by Jade, Amelia
But she wouldn’t understand. So he kept his distance, and tried his best not to weep as he brought the last pillar of her world crashing down around her.
“He’s lying to you.”
Her green eyes went glacially cold. “He’s never told me one way or another what his contract is about. I don’t ask, because it’s his business. He hasn’t lied to me.”
Other than telling you it’s a government contract…
But that’s not what he had to say.
“That’s not what I was referring to, Willow.”
She frowned. “What else could he be lying to me about?”
Aiden swallowed nervously, not wanting to continue. Something about his expression must have clued her in to what he was talking about. Willow’s eyes grew wide and she started to shake her head quickly back and forth. “No. I don’t believe you. It’s you. You’re the lying one.”
“You know that’s not true,” he said gently. “Deep in your heart, you can hear the truth in my words. The truth you’ve never heard from him. He’s lying about your family, Willow. Whatever happened to them, it wasn’t the work of a rogue shifter.”
“How do you know that?” She was near tears.
“Because, Willow. All wild shifters are reported and logged. There’s also a huge bonus for bringing one down, as incentive for ensuring people don’t forget to log it.”
“So?” She crossed her arms defiantly, but the doubt was plain to see in her eyes.
“So? Willow, there is no record of a wild shifter anywhere near here thirty-five years ago. Nothing on three years either way. So unless you were a three-year-old when he adopted you…?”
She shook her head. “No. I was only six months old.”
He looked away, unable to bear the way he was destroying the only world she’d ever known. Why did it have to be him doing this? He didn’t want to see her like this, in this much pain, let alone hurting because of what he’d done!
“He’s lying to you, Willow. I don’t know why, but he is.”
She stood there, coffee forgotten and cooled by now, leaning against the island in the kitchen, staring desolately at the floor off to his right. For five minutes Willow didn’t speak. She just stared at something only she could see.
“Why are you here then?”
The question caught him completely off guard. “What?”
“If my father is such an evil person, and is involved in something bad, then why are you still here? Why not…” Her head came snapping up, eyes ablaze with jade fire. “You weren’t banished from your pack…were you? This is all an elaborate setup to take my father down.” Her face flushed with fury. “Mack always was trying to get rid of him. He doesn’t like my father. So now he’s sent you here as a spy to try and take him down from the inside!”
Aiden’s mouth hung open for a second, and Willow used that time to formulate her next argument. But he recovered in time, speaking harshly to her for the first time.
“Willow, Stephen has tried to have Mack assassinated no less than four times. Because he wants to be the regional Alpha. He doesn’t want to challenge him directly, because he would lose! So he wants him out of the way. Mack dislikes Stephen because he’s a coward and power-hungry. And because he tried to kill him! That’s a perfectly valid reason in my opinion. And before you ask, I helped thwart two of the attempts, so I know for a fact they aren’t lies.”
She looked away.
“Stephen is not the person you think he is, Willow.” Aiden paused for a moment, wringing his hands before rubbing his face. “I’m sorry. This is not the way I wanted to do things, or how I saw this morning going. But I’m telling you the truth. I know you can hear it in my voice. You don’t want to believe it—you want to hate me and tell me to get out, I’m sure. But that can’t stop the fact that you need to stop hiding from this, and take some responsibility yourself.”
“He’s my father,” she whispered.
“No. He’s a liar who adopted you for his own reasons. He’s also a criminal, probably in both the human world and mine. There’s little I can do to stop what’s already started, Willow. I’m sorry…I…” He trailed off, looking up at her, seeing the fire in her eyes fade, replaced by bitter agony and possibly even betrayal. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, not knowing what else to say.
Willow was shaking her head. “Get out.” She pointed at the door. “Now.”
Aiden sighed, looking down at the floor in defeat. “Willow, this isn’t going to fix anything.”
“Get. Out,” she hissed with barely constrained fury. “Now.”
He pushed off his resting post on the far side of the island from her. “This doesn’t change what I said. You can deny it as long as you want to try and continue to live in your fake little world, but you know it’s a lie as much as I do. It’s time to move on, Willow. I know you’re scared, but if you’ll let me, I’ll help you as much as I can.”
She looked up at him. “I believed my father too when he told me similar things. Now you tell me he’s a liar. Why the hell should I believe you? Get the fuck out of my house.”
He grimaced. “Fine.”
“Good. You know what? I’m going to go ask him now, to find out the truth. You’ll see. He does care. He loves me. He wouldn’t lie about my birth family. That’s not who he is.”
Aiden rolled his eyes at the denial in her voice. “You’re going to be disappointed. Even more so when I return with proof that Stephen isn’t the man you think he is.”
He spun on his heel and started to leave.
“How are you going to do that?” she asked.
Aiden didn’t answer. If she admitted to herself what was going on, she would know what he was going to go do.
Sixteen
Aiden
Getting into Stephen’s shipping facility was the easy part. Within the first three days Aiden had figured out two separate methods of entry.
Two days later though he’d been given an access code to the rear door so that he could help load a van with some packages and not get locked out. He assumed it was a slip-up on Langdon’s part, because he hadn’t been entrusted with any other information since. Now though it served to easily grant him entry inside where he could snoop around privately. He opened the door and slipped inside, ready to work his way through the warehouse in darkness.
There was one little problem with that plan: the lights were on.
Aiden froze. Shit.
Did Stephen keep a guard here on the weekends? Or was someone else here for different reasons? His eyes scanned the floor, but he saw no movement. Whoever was here, they must be in one of the offices along the wall to his left.
Unless someone just left the lights on? A quick check of his memory told him that no, he remembered the lights being turned off before they left on Friday. Someone was definitely here. The question was who, why, and where were they? If it was a member of the pack, Aiden would just tell them that Stephen had sent him to retrieve something from his desk. A trivial task that he wouldn’t give to one of the others, but that the new guy was perfectly suited for.
If it was someone else though, there might be trouble. Reluctantly he prepared himself to fight. It was strange, putting himself in that sort of mindset. Other than the night he’d gone with Flint, Aiden had spent so much effort into keeping calm and refraining from fighting, that conjuring the urge to do so now was almost difficult.
Almost.
“Aiden?”
He jerked in surprise as Patrice’s voice echoed out from the stacks straight ahead of him.
“Holy shit, you surprised me,” he said, giving the other shifter a wave. “I thought you were up in the offices. I was going to sneak up and surprise you.” He smiled, trying to act as if he was mildly upset his plan hadn’t worked, not that he’d been caught red-handed.
“Sorry about that. I was just stretching the ol’ legs. Guard duty can get pretty boring, you know?”
He nodded. “Yep, I know. Well, I guess I don’t. Haven�
�t been trusted with that yet. But, in general I understand.”
“Why are you here?” There was no suspicion in his voice. Perfect.
“Stephen needed a phone number from his desk. Something to do with those humans who tried to ambush Flint and me Friday night. He certainly wasn’t going to send Flint on a little errand, so guess who drew the short stick?”
Patrice laughed, falling in step next to him as they walked past the conveyor belts toward Stephen’s office. “Hey, you’re talking to the guy who works almost every Sunday here. Trust me, I completely understand.”
Aiden frowned to himself. Every Sunday? How had he missed that little bit of information! Sloppy, Aiden. Sloppy. If you’d been more involved with the pack, you might have figured that one out already. He would keep that in mind for the next time he was forced to be a spy, which would hopefully be never. After what he’d been forced to do to Willow, Aiden hated himself and the whole operation. He was ready for it to be over.
“So, anything fun going on back at the—”
CLANG!
Patrice fell to the ground in a heap, bleeding from where Aiden had reached up and grabbed the back of his head and slammed him face-first into one of the giant metal support beams that kept the roof up.
“Sorry about that,” he muttered. “But I don’t have time for your small talk.”
He stepped over the body and hurried to the far wall. Instead of Stephen’s office though, he kicked open the door to the room next to it. This room was obscured by double doors, and the shifters going in always waited for one set to close before they opened the next. Whatever was going on behind here was a secret they didn’t want him or any other visitor seeing. The next set of doors opened just as easily, admitting him into the room.
“What the fuck?” He walked forward several steps and looked around.
It was empty. Completely, and totally empty.
“Ooookay. That’s weird.”
Confused, he went back out into the main section, grabbed Patrice’s limp body, and dragged it in after him. Then he slapped the smaller shifter several times until he came around.
“What the fu—”
Aiden drove his fist into one of his kidneys. The other werewolf curled over in pain.
“What goes on this room?” he snarled.
“Fuck you.”
“Wrong answer, bud,” he muttered, grabbing Patrice by an ankle, whirling him around and launching him into the wall along the rear of the building. The cinderblocks cracked and dust flew everywhere as Patrice slipped to the floor, moaning incoherently.
“What goes on in here? There’s more to this room than just this emptiness. Tell me.”
Patrice spat, blood and more than a few teeth coming with it. He was too weak for it to hit Aiden, but it splattered on the floor nearby.
“I really don’t want to have to torture you for the answer, P. Just be a good boy and give it up.”
A shake of the head was his answer.
Aiden sighed, leaned forward, and grabbed Patrice’s wrist as he swung a punch at him. Aiden snarled, twisted his hand around and then drove the other down hard onto the elbow joint. Things cracked and made disgusting noises. Patrice howled in pain.
“Tell me!”
“Go suck your momma’s—”
Aiden slapped Patrice twice in the face, grabbed his neck, and hurled him against the opposite wall.
“That will be the last time you mention my mother,” he said calmly as he walked over.
Patrice was slumped on the floor, back against the wall, feet outstretched.
“Ready to talk?”
The werewolf weakly lifted his good arm and extended the middle finger. It was curled and unable to straighten, but the point was there.
“This is just not going the way I expected it to,” Aiden said with a sigh. Then he stomped on Patrice’s ankle, crushing bone before he ground his foot back and forth, turning more of the bone into dust.
“So, ready to talk yet?”
But Patrice was too overwhelmed with pain to respond. He just kept rocking back and forth, tears streaming down his face as he tried to handle the pain.
Aiden grabbed his good ankle, pivoted and set his feet. “Last chance,” he prompted.
The foot jerked in his grip in an attempt to wrench it free.
“Fine.” Aiden hauled on the leg, tossing Patrice at the wall opposite the one he came through. “Have it your—”
He’d timed his sentence to complete when the wreck that had once been a human-looking person hit the wall. But when Patrice went sailing right through an incredibly well-concealed set of doors, his timing was interrupted.
“Well look at that. You wanted to help after all!” he crowed. “So nice of you.”
The room beyond was dark, except for a number of soft blue glowing lights. Aiden walked forward. He’d never thought that perhaps Stephen owned more of the building than just the shipping facility. But the room beyond was so large it had to be two or three of the units next to them as well. Which meant that the signs out front of them were all cover for what was actually going on.
“Which is what?” he murmured to himself as he stared at row upon row of blue lights. They were coming from some sort of boxy contraption, one that looked oddly like a shortened version of a coffin.
He walked up to the first of them and peered inside. His eyes widened as he realized what it was he was actually seeing.
“Oh. Shit.”
Seventeen
Willow
She returned to her room to cry where nobody could see her.
How could Aiden do this to her? After all she’d done for him, after she’d given herself to him, both her mind and her body. Apparently that wasn’t enough though. He needed her soul as well, which he was trying to take by severing all the connections she’d known.
That doesn’t make any sense, girl.
Okay. Maybe it didn’t. But it didn’t mean that he wasn’t acting jealous, trying to get her to abandon her father so that he could be the only man in her life.
You know that’s a stretch.
“Stop it!” she snapped, speaking out loud to her inner voice. It had always been pragmatic when forced to acknowledge something. Normally Willow appreciated that, but now that she wanted to keep living in the perfect little world she’d constructed, its inability to believe the lies and falsehoods that surrounded her was extremely annoying.
Aiden was lying. He had to be lying. Oh, Willow could buy in to the fact that maybe her father was doing some things that weren’t…strictly speaking illegal. But whatever it was, she was sure it was for a good reason. Wasn’t she?
Why would you be sure of that?
Angrily she tried to come up with logical reasons, but each of them fell apart as she tried to construct an argument around them.
Okay, fine. Maybe he is involved with something shady or even illegal. But he’s not lying to me about what happened to my family. He wouldn’t do that.
Would he?
The question echoed around in her head. Willow was torn on this one. She obviously wanted to believe he was telling the truth, that her family had been killed in an unfortunate attack by a wild shifter. But the truth in Aiden’s voice, the way he’d told her not what had actually happened, but simply that it hadn’t happened the way her father told her, that was near impossible to ignore. He didn’t know any better than she did why Stephen might have lied to her. That was the part that made it believable. Or at least, not immediately unbelievable.
So what did she do? The answer was obvious, but for a solid half an hour she shied away from it, unwilling to confront that particular path. But as the noise outside in the house increased and the pack came awake, Willow knew she would never be satisfied unless she confronted her father and got the truth out of him. She’d learned to read him well, and since this wasn’t a question she’d ever asked before, or something she’d ever seemed to doubt, any surprise should be easy for her to pick up.
�
��You can do this.” The spoken encouragement didn’t help.
“Fine. You’re a coward if you don’t.”
Willow was on her feet ten seconds later. For whatever reason, that particular designation had always been something she’d feared being assigned to her. She may not be a fighter, but she was no coward.
The walk out of her room and through the house to her father’s office downstairs felt like the longest steps of her life. Twice she paused, and once she even turned around to head back upstairs, hoping to put the conversation off to a later point in time. But she didn’t. Her hands were shaking and she was on the verge of tears, but Willow wound some coil around her fragile mind and yanked it tight, forcing herself to keep it together until she could get through this.
Then, and only then, if her fears were confirmed, would she allow herself to have the mental breakdown that was likely to come with having her entire world torn apart. The fact that she was already preparing for that eventuality told Willow several things in itself, but she refused to acknowledge them just then. First her father. Then her.
His office door was closed, but he responded readily when she knocked on it.
“Can I speak to you?” she asked, pushing the door open.
“I’m sort of busy right now, Wil, but once I’m done, of course.”
She stood her ground, not willing to take his dismissal. “Please, Father. I don’t ask much of you. But I need to talk now.”
It wasn’t hard to pick up on the fact that she was in distress. It had to be practically etched on to her face. Stephen nodded to Flint and Orren, dismissing his two senior-most lieutenants. The werewolves nodded respectfully at her as they passed, then closed the door behind them.
“What is it?”
She noticed he didn’t get up from behind his desk.
“I need to know something.”
“Of course. Anything.” He spread his hands wide, then indicated she should take a seat.
Willow approached, but she remained standing. She caught his gaze and kept it, staring into his stormy gray eyes. “Father, what really happened to my family?”