by Amelia Jade
“Hey,” she said, calling out and catching the attention of one of the nearer officers.
“Yes, miss?” he responded politely.
“How come nobody is calling this out for the big farce that it is?” she asked, unloading all of her suspicions without preamble.
The officer looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Well, because it’s not a farce, ma’am,” he said, looking pained. “After all, there is footage of Andrew shifting inside the town. That can’t be faked.” He paused, looking away, but Karri didn’t miss the anger that flashed in his eyes. “I suppose one could interpret him going into the house to be seen as him kidnapping you. It’s technically possible to see it that way.”
“But you don’t agree.”
“I follow orders, ma’am,” he said, fixing her with a look that said she was right, but he couldn’t come out and say it.
“As do the rest of the force,” she said, tilting her head in acknowledgment. “Would you say that the majority of your fellow officers agree that technically the footage could be interpreted that way?”
There was a pause as he thought about it. “Yes. The captain is, unfortunately, positive about it, as are several others. They see things differently than the rest. They can see things that we sometimes miss,” he said.
“Ah, I think I understand. They’ve been exposed to things that allow them to see this way?”
The officer nodded. Although they hadn’t come out and said it, Karri had all but confirmed that the captain and some of his underlings were being bribed to act on Al’s behalf.
“Thank you for the chat, officer. It’s been very eye-opening.”
“Sorry I couldn’t do more to be of assistance.”
“You’ve done plenty,” she said, heading back inside to where Gray waited.
Her brain was already spinning. The captain was deep in Al’s pockets. Nothing was going to change that really. Andrew was going to be forced to resign in disgrace and go back to Cadia. She would never see him again. That was unacceptable. What could she do, though? She had to get some of the charges against him dropped, enough that would make the case against him seem less clear-cut.
Almost immediately Karri knew what she had to do. It would mean she was giving up something she desperately wanted.
But in return, I’ll get something I think I need…
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Andrew
The ride to the police station was uneventful. He’d kept expecting the captain to make threats or something, but in reality, nothing happened. They didn’t exchange a single word. Then again, they didn’t have to. Both parties knew what was going on. Andrew was aware now that this had been Al’s plan all along.
He had to give the wolf shifter credit. Instead of coming after Andrew with pure violence, he’d instead deployed a cunning plan that the gryphon shifter hadn’t seen coming at all. He’d walked into each trap over and over again. The cherry on top had been Karri’s father and his missing persons report. That had to be entirely coincidental; there was just no way he could envision Kirttle working with shifters. But it had been the final nail in the coffin. His coffin. The police captain had never truly struck him as bribable before, but with all the evidence in front of him, he wasn’t being bribed to make something up anymore.
No, all the captain had had to do was see the evidence from a certain—albeit unrealistic—point of view. There was enough evidence to support his claim though, which was what mattered in the here and now. Andrew didn’t see a way out of it yet, so he’d gone along quietly, and without issue. The last thing he wanted was a real resisting arrest charge.
Andrew didn’t know much about human courts, but he knew that they would never buy the story about Myles being sent on behalf of the police force. Shifter-on-shifter violence was outside of human jurisdiction, even if it happened on human ground. No court would try to change that. So that could get thrown out. He was positive the video of him and Karri leaving the house, when shown to an impartial jury, would also be dismissed. The home was owned by a shifter, which meant that he wouldn’t be in trouble for breaking into it in the same way he would if it were human-owned.
That left the shifting in the city limits, and then the charge/accusation by Karri’s father that he had kidnapped her. Things would probably be okay if that charge could be dropped. If all he was convicted of was shifting within city limits, he could return to Cadia a free man. Karri’s testimony should put that to rest.
As he was removed from the car and walked inside, Andrew became confident that he would be a free man. Unfortunately, that didn’t matter. The damage to his reputation had been done. There was no way he would be allowed to continue as ambassador. Cloud Lake had perfectly clear, unaltered evidence of him shifting inside the town’s limits. He couldn’t refute that, couldn’t say it was someone else. That alone would be enough to have him removed and sent back in disgrace, although without further recrimination.
The police station was a squat three-story affair. A plain concrete building with minimum amounts of windows and a very spartan look to it. There was little in the way of decoration, just a coat of arms above the main doors and the police department flag to one side of the door, and the national flag to the other.
“Lovely joint you’ve got here,” he muttered as he was escorted through the front doors.
There was no response.
Oh boy. White. My favorite color.
Everything was white. The walls, the ceiling, the lights. Even the floors had once been white, though they were now faded and scuffed with age. What was it with humans and white? Andrew couldn’t understand it.
He followed the directions, expecting to be thrown in a holding cell. Instead he was directed to what he could only surmise was an interrogation room. The eight by eight room featured three solid walls. The fourth had a rectangular pane of glass that he knew was one-way.
In the middle of the room there was a metal table that had been bolted to the floor, and two metal chairs. A metal ring protruded from the table in front of one of the chairs. A similar ring was anchored into the concrete floor. For prisoner chains. He gave the captain credit for not bothering to put those on him. They wouldn’t have hindered him in the slightest, and would actually have ticked him off, since he’d said he would come in peace.
“Take a seat,” the captain said, gesturing to the chair with the rings near it.
Andrew did as directed, expecting the captain to sit. Instead, he turned and left the room, closing the door behind him.
“Are you seriously trying to play the intimidation game?” he asked loudly, knowing that someone would be listening.
Almost immediately the response came back. “No. The person coming to talk to you is just running behind. They’ll be there momentarily.”
He didn’t recognize the voice. With a shrug he settled back into the stainless steel metal chair, enjoying that unlike most chairs—including the one in his office—it didn’t squeak and groan in protest as he relaxed into it. It was a small thing, but it made his lips twitch.
Just as his eyes began to droop toward sleep the door opened and an older woman in a suit walked in.
“Who are you?” he said immediately, dropping his feet from where he’d put them on the table.
Without a word the woman dropped some stapled papers onto the table.
“Sign this, and you’re free to go.” She held out a pen.
“Let me guess, this is my resignation as Cadian ambassador to Cloud Lake.”
The pen moved in her hand, the only acknowledgment that he was correct. He took it and twirled it around as he contemplated what would happen if he signed it.
If you sign it, you go back to Cadia. If you go back to Cadia, Karri can patch things up with her father. She’ll get the company.
It was that argument that kept coming back to him.
“Who is going to be assigned as ambassador to replace me?” he asked, still flipping the pen around.
The woman jus
t gave him a knowing look.
“I’d do it in a heartbeat if I didn’t think that Al was going to abuse the position and ruin all the good faith that I’ve built up here in town. He’ll fuck it up, and all of his buddies will come here and someone will get killed. A human. Then Cadia will come under attack as a result of it. Al is a loose cannon.”
The woman’s lips became a thin line, a look on her that he realized meant she was contemplating.
“You have no idea who I’m talking about, do you?” he sighed.
“I was retained to come here and have you sign these documents, that is all,” she said tartly.
“Of course you were.” He sighed. Did he really have much choice? He was going to be forced out either way. At least this way he resigned on his own terms, and wasn’t stripped of the position in disgrace. He’d consider himself lucky, except he knew that it would take them weeks to file all the proper paperwork back home to have him recalled, then a trial, and finally a verdict. Lots could change in that time. By having him resign, it was effective immediately. So despite the fact that it would allow him to go free, he didn’t see it as a nicety.
His mind kept coming back to Karri and her father. If he did this, her life could be restored, put back on the right track. He’d correct that wrong, and in doing so, ensure that all the employees of her company had jobs for decades to come. Wasn’t that exactly why he’d taken the position in the first place? To try and help better the lives of the humans any way he could?
But there was all the damage Al was likely to do that he had to consider as well. With someone like him in power here, he would do a lot of damage before he was stopped.
Probably. You can’t know that for sure. Whereas you know for sure what will happen if Karri doesn’t get her father’s company.
With a sigh he made his decision. The pen stopped spinning.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Karri
She stood still, simply staring at the wall.
Her father paced back and forth in front of her, screaming vitriol and invectiveness in a never-ending streak that actually kind of surprised her. It was quite a while before he started repeating himself. She’d never known him to have such an extensive vocabulary before.
“Are you done?” she asked as he began to wind down, and then braced herself as he launched himself into another tirade.
By the time he came to a halt she’d been standing in the front hall of his house for a good fifteen minutes being screamed at. It wasn’t the reception she wished she’d gotten, but considering the last time she’d seen him he’d cast her out of the family, it was actually better than she’d expected.
Karri was willing to put up with it all, however, as long as she achieved her goal in the end. She’d come back to her father’s place with one goal in mind, and that narrow focus was allowing her to drown out all the things he was saying to her.
“Get out,” he said at last.
Steeling herself, Karri crossed her arms and prepared to defy her father. “No,” she said, injecting as much iron into her tone as possible, hoping to get through to him that she wasn’t leaving until she was damn well ready to, and on her own terms.
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t give me that bullshit,” she said, already tired and only having just started. “You heard me clearly. I said I’m not going. Not until you calm down and have a rational talk with me.”
“How am I supposed to have a rational talk with someone who would betray her family?” he screamed, his face going blotchy red.
“I didn’t betray anyone, Father. Quit being so dramatic.”
The older man shook, so angry he couldn’t even speak.
“Father, listen to me, and listen well. You have got to let go of your hatred. You have to grieve for her. She’s gone.”
He didn’t respond. Karri sighed and decided to try a different approach.
“Look at it this way. If the situation had been exactly the same, except no shifters were involved. Let’s say they didn’t even exist. If someone from Cloud Lake took Mother. Would you hate every resident in Cloud Lake with the same rage you have these past few years?”
He looked away.
“Exactly. You wouldn’t. You’d hate the person responsible, because you know the rest of them would have had nothing to do with it! If I dated someone from Cloud Lake, would you try and shoot them simply because of where they’re from?”
She held up a hand when he opened his mouth to speak. “No, Father. You do not get to dictate who I can and cannot date anymore. I am a thirty-year-old woman. I am allowed to make my own choices, to make mistakes if need be. I understand that you’re worried, that some of that anger is born out of fear for me. It’s…endearing, when you aren’t firing your damn shotgun at me. Which, by the way, you have yet to apologize for.”
He was beginning to squirm under her constant assault, and Karri kept pressing it. She’d always abandoned these sorts of fights with him before they even started, not wanting to risk him taking the company away from her in a fit of rage, but now it didn’t matter any longer. Now she could hit him with every trick in the book.
“She’s dead, Father. It hurts to say. I know. I’ve cried over i. Have you? She may not have been my biological mother, but she sure played the part of mom for over twenty years. If you even try to pretend like she didn’t mean just as much to me as she did you, then you’re a liar as well.”
Karri took a step toward him, noting the way he was no longer red in the face, his eyes darting left and right as she approached. This was long overdue, a conversation they should have had over a year ago. Grieving for a lost loved one was hard. It wasn’t something that Karri had any experience with. She knew exactly zero about how to approach it, what to say, what not to say. But it was clear to her that her father had wrapped himself in a ball of anger, insulating himself from his grief.
As time had passed, the anger had hardened into something she doubted he knew how to get rid of. So it was up to her to chisel and blast her way through it, exposing the hurt below. Tears welled up in her eyes as she continued to speak.
“I miss her,” she whispered. “So unbelievably much. Every day I wake up, and something triggers a memory of her, and I think about wanting to shoot her a text, to tell her that this reminded me of her. And then it all comes rushing back to me, the fact that she’s gone. Those assholes from Fenris took her, Father. They killed her. And you know what Andrew and his friends did?”
Her voice took on a feral snarl. “They hunted them down, Father. They went after them and they killed them. Every one of the fuckers who came to our little peaceful town. They ended them without mercy, without tenderness. We might not have known who did it, but they did. They avenged her, Father. You don’t have to love them. You don’t even have to like them. But you have to let go of your hatred just because they’re different.”
She offered up a silent prayer and then stepped closer, wrapping her arms around him in a tight hug, letting the tears spill down her cheeks at last. “I miss her too…Dad.”
He shuddered, and a moment later his arms came up to pull her in tight, holding her like a father to his daughter.
“I miss her so much,” he whispered in her ear, his voice breaking as sobs interrupted it.
“Me too,” she said, giving him a squeeze. “Me too.”
They stood like that for some time, letting their grief out.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last.
Karri knew that had to cost him, but she needed to keep pressing. To hear him say it. “For what?”
“For everything,” he said insistently. “Being an asshole these past two years. I took out far more of it upon you than I had any right to. Hell, I shot at you!” He looked away. “Oh my God, I shot at my own daughter!” He ran a hand through his thin graying hair. “What kind of father am I?”
She laughed, sounding almost hysterical when mixed with her tears. “It’s okay. You have terrible aim. You missed me entirely.”
She paused, trying to decide if she should continue. Screw it, he needs to get over it. “You hit Andrew twice though. You almost blew off his foot and you made a mess of his back. If he were a human, he’d have died on the spot.” She wasn’t going to forgive him quite so easily, even though it was reassuring to hear him sound genuine about apologizing to her.
“I…I regret doing that,” he said at last.
Good enough I suppose. That’s more than I think I ever actually expected him to say.
Karri didn’t want to push it. Her father was feeling sentimental at the moment, but that didn’t take away from the core feelings he had within him. He still didn’t want her running the company. That would never change. So she decided to play her final trump card.
“Father, I need you to do something for me.”
“What’s that?” he asked warily.
It had to be done. There was no way around it. Not if she wanted to make things right in the end. It would make her father happy too, which would help. Two out of three parties wasn’t a bad ratio. It was better than one out of three.
Taking a deep breath, she told him exactly what was going to happen. At first he looked at her like she was crazy, having never expected to hear the words come from her mouth, but by the time she was finished, Karri knew she had him on board. He would do as she needed, in exchange for what he wanted.
It was a deal worth doing.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Andrew
The cell door clanked aside, and the police captain stepped into view.
“Is it exercise time already?” he asked dryly.
“Grab your things,” the other man snapped, clearly irritated. “You’re free to go.”
Ah, so they’d made the arrangements had they?
“Good,” he said, yawning. “I was beginning to wonder if there was some incompetence going on or not.”
The captain bristled, but Andrew just shouldered him out of the way as he strode through the cell door.
