Caged, page 15
“Sounds good.”
I ended the call and slipped the phone back into my pouch.
“He’s on edge,” Peasblossom said, keeping her voice down even though Liam would hear her regardless. She tugged on my shirt, and I lifted her to my shoulder. “He wasn’t this bad when he was with us last week.”
“No, he wasn’t. At least he’s ordering food. That should help.” I bit the inside of my lip. “Do you think this is something that was building, or did something happen after he left us?”
“Emma was turned five months ago. She shouldn’t still be questioning him like this. If it’s been this bad the whole time…” Peasblossom shook her head. “Building gets my vote.”
Liam hung up the phone. “As you may have noticed, things have not been going smoothly around here.”
“Emma?” I asked.
“Not just Emma, but she’s a big part of it. I let her and Stephen move in together two months ago. Brenna insisted it would help her adjust, but now I can see that was a mistake. She acts like Stephen is her alpha. She looks to him for protection, and she looks to him to learn the rules. The problem with that is Stephen has been steadily losing respect for my rules.”
“Did Brenna notice that it wasn’t working?” I asked.
Liam leaned against the counter, holding onto the edge with both hands as if anchoring himself. “The problem Brenna saw wasn’t with them. It was with me.”
I remembered our earlier conversation in his truck on the way to meet with May. “She was concerned you were turning into your dad.”
“I told you I left my father’s pack to start my own. What I didn’t mention was how I did it.” He gripped the counter tighter. “I did what Stephen’s doing now. I highlighted the differences between us. I chose moments right after Dad delivered one of his ‘obedience lessons,’ when people were scared. I sat with people and talked to them, helped them feel safe again. I dropped little hints that while I supported our alpha, if it were up to me, I’d do things differently.”
“Blake doesn’t strike me as someone who offers false praise,” I said gently. “He thinks you’re an incredible alpha.”
“And among my pack, I am. Experienced shifters recognize what I’m trying to do, and they understand the less pleasant parts of leadership because they know I’m fair, and I don’t hurt people to make a point.”
Understanding dawned. “But here at New Moon, you’ve got a bunch of recently turned shifters who still have human ideas about how social structure works.”
“And shifters who need rehabilitation to bring themselves under control,” Liam added grimly. “Shifters who need a heavier hand to rein in their more violent tendencies.” He snorted. “It’s the perfect breeding ground for mutiny.” He stared down at his feet. “The worst part is, I’m starting to understand my father. I understand why he chose the method he did. It was a simpler way.”
“I admire you for trying to be better,” I said quietly. “You chose a harder path.”
“So did you.”
He met my eyes then. It took my breath away to see the pain in his gaze. I kept my mouth closed, resisting the urge to ask him who an alpha had to lean on and confide in when things became unbearable. It wasn’t a question someone should ask if they weren’t ready to be the answer.
“And now Brenna.” Liam ran a hand over his face. “Stephen’s been getting to her. It was bad enough when I only knew she was missing. I could tell myself she’d gone off on her own to think, or maybe she’d told me she was leaving and I’d forgotten. Now I find her DNA at a murder scene along with a fresh shifter. And I find out she’s been hiding so much…” He choked before he could finish the sentence, his gaze falling to the floor again.
“We’ll find her,” I said, keeping my voice soft, but firm. “We’ll find her, and you two can sit and have the conversation you both obviously need.”
He bent down and started gathering the pages of the reports that he’d dropped. “Brenna and I were close. We are close. Were.” He braced his fist against the floor. “I should have noticed I was losing her. I can’t believe she kept so much from me.”
Guilt stabbed at me as an image of Flint rose in my mind. The sudden weight of it hit me and I let it carry me to the floor, kneeling to help Liam retrieve the dropped pages. “The thing about keeping secrets,” I started lightly, “is that it usually starts with one piece of information you don’t want to share. Maybe because it’s not the right time. Maybe because you’re not sure how the other person will react. It sounds to me like Brenna had feelings for St. John, she knew you didn’t like him, and she chose not to tell you—yet. That put distance between you, and everything else snowballed from there.”
Liam stared at the floor, papers forgotten in his hand. “She found out the man she fell for was responsible for the death of a patient who relied on her guidance.” His voice was so low, I had to lean in to hear him. For once there was no anger. He wasn’t thinking about St. John. He was thinking about his sister. Her pain. “What does that say about our relationship if she thought she couldn’t tell me any of that?”
“You don’t know that she wasn’t going to tell you, or that she didn’t have a plan to tell you,” I said gently. “If she did have feelings for him, then finding out what he did… That would have taken her some time to work through herself. You can’t expect her to talk to you about it, knowing how you’d probably react, when she didn’t know how she felt herself?”
Liam didn’t answer that, focusing on gathering the report. I handed him the pages I’d retrieved and stood. “We’re going to find her, and then the two of you can talk.”
The papers tapped sharply against the desk as Liam settled them into a neat pile. “My personal issues with my sister aside, she was there. She bit Paul.”
I waited, but he didn’t say anything more. “What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know. But I have a hard time believing that either Paul or Varca could have caught her and held her against her will. So either she was there willingly, or someone helped Varca or Paul catch her.”
“You think Andy was right?” I asked.
Liam stared at the pages as he started putting them back in the right order. “Starting a new pack takes money. Most packs need a business to run to cover the costs of a pack—repairing the damage after someone loses control, supporting new members who just turned and can’t keep working. Varca wanted a wolf, and from what your partner said, he was willing to pay a lot of money to get one. Given Brenna’s feelings about my decisions regarding Stephen, and her obvious interest in helping him form a new pack…”
“So you think Brenna allowed herself to be sold and played good pet wolf, intending to run away later and keep his money?”
“It wouldn’t have been a bad idea,” Liam said. “I’m not even sure if it’s technically illegal. Can’t say anyone’s ever tried it before.”
“If that’s true, then why bite Paul?” I asked.
Liam considered that. “Maybe she changed her mind. Or maybe she discovered they’d taken precautions that would make escaping too difficult to risk. She may have bit him to escape.”
“If that were true, then she’d have left a trail behind,” I pointed out. “If she were pretending to be a wolf, she couldn’t very well drive herself there.”
“If she were pretending to sell herself as a pet, she’d need a partner. Someone that negotiated the deal with Paul, or Varca. She could have left with them.”
“If someone else was involved in the deal, then why was Paul there?”
“Maybe Varca told him he had a wolf and asked Paul to come over and run it through some exercises, make sure it was really trained? Maybe that’s what ruined Brenna’s plan. She and her partner weren’t expecting Paul to be there.”
I drummed my fingers against the top of my pouch. That did make a certain amount of sense. “But why would Brenna be hiding now? Like you said, what she tried to do wasn’t exactly illegal. And if she bit Paul in self defense, you wouldn’t hold that against her.”
“Biting Paul would be reason for punishment,” Liam corrected me. “Because she chose to be there in that situation. She had no way of controlling who was and wasn’t there. It carried a risk.” He frowned. “But that doesn’t explain why she disappeared so suddenly two weeks earlier.”
“Unless she wanted to fake her own abduction,” Peasblossom pointed out. “If she’d just disappeared the day Adrian was robbed trying to buy a wolf, that would be suspicious. And word was bound to get around.”
Liam’s energy roiled against me, a sign he was getting upset again, and part of me half-expected the force of his aura to scatter the report over the floor again.
I cleared my throat. “All right, so let’s say she wasn’t there willingly. Let’s say someone more powerful than Paul or Varca managed to capture her and hold her against her will. She saw an opportunity to escape, she bit Paul, and ran away.”
“Then we’re back to how did she leave without leaving a trail for us to follow?”
Peasblossom perked up, her sudden movement almost sending her tumbling off my shoulder. Her grappling gun clicked, and a second later there was a vicious tug at my hair.
“Ow!” I yelped.
“What if she stole a car?” Peasblossom asked excitedly, hugging the grappling gun as she dangled from my hair. “Rich men always have more than one vehicle.”
Liam straightened, a hint of hope brightening his blue eyes. “I’ll check vehicle registration records and see if he had another car.”
“I’ll ask Andy to do it,” I said, wincing as I untangled the pixie and her grappling gun from my hair. “That way you can eat your dinner.”
Pausing with his phone in his hand, Liam fixed me with a stare that almost made me forget the pain in my scalp.
“My understanding is that it’s best for shifters to have a full belly during stressful situations,” I said weakly.
Liam made a sound deep in his throat, but nodded and turned his attention to Kylie’s report. “Fine.”
I fished Peasblossom out of my hair and set her on the desk to untangle her grappling line while I texted Andy.
“If Brenna was unwilling,” I said thoughtfully, “then that means someone tried to sell her.”
“Either someone strong enough to overpower her, or someone she trusted,” Peasblossom volunteered. She grunted and shook a particularly stubborn knot, making it ten times worse in the process.
“Brenna’s no pushover, she wouldn’t be easy to overpower,” Liam mused. “But she was no fool either. I can’t imagine anyone she trusted getting the drop on her. She wouldn’t have been easy to trick.”
“So maybe look at it from a different angle. Can you think of anyone who hated Brenna, anyone who’d want her out of the way, or want to see her suffer? Anyone who needed money so badly that they’d sacrifice her to get it?”
“I can’t think of anyone who hates Brenna,” Liam said. “Even Stephen and Emma like her.”
“You said she’s a therapist here, and she’s responsible for new wolves and for wolves having a hard time keeping balance. Therapy can be very intense, and it’s not unusual for clients to displace emotions that arise during therapy onto their therapist.”
“What about St. John?” Liam asked.
I grabbed Peasblossom’s grappling gun and wrinkled my nose at the now even bigger knot. “You think he’d do that to Brenna?”
“She quit counseling him, there had to be a reason.”
I gripped the knot with the tips of my fingernails, trying to loosen it. “I’m pretty sure the reason was the romantic relationship. Brenna probably transferred him to another therapist as soon as she decided she wanted to pursue her romantic feelings.”
A dark cloud passed over Liam’s face. “I don’t trust him. We research everyone who comes into the center. If they have skeletons in their closet, people who will ask a lot of questions, we need to know so we can stay ahead of it while they adjust. Our research into St. John was more interesting than most. He’s left behind a trail of angry women.”
“Not just the one that cursed him?” I asked.
Liam snorted. “She was just the most recent. He has a bad habit of earning women’s trust then taking advantage of them.”
“Too bad for him the last one was a witch,” Peasblossom commented. She crowed in triumph as I finished unraveling the knot, then clicked the button on the grappling gun. The untangled cord zipped back into place.
“So do you think St. John talked Brenna into going along with a plan to fleece Adrian, or do you think he sold her against her will?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But right now, I’d bet the latter. Maybe he had her hidden away, trapped so she couldn’t rat him out.” His grip on the report tightened, and the paper rustled as it began a slow death.
“If that were true, then why would St. John still be hanging around?” I asked.
“Maybe Varca never transferred the money.” Liam slapped the report down on the table. “Maybe Brenna escaped before he could close the deal.”
“There was no evidence of a fox shifter at the scene,” I said doubtfully.
“St. John would have known about Vincent’s spell. He could have met with Paul and arranged for him to be the one to deliver Brenna.” Liam drummed his fingers on the table. “St. John used a spell to zap the first person to come into his apartment without his permission. Could he have other magic?”
“Maybe. Or he could have access to someone who does.”
Liam frowned. “The ex who cursed him moved to France shortly after. I reported her to the Vanguard.”
“If he stole from her, she was within her rights to curse him,” I pointed out. “She didn’t kill him, she could argue that it was a proportional punishment.”
“I didn’t report her to have her punished, I reported her so I could request a tag on her passport. I just wanted to know if she came back, especially during his year here at New Moon. So far, she hasn’t tried to return to this country.”
“He had other magic objects in his apartment,” Peasblossom offered. “I saw sleeping powder on the table with the lamp.”
“Sleeping powder?” I asked.
Liam wrinkled his nose. “That explains the bad smell. Valerian root, right?”
“Yep. Stinky stuff, isn’t it?” Peasblossom agreed.
“Could he be a wizard?” Liam asked.
“It’s possible. I didn’t pick up on it, but depending on how powerful he is, he could hide from me even if I was looking for some sign of his magical ability. Either way, it’s impossible to find out for sure while he’s MIA.”
“If he’s guilty, then he’s going to run,” Liam said grimly. “He has enough control over the change that he could survive on his own. He’ll be sorry eventually that he has no support network, but then I guess he’s used to relying on himself.” He slammed a fist down on the desk, and I winced as his aura flared white-hot all over again. “If he’s responsible for Brenna disappearing… If he’s hurt her…”
Blessedly, room service chose that moment to arrive with our food. I must have looked as panicked as I felt, because the gruff, stout man who delivered the food glanced quickly from Liam to me, and understanding softened his features. He made a beeline for one of the tables, and in five seconds flat, he had the dinners uncovered and ready for consumption. He left as quickly as he’d arrived, and honestly, I couldn’t blame him.
We sat down, and I was grateful when Liam started eating right away. Whatever was causing his strained control, a full belly was never a bad thing for a shifter’s temper.
I nibbled on a French fry and tried to study Liam while he wasn’t looking. I thought of Ruth. If St. John was right, and she did have feelings for Liam, then it would have taken a lot for her to go against his wishes like she had warning St. John to stay away. She had to be legitimately concerned with Liam’s control.
What’s a nice way to ask an alpha werewolf if he’s been a bit testy lately?
“So you’re losing control then,” Peasblossom said conversationally. She picked a grain of salt off one of my fries and tried to skip it across the table. “What’s that about then?”
Liam paused with a bite of steak halfway to his mouth. “What?”
“Temper—”
“I think what Peasblossom is trying to say,” I interrupted, scrabbling for a honey packet with my left hand, “is that we’re sorry things have been so stressful around here.”
Liam narrowed his eyes. For a long minute, I thought I was going to see another uncharacteristic flare of temper. Then he finished the bite of steak, stared down at his plate, and took a deep breath.
“After I had Stephen collared, I knew I was in for a rough time. But after the initial blow up, he really pulled himself together. I took the collar off after two weeks. I told him he had to start at the bottom and work his way up. And he did. Emma made progress with Brenna, and like I said, a couple months ago I let her and Stephen move in together, and everything was going really well. Stephen was in therapy, he was working harder, showing more initiative. I thought maybe he was just showing off for Emma, but I didn’t care why he was getting better, just that he was getting better. Then he started backsliding.”
He downed half his water in one gulp, then put the cup down with more force than was wise for something made out of paper. “A wizard approached me a few weeks ago. He said Emma had contacted him, asked him if he could remove a collar that kept a werewolf from shifting.”
I winced. “Preparing in case you collared Stephen again.”
Liam grabbed his knife and sawed off another piece of steak. “The wizard told her he couldn’t do it. He said he came to me because he knew if a shifter was worried about being collared, likely there was a good reason for it.”
That might have been part of it, but I was guessing the wizard was also very anxious to avoid any chance he’d end up in the middle of shifter politics. When werewolves went at it, there was usually blood, and wizards might be magic, but they bled all the same.
“Kristine said it was a natural part of therapy,” Liam continued. “She said I shouldn’t be discouraged and this could be a temporary setback.”
