and that she was willing to accept me.

I promised to do whatever I needed to in order to be worthy of her.

I just kept talking, and when he didn’t say anything, I spoke some more.

Finally, I ran out of words and the silence that followed chilled me to the bone. ”

Jasper shivered next to me, as if he could feel it too. “What did he say?”

I swallowed hard before forcing the words out. “He told me that I was nothing and no one, and he ought to have me executed for daring to think I would ever be a suitable mate for his daughter.”

Jasper sucked in a breath. “Shit.”

“It gets worse. He accused me of trying to use Amanda to improve my ranking in the pack. He claimed I was manipulating her somehow, that she would never agree to accept me on her own, and he said that unless I agreed to stay away from her and never mention our mate bond again, he would exile us both from the pack.”

As someone who knew the consequences of exile personally, Jasper blanched. “He threatened to exile his daughter?”

“Not just that.” Bile gathered in the back of my throat but I forced it down once again.

“He promised to put a bounty on her head. He would rather see her dead than mated to me, and the bounty would only be for her , not for me. So that if she were killed, I’d have to live with knowing it was because of me. ”

“Fuck,” Jasper breathed. “That’s insane. I can’t believe the Alpha said that.”

“I didn’t want to believe it either, but nothing about him at that moment suggested he didn’t mean it. I couldn’t call his bluff. I just couldn’t put her in that danger. So, I agreed to his terms, and he added one more condition.”

Jasper guessed it easily. “You couldn’t tell her what he said.”

“Right.”

For a minute or two, we walked in silence again, the calmness of the forest at complete odds with the pounding of my heart inside my chest.

“If it were only my life at risk, I wouldn’t have hesitated, but how could I protect her against assassins with no pack, no friends, no money? I couldn’t take the chance, so I agreed to all of his conditions, and she’s hated me for it ever since.”

“You have to tell her,” Jasper urged. “She deserves to know the whole story.”

“She does, but I’m afraid…”

I trailed off, my throat closing up one more time.

“I’m afraid she won’t believe me. It’s his word against mine, and she has no reason to give me the benefit of the doubt. I need to earn her trust first, to prove myself to her, and then I can tell her. Does that make sense?”

Jasper grimaced, kicking at a stone with his foot as he stepped.

“I see your point, I do, but I still think she needs to know. If for no other reason than because it’s another potential person who means her harm.

Her father gave up the pack, but maybe he’s not beyond hurting her to take it back again.

If he was willing to kill her before, what’s stopping him now? ”

An icy cold shiver slithered through my entire body. Fuck. I hadn’t considered that.

Could her father be the one who planted the necklace in her mother’s jewellery? Did he know about the genie? Would he use Kalo to get rid of his own daughter?

“We need to get back to the pack house,” I announced, and before Jasper could respond, I broke into a jog, determined to get to Amanda’s side before anything else could go wrong.