The Society Series Box Set 2

by Mason Sabre

  “Are you sure? You don’t mind? I mean I can come in. I will. It’s just …”

  “Beth is having a good day.”

  “Yeah. It’s so wonderful to see her smile.”

  Cade leant back in his chair and gave a smile of his own. It didn’t reach all the way to his eyes, but he was happy for Natalie and her sister. He pinched the skin at the top of his nose, pushing his thumb and finger into the corners of his eyes as he took a breath. He tried to breathe so Natalie wouldn’t pick up on his relief. She’d be hurt, and rightly so. “Well, you don’t know when you’ll get another day like this. Besides, there's not much you can do here just yet. It’s mostly setting you up on the work station, shit like that. We can do that anytime. My father won't care if you don’t come in.” No. Trevor wouldn’t care what she did. As long as her mother was part of Society and providing his political aide, he’d be happy.

  “No. We don’t.” He could hear the edge of sadness in her voice. She had told him about Beth’s struggles and that these moments of relief weren’t just for Beth, they were for the entire family. A snapshot moment in their lives to feel normal. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  “Of course, I don’t. I’ll be home sometime this evening. I got Jessica’s records today. I want to go through them and get something moving a little faster on it all. Maybe get us some answers.”

  It was strange to tell someone who wasn’t Gemma what was going on with work.

  “Tell me about it when you get home?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you sure you don’t need me to come in? I can go through the records for you.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I've got this. You enjoy your day, okay?”

  “Thank you.” Squeals erupted in the background and the giggling began once more, but then when she ended the call and hung up, Cade was suddenly thrown into the silence of his office again and transported back into himself.

  He didn’t put the phone back on the desk, though. He leant with his elbows on the desk. Gemma’s name appeared above Natalie’s in his call list. He pressed call under her name and put the phone to his ear before he could talk himself out of something he already knew was a terrible idea. He hadn't spoken to her in two days. It might as well have been months. Every minute dragged, and he was surprised he had made it this far.

  “Hello?” Just the sound of her voice was enough to rouse his wolf from the depths of his solitude.

  A heartbeat passed, and Cade listened to the connection between them. The universe had connected them, and he could reach out across space and time and pull her closer. His body ached from just the sound of that one word.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked when he hadn't said anything.

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “Did you call me by accident?”

  He let his head hang and pressed the phone against his ear until it hurt. There were no accidents. Not with her.

  “Cade?”

  His heart twisted with the sound of her voice and his wolf howled with the need to go to her. She was just a step away, something he could reach, but the world was denying him. “I miss you.”.

  She let out a slight choked gasp. “Cade … please.”

  “I needed to hear you.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, but she was still there. He could hear her breathing, but more than that, he could feel the connection between them. It was like she was there, an invisible cord connecting them both together. “I called you this morning,” she said after a moment had passed. “Natalie answered. Said you were sleeping.”

  His heart jack-hammered hard enough it felt like it smashed into his ribs. “Gemma … I—”

  “It’s okay. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. I’m going to go now.”

  “Gem …”

  “Bye, Cade.”

  The line clicked, and the call went dead. Cade stayed there, frozen, every piece of him not able to move. His skin chilled with the absence of her voice and his wolf whimpered back down. He clasped the phone between both palms and then leaned his face into his hands as if praying. He would have prayed if he thought it would work, but every time he thought he was going forward, the world took another thing from him.

  He swallowed several times, his breathing ragged. His chest tightened enough he thought in a moment he would stop breathing. His throat constricted, painfully swollen inside and he pressed his hands to his face as his mind tried to run away with everything.

  When he could move, Cade threw his phone into the top drawer of his desk, sucked in a breath and then let it out slowly. He wiped his hands across his face as if to somehow wipe away the emotions that riddled his body like rapid fire. Man and wolf fought. One trying to wander into the wilderness of insanity to pine, and the other, trying to get a desperate grasp onto work and things he could control.

  Man won out and Cade grabbed the papers from the envelope and held them in both hands, forcing his gaze to fixate on the rows of blurred numbers.

  He had to get a grip.

  He had Jessica’s bank records. They went back to the creation of her account, which was only two years back. Mostly, it showed her wages going in, and then it filtered out across the month to various places. There was nothing unusual in that—nothing there that seemed to total the five hundred they had found in her room. Not recently, at least. He scoured the records, losing himself as he made lists of the purchases that appeared the same, month in, month out. He could eliminate them from any suspicion. The odd purchase, he could search by name and most of them came up as nothing more than usual teenage online expenditures.

  Ten months ago, she had made two cash withdrawals of two hundred and fifty pounds. Cade circled them. She had taken it from a cash machine. Same date … both the day she had been paid. But she hadn't been pregnant then….

  Cade wrote those down under the heading of interest. He could ask Angela. Maybe she was paying something back then. Maybe they had planned to run away then, and the baby had been a spanner in the works? It was possible. Cade hadn’t needed Connor to make him ask Gemma to run away with him, but Connor wasn’t a spanner. He had been a blessing.

  Two hours passed as Cade combed through every penny in Jessica’s financial history. He traced every transaction, so he could mark them as nothing. He tracked every location too. It was like making a map of the girl’s final year. Scary really. It amazed him that a person's bank records could be so telling for hobbies and habits. The last transaction had been a few days before her death–two train tickets.

  With a yawn, Cade sat back in his seat and rubbed at his throbbing eyes. They were like sand. He had stared so much at the numbers. His neck ached from hunching over and he stood to stretch out his body.

  He could go home … He glanced out of his office window, down to the stark and deserted area. Where he worked was in an old place off the centre of town. He had a view of the beach and the sea from there. At the other side of the building, he could see the river. Gemma was out there, somewhere.

  No.

  He shook his head. He couldn’t go home. Not to Natalie. Not to his thoughts and certainly not to the dark place where his wolf would sit and lick his wounds. Forcing himself on, he plonked himself back in his chair and pulled out the phone records, ready to start the same laborious task, again.

  The offices had got both outgoing and incoming call lists. Cade had paid extra for that, but her mobile phone was missing—no recent list to go off. He flipped to the page that had the calls listed before her death. The first number leapt off the page at Cade, sending his already struggling heart deeper into the depths of its sadness. Danny … The digits might as well have been written in bold the way they stood out, waving their hands up at him. Even without the tracer test for the baby, staring at the number … Cade knew. He knew it in his heart as sure as he knew anything. Danny had called after her death, too, several times. Then he had stopped right around the time people had been informed she was dead.


  Another number caught Cade’s eye when he could finally focus on the rest of the page. A number that shouldn’t have been there. Surprising, yet so familiar … Aaron. Cade frowned. There was no business for Aaron to call Jessica. None at all. Yet he had done so several times and twice before she had died. Then nothing.

  Cade called Aaron. He would speak to Danny later, in person, but Aaron … there was no heartbreak for him. He didn’t need to handle him softly.

  “Why were you calling Jessica on the day she was murdered?” he asked when they had got over the usual telephone pleasantries. “You called her twice before she died and some days before that too.”

  “That is none of your business,” Aaron said, sounding annoyed. “I am in an important Council meeting.”

  Yes. Cade could hear the room. Even without being there, he knew … he could feel them all, sitting on their high and mighty thrones, deciding the fate of the world.

  “It is my business when you called someone who is dead, and I am the one dealing with it. You were the last one to talk to her, according to this.” It showed they had spoken for a couple of minutes. “What was it about?”

  “I’m in a meeting.”

  He listened as Aaron excused himself and then he heard Aaron’s well-polished shoes across a wooden floor as he came out for privacy.

  “I don’t give a shit about a meeting,” Cade said, pushing his chair back. “Why did you call Jessica?”

  “You should care,” Aaron hissed at him. “Your little tiger got Margaret’s back up again and here we must clean up after the messes you all make.”

  “Gemma?”

  “Are there any other tigers in your life you fuck and risk your life for?”

  Cade bit back his retort. Later he would pat himself on the back for not rising to Aaron’s button pushing and obvious distraction. “Why did you call Jessica?”

  Silence …

  “Aaron? If you don’t answer me, I will take this to Society.”

  He heard Aaron sigh. “I will come and see you later … tomorrow.”

  “You’ve got twenty-four hours.”

  It was only because it was his brother, he gave the time. Aaron might have been Trevor incarnate, but he was still pack … still blood.

  Most of the other numbers on Jessica’s list were her friends. Cade made more lists of things he would check out tomorrow. He marked up numbers she called more than once, and those that called her. He marked up the ones on the day of her death. There was one in particular that had called daily for the past week. From what Cade could tell, the caller had rung her several times with no answer, and then she had finally answered, and they had spoken for a minute each time. But it was every day. He filled in a request for a trace on it. There wasn’t much else he could do.

  The call logs had taken him longer than the bank accounts, but he didn’t want to go home yet. He didn’t want to do anything but sit and wallow …

  If he could go back to that day he’d found Phoenix half-dead in the woods, he would still do it. He would do it knowing every loss and heartbreak that would follow. He would do it because Phoenix was like a son to him now, and their wolves had bonded in such a way. He wished there was another way to deal with his father. Another way to get safe passage for Phoenix into the pack and Society. One that didn’t mean losing everything and losing himself.

  Without hesitation, he grabbed for his phone again. This time he called Phoenix. It had been a week since he had seen him. Phoenix was locked down with his books. He was studying. Some long name that Cade couldn’t pronounce.

  “You busy?” he said when Phoenix answered.

  “Always.” Phoenix let out a snort on the other end.

  “Good. Up for a run?”

  “Can we hunt? Like actually hunt and eat?”

  Cade smiled. Bloody Stephen. He’d ingrained in the boy his craving for fresh meat. “Sure. I’ll pick you up in thirty?”

  “Nah, I got my bike running. Wanted to show you. Let’s meet.”

  Chapter 7

  Gemma

  Just like he had promised, Karl was on time to pick Gemma and her car up. He had the recovery truck with him, the kind that rolled the two front wheels and then lifted the car up and dragged it behind. Gemma slipped into the cab beside him, but she sat with enough space that another person could easily fit between them. Maybe it was stupid, odd even … reading into things that could have a hundred different signs and avoiding them, just so she didn’t give off the wrong idea … except, she was meant to be giving him that idea.

  Cade’s call kept coming into her mind. Not so much the call, but the way he spoke, the longing in it. She could tell herself she hadn’t heard it, that her cat hadn’t latched onto it and wanted to go to him, but the truth … she had needed to hear his voice as much as he had needed to hear hers. She wanted to throw everything to the wind and fucking run to him. Hanging up on him had been one of the most painful things she’d had to do. She burned with the image of him in her mind even now and her tiger wanted to call him back. Make it right.

  Shit.

  The drive to where Karl lived wasn’t so long from her own, or Cade’s. He lived in the remote part of the area that boarded with the stray lands. The houses there were nice, some big even, but many Others and Humans avoided them because it was like living where the Border Patrol was.

  “This is your house?” Gemma asked when Karl pulled up to a large property. It was a glorious house, set back in the country along an old dirt road that spanned through the trees and lost itself to the darkness. Karl nodded and smiled, the pride of his home clear with his expression. She let out a breath. “It’s beautiful.”

  “It was my parents’ home. Mine now, though. After my mother … my dad remarried and moved out. So now this is mine.”

  It was breath taking. She had seen a house like this before. No. Henry’s house was like this, but she hadn’t been there. It didn’t matter. Henry made even less sense to her than Cade. She had memories of Henry that weren’t even possible, and the more times she came across him, the more those things came into her head. Stolen kisses, walks, whispers between them. Mary’s memories.

  Fuck.

  She slammed down on that train of thought and the fight between Henry and Cade for her mental attention. But Cade liked houses. He liked to build things. Maybe it was the wolf in him, making somewhere a home for his pack. He’d spent hours on his own home, making it right. Somewhere like this …

  “It’s so amazing.” It needed a little work, but that was the same with all old houses. The weather got to them and most of them had been built pre-war—almost a century. It was a long time for the bricks and mortar to stand against the constant battering of coastal winds and winter rains. Especially when the storms came, and the gales battered the coast relentlessly.

  There was a garage at the far side of his land. The walls of it gleamed in the day’s fading sunlight, and it was clear from the lack of weathering on the building that Karl had added it recently. There were three cars at the side. Two of them had obviously seen better days. “Works in progress,” he said when he saw her staring.

  The car at the end—an old-style BMW. “You’ve got a Z3?” Girl’s cars if she’d asked Stephen. Cade had had one, and it had been the butt of insulting masculinity jibes. But there she was again … every shadow, everything … every moment of her life tuned into what Cade loved and liked.

  “Yep.” Karl pulled the truck in front of the house at an odd angle. “That one there, the BMW, it’s done. Worked on it the last six months. Fingers crossed, I've got a buyer coming to look at it next week.”

  “It looks great. I am sure they will snap it up.” The body work on it alone was a gleaming attraction. He’d shined it to an inch of its life, but the hard work had paid off. It had a private plate on it, so the year it was made was unknown, but to look at it, anyone could easily assume it was a new car.

  “I hope so.” He angled his truck so he could reverse it and push Gemma’s car int
o the garage.

  Gemma leant forward and gripped the side handle on the door. “How can you—” She was about to say, see.

  “Practice,” Karl said before she could finish her question.

  Gemma had just about mastered reversing into spaces. She was more adept to movement on four legs rather than four wheels. That was another laugh for Stephen. He could move easily whatever he was in.

  “It’s all about the angle you go in at.” He gave her a wink and a smile. One filled with the promise of a different topic. Maybe she wasn’t so much in the mood for it, but her tiger sparked at the insinuation hidden in what he’d said, and she gave a flutter in Gemma’s chest.

  He parked the car perfectly. Gemma was about to give him a round of applause. She was impressed, truly, and he grinned at her. “You can jump out if you want. I'm just going to back it into the garage and load it onto the ramp.”

  “Sure.” She pushed the door open and let herself down. Karl got out and dashed around to pull open the garage door.

  There was a ramp in there. It was set to the ground, and the whole place was huge. It went farther back than it appeared to from the outside–a deceiving Tardis. He had cars in there, too. Well, two-and-a-half cars. One of them was covered in a tarp with bricks holding it down and the other was nothing but half a shell. The bonnet was missing and so was the engine.

  Gemma stepped back to let Karl get the car in. He reversed the truck until the back wheels of Gemma’s car touched the ramp and the top of his truck came dangerously close to the edge of the garage. When it was in the correct position, he lowered the chain and set the car down “I’ll push it in the rest of the way, then look at it. Do you want to eat first?” he said when the car was all secured and the hand brake was on.

  The evening sun was still shining, and so much as Gemma wanted to shift and hunt, she wanted the darkness … complete, isolated darkness. She also didn’t want to get her ass caught shifting when her father had forbidden it. “In a little while, maybe. Perhaps you can show me the house? I’d love to see it. If that’s okay of course. Unless you want to eat?”