Ace continued down to his office still trying to piece together all of the clues. Someone was helping Leif; that much was sure. Someone with access to medical supplies, it seemed. Though without knowing what drug was used, Ace couldn’t be certain if it was one of his own pack who had connections to the hospital or just a backyard pharmacist playing with chemicals.
Everyone had cleared out of his office, but as Ace entered the room, the judgment of all the Alphas around the walls threatened to crush him. Immortalized on the wall in all their splendor, they appeared to glare at him as if finding his reign unworthy.
“What the hell am I supposed to do?” he asked the empty room.
Cold, unfeeling eyes offered nothing in response to his frustration.
Ace collapsed on the sofa, feeling the need for sleep to clear his head but knowing it would not come. Even though the elixir he’d drunk was keeping him awake, the mental drain of processing so many unanswered questions was proving powerful enough to overcome even those magical effects.
A knock at the door startled him. It opened just a crack, and Peter poked his head inside. “Do you need anything, sir?”
“Why aren’t you sleeping now?” Ace threw the question at him like an accusation.
“Just doing what you asked, sir,” Peter replied. “You said to keep an eye on Tito. He only just retired.”
“Why so late? He was confined to his quarters hours ago,” Ace asked, with renewed curiosity.
“He had a visitor. Nikita Chevalier was trying to speak to him,” Peter replied. “But he refused her.”
“Where is she now?”
“Last I saw, she was heading back to her room. Looking a little annoyed, if I may say.”
“I wonder what she’s up to?” Ace asked, more to himself than to his butler.
“Do you want me to switch targets?”
“In the morning, yes. Get some sleep now.” Ace nodded. “Thank you.”
Peter bowed out of the room, and as the door shut behind him, Ace jumped to his feet and began scouring the briefings he’d received on the female from the Canadian territories.
28
Emma MacBride
Sleep came in troubling waves, cresting with nightmares of Leif’s maniacal laughter that broke upon a war-torn beach. Death lingered, waiting for another victim to claim. The domino effect had grown to such epic proportions that it seemed there was no way to stop it. One after another, they all fell. Brother killing brother. Packs reveling in the destruction of their enemies, claiming territories as their own, and immediately falling prey to another bigger, stronger pack. As the carnage rose to a deafening crescendo, the mighty hand of God appeared, ushering in a new more powerful breed of hunters. The Acta Sanctorum returned to cleanse the world of the unnatural.
She awoke in a cold sweat, eyes frantically searching the darkened room for truth to the reality that lay before her.
Blood’s coppery tang still clung to her skin – a reminder of the death and carnage that had happened earlier in the evening – but this place was not under siege.
Smells lingered, but no trace of their origin discolored her hands. No cries of the dying called out for her aid. The room held a silence that should have brought peace to her troubled mind, but only served to remind her of what remained when death came to call.
Emma’s heart raced as if she had experienced it all on the front lines, yet she found herself cradled in the warmth of a fluffy duvet. Slowly she began to allow herself to accept the reality of where she was. All that had come before had been vivid conjurings of her subconscious.
The dream clung to her memory as a warning of exactly how bad things could get. She’d casually alluded to it earlier before shit had hit the fan, hoping to impress upon Ace how important his position was, but the truth of the matter was they had to put a stop to it all before things snowballed out of control.
She threw herself out of bed and quickly dressed to accept company.
Morning’s light had not yet broken over the horizon, but through the sheer curtains, the gray-blue sky suggested it was not far from coming. Emma grabbed her phone and called Fallon.
She and Aiden were knocking on her door moments later.
“Sorry to wake you both. I wasn’t sure what to do.” Emma spoke frantically, still under the anxious rush of her dream warning. She pulled them inside her room and offered them a seat, not quite sure how to begin the conversation.
“You’re shaking.” Aiden’s concern was comforting, given her mental state at the moment. She almost expected anger at having woken them so early.
“Have you spoken with Ace?” Emma blurted out.
“We’ll be speaking to him in the morning.” Fallon pulled Emma to sit on the bed.
“We’re on the brink of war. I can feel it.” Emma sprang back up from the mattress the moment her butt hit the pillow top. She spoke in a jittery rush, still trying to process the dream’s warning and the reality of what had happened already. “Regina. The bodyguards. Leif. It’s all connected.”
“Bodyguards?” Aiden asked curiously. Either he was waiting for her to fill in the gaps, or he truly had not been informed of the extent of the damage done in the last few hours.
“Dead too. And whoever it was nearly took out Richard,” she replied. “I took care of him. He’s okay.”
“Regina’s bodyguards?” Aiden’s concern turned to annoyance. “Why weren’t we told?”
“See how easily it spreads?” Emma warned. “The suspicion. You were probably asleep when this went down.”
Aiden nodded and took a deep breath before responding. “True. I’m sure we’ll be notified when day actually breaks.”
Emma nodded. “But you see the domino effect already.”
“We have no quarrel with the other packs. We’re complying with everything the Long Teeth pack requested.” Aiden sounded as if he were trying to comfort her, but his words fell flat. “We’re in their territory, and I have already made it a point to play by their rules.”
“Until one of our own is targeted,” Emma warned. “Or how about Tito? He’s a wildcard as it is. What happens if one of his own is attacked next?”
“Calm yourself.” Aiden held his hands up to pause her train of thought before it headed further into doom and gloom. “I agree the timing of attacks is not good. But I’s sure Ace is handling this as it should be, and we will continue to cooperate.”
“He’s doing what he can. But he’s at his breaking point. I can tell.”
“Then as his ally, I will do what I can to assist. But only when he asks for it. I cannot overstep in his territory,” Aiden reminded her. “I’ve never seen you like this. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” she lied. Everything Aiden said made sense. But the warning still remained in the back of her mind. How much would it take to tip the scales? Who could be the next target? What death would really shake this council to its core?
“We’ll give the Long Teeth pack our full cooperation, no matter what happens,” Aiden reassured her.
“Then we should be putting our efforts into figuring out who Leif’s allies are.”
Fallon turned on Emma with a kind of curiosity that needed no words to back it up.
“We know he’s undermining us all, but what we don’t know is who’s in his employ,” Emma answered the unasked question.
“Have any suspects?” Fallon asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine.” Emma shrugged. “I’ve been trying to work through that question all night.”
“Who had the opportunity to poison Regina?” Aiden asked.
“We know she was poisoned when she visited Leif in the cell. What we don’t know is what the poison was and how they got it.”
“You’re working under the assumption she was poisoned without the intent to kill her, right?” Fallon asked.
“Yeah, because our people generally don’t die from poisoning.”
“So they just wanted her to act a bit crazy and then
recuperate?” Fallon sounded as if the whole idea were insane. And Emma had to admit to herself that when it was said that way, it sounded pretty bad.
“Okay, I know it sounds farfetched, but stay with me here.” Emma met Fallon’s eyes, begging her to listen. “They needed to make her look crazy to discredit her testimony. And then to further discredit the way Leif has been treated by the accusing packs.”
Fallon all but rolled her eyes in disbelief. “Why not just kill her, then?”
“Because killing an Alpha would only create more problems,” Aiden replied, before Emma could explain. “A bigger inquiry would have to be carried out.”
“Fair point,” Fallon agreed. “So this was a calculated risk. By... we’re assuming, Leif?”
“It has to be him.” Emma paced the space in front of the bed, trying to work through the facts and see if she’d missed something important. “She was dosed when she visited his cell.”
“Why visit his cell in the first place?” Aiden asked.
“To gloat,” Fallon answered, and both Emma and Aiden turned toward her, shocked by her blunt assessment. “What? Wouldn’t you gloat if the man responsible for my death were behind bars?”
Aiden nodded but did not speak to confirm the truth.
“Which means he expected that. He knew she would come. Creating opportunity.” Emma continued her pacing. “He probably instructed the Tweedles on what do to. How to dose her with the drug. They weren’t the brightest.”
“Where did the drug come from?” Aiden asked.
The wild-card question that had them all stumped. More trails still needed to be followed to their end, and none of them had a complete map to follow. “They would have had to procure whatever drug it was.” Emma spoke her thoughts out loud. “Which means it didn’t travel with them on the airplane. Too risky. They’d have had to pick it up here.”
Fallon picked up on her train of thought. “So we’re looking for a local contact with access to drugs.”
The word drug kept throwing Emma off. Regina’s body had given her all kinds of mixed messages when she’d performed her initial evaluation. The mottled skin. Splotchy like an allergic reaction... hives.
Aiden broke her train of thought, asking, “What kind of drugs would cause someone to act funny?”
“Tons of drugs will do that,” Emma responded snippily. She felt like she’d been on the verge of an epiphany before he’d derailed her with this question.
“Narrow it down,” Aiden replied, just as curtly. “What could someone easily get their hands on?”
“She was injected with it so it would have to be something.... Wait a minute.” Emma stopped dead in her tracks. “There was no label on the syringe, so it wasn’t a pre-packed dosage. It was something that either drawn up from a vial or prepared by hand.”
“Does that make a difference?” Aiden asked, giving his full attention to Emma as if he expected her answer to crack the case.
“It does if it’s a home-grown poison.”
Aiden leaned in closer to her. “Like?”
“Wild mushrooms. Oleander. Foxglove.” Emma remembered all the greenhouse plants she’d seen around the mansion. Some of the most beautiful and colorful plants in nature were deadly. “They’re all toxic to some extent. In small doses they can be therapeutic. But foxglove, for example, can cause symptoms like disorientation, depression, and loss of appetite.” She met with Aiden’s curious glare and asked, “Sound familiar?”
Fallon and Aiden both nodded, but neither of them opened their mouths to speak. Perhaps they knew better, now that Emma’s train of thought was on the right track.
“Overdose, however, adds hives, nausea, and eventually coma and heart failure to the list of symptoms.”
“But you said this drug can be used therapeutically?” Fallon asked.
“Yeah, there’s a commercial medicine derived from the foxglove plant for heart patients.”
“That certainly fits with the theory that they wanted to discredit her,” Aiden agreed.
“Only they accidentally overdosed her,” Fallon added.
“Oops.” Emma nodded. “I’ll bet she passed out and the Tweedles took her slow heartbeat as death and rushed to bury her and hide the evidence. That’s what ultimately killed her – suffocation. Had she been diagnosed, there are things I could have done to counteract the poison.”
“But we’re still missing one important answer.” Aiden sighed. “How could her bodyguards get their hands on the poison? They’d only just arrived that afternoon. They weren’t here long enough to cook up a poison themselves.”
Emma responded with the only answer she could come up with. “Someone with extensive knowledge of plants would have had to do it for them.”
For every answer there was another question, leaving them no closer to figuring out the missing link.
29
Aeson Silverman
Nikita’s background information had proved an interesting enough read to keep him awake until the sun had lifted high enough into the sky to officially call it a new day.
The door to his office opened without the courtesy of a knock or the visitor bring properly introduced. But that was his mother’s way. The office had been her place of business just as much as it had been his father’s when he was the Alpha. Any annoyance at being disturbed was immediately forgiven when he saw his mother carrying a steaming mug of coffee.
“Up all night, were you?” Vivian asked, with her motherly glare that said she knew the truth without even needing confirmation.
Ace greedily reached for the liquid caffeine, not caring if it burned all the taste buds off his tongue. All that mattered was getting it into his belly so that he might find the strength again to stand. “What do you know about Nikita?”
“Not much.” Vivian took a seat across from the desk. Even at this early hour of the morning, his mother looked as put together as any woman who’d spent hours at the salon. How she managed it was anyone’s guess. Vivian took a casual glance at the desk and smirked at the papers he’d strewn across it in his night of research. “She’s a second mate, I believe.”
“Odd, don’t you think?” Ace asked, hoping to lead her to say something that he might not have already read. “Wolves mate for life, or so the saying goes.”
“Absolutely right.” That earned him the kind of approving smile she used to give when he’d come home with straight A’s on his report card. “But Alphas must provide heirs, and Leif lost all his boys in one battle or another.”
It didn’t matter how old he’d grown or what position of power he held; earning that particular look from his mother worked like no other magic could, giving him confidence and determination to continue his current path. “And in all the time they’ve been together, she’s never had children?” He honed right in on the most important point.
“Well, it’s not like he can divorce her for not having kids.” Vivian dismissed the notion with a wave of her hand. “They’re mated. That is for life. His or hers.”
“And when Leif dies, she can legally claim his territory,” Ace said, to clarify the point. Wheels were turning slowly. The caffeine helped. So did his mother’s company. He’d suspected something the first moment he met Nikita, but without a clear line connecting the dots, he couldn’t make an outright accusation.
“If the council agreed. But we already discussed this.” Vivian’s former approval fell sharply into disappointment.
“I don’t think you’re understanding me.” Ace leaned towards his mother. “She’s pretty opportunistic, then, requesting our council’s consent so quickly and making a trip down here without a prior invitation.”
“Most wolves are,” Vivian replied. “Especially Alphas.”
Maybe he was overreaching or maybe he was completely off base about Nikita, but the more he thought about it, the more her actions seemed calculated. “What I found most interesting, though, in reading her background, is that she was an arranged mating.”
“Too much o
f that happening in these older territories.” Vivian’s disgust with that topic was plain. Her generation had seen it happen to the detriment of many a female wolf. Broodmates had been outlawed in their pack, but not all territories had followed suit. “It’s good that the younger generations of Alphas are putting a stop to it.”
“I agree. Mating for power and position only causes problems. Or in this case, I think a motive.” He drove his point home. “A vengeful broodmate might find any way to ensure the death of her husband, especially if it led to her ruling a territory.”
Vivian looked confused. “But Leif was going to be executed anyway.”
“And she stacked the deck to ensure it.” Ace nodded. “Do we actually know when Nikita arrived in town?”
“She showed up last night,” Vivian sounded slightly unsure. “During all that business with the bodyguards.”
“Alone, right?” Ace asked, and before she could answer, he filled in the silence. “With no driver. No entourage. She filed no itinerary with our staff. All of our communication was done by phone. Cellphone.”
“That is out of sorts.” As if a light had clicked on behind Vivian’s eyes, she too began to sound convinced.
“And she was coming here to personally ensure the council’s vote once Leif was executed.”
Vivian held up her hand to stop Ace’s train of thought. “She came to ask for it, but the council would have had to agree before she could legally have it. As I remember, we were not all in agreement.”
“That’s why she’s here. A personal touch,” Ace added, as a counterpoint.
Vivian had looked nearly convinced, but then she winced as if hesitating to respond. “No. I don’t think so. A female of no prominent upbringing, with no children by her Alpha husband, wants to claim power over a territory she has only been a part of for a few years? When you line the facts up, even the most feminist among us would say it’s a long shot.”
“We know it wasn’t going to happen, but I bet she doesn’t. Which is why she came down early. She poisoned Regina to make her even more spiteful toward Leif, ensuring the council would agree to his execution,” Ace said triumphantly. “Then as the only official link to the pack, she’d make a good showing and win us all over. She tried to talk to me privately. She’s been seen snooping around Tito. I guarantee she’s trying to work us all over.”
Being Alpha_Olde Town Pack Page 17
