Careful, Bryn, he warned. The other alphas don’t know about Keely. If you send this boy back and he ends up tipping Shay off, we could all be in for a world of hurt.
I knew as well as Mitch did that most alphas wouldn’t take kindly to the idea of a human who could loosen lips just by brushing up against someone or looking them in the eye.
She does it all the time, I responded, sending the words from my mind to Mitch’s. And nobody’s figured it out yet.
People—even the kind who turned into wolves on occasion—expected bartenders to be good listeners. Keely just lived up to that expectation—and then some.
“Maybe some lemonade?” Lucas asked tentatively, and I tried to digest that the source of all of this trouble was the type of person who, when asked if he wanted something to drink, requested lemonade.
In Shay’s pack, Lucas had never stood a chance.
“Keely?” I called. She’d done a good job making herself scarce, but Keely was a smart woman, and I doubted she’d gone far. She probably knew as much about werewolf politics as I did, and she’d been the human equivalent of truth serum all her life—the moment Chase had taken the little ones out, Keely had to have known that her services might come in handy.
Sure enough, a few seconds after I’d bellowed, Keely sauntered out from the kitchen and leaned across the bar. “You rang?”
“Can we get some lemonades?”
“Sure thing, kiddo.” Keely spun glasses out from underneath the counter like a pro, and Devon cleared his throat.
“Don’t be stingy with the cherries, Keel,” he called back to her.
Obligingly, Keely put a cherry in each of the glasses. I knew for a fact that she could carry four at a time without breaking a sweat, but she opted for carrying one in each hand, a strategy that would allow her to make several trips past Lucas and back to the bar.
Anything happens to her, and we’ll be having words, Bryn. Mitch eyed me across the table, his expression deceptively mild. Lake’s dad might have been a part of my pack, but Keely and the rest of the folks at the Wayfarer were Mitch’s to take care of, the same way the rest of Cedar Ridge was mine.
I did not want to consider the possibility of “having words” with Mitch any more than I wanted to think about something happening to Keely—which meant that I had to play this just right.
“Here ya go,” Keely said, bending over to set one of the drinks in front of Lucas, brushing his arm as she did.
“Now that you’re all beveraged up, mind telling me how many of these humans are after you?” I timed my question perfectly and managed to keep my voice casual and wry.
Lucas never knew what hit him. “There were maybe ten of them total, maybe not even that many, but I don’t think I saw them all. Their leader was a woman named Valerie. She and Shay have some kind of agreement, I don’t know what exactly, but he did something for her, or she was going to do something for him, and I was just a part of the deal. There was something about a daughter, Valerie’s daughter, but I never saw her.”
The information was flowing freely now, but I didn’t have time to sort through the significance of what Lucas was saying. Keely went back to the bar for two more lemonades, and my next question made its way out of my mouth as she returned.
“How dangerous are they?”
“Very, and they’re not exactly fond of werewolves. Something happened a long time ago, and now … sometimes I think the only reason they didn’t kill me is because dead dogs don’t scream. If I’d stayed long enough, the novelty might have worn off, but it also might not have. I’m not sure if they’ll kill to get me back, but if the killing involves werewolves, they probably wouldn’t consider it murder any more than one of us would report a fight for dominance to the human police.”
Keely made her last trip to and from the bar: two more lemonades, one more question.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
It was a pretty broad question, but with Lucas’s apparent habit of hiding the truth until it blew up in his face, I had a feeling that the information I most needed to know was probably whatever he least wanted to tell me.
At first, he said nothing, but as Keely leaned over Lucas to pass Mitch a lemonade, the bottom of her arm touched Lucas’s shoulder, and his entire body seemed to relax. “I won’t go back,” he said, his tone conversational, with an iron edge buried layers underneath. “I’d die before going back to those people, and I’d kill myself before going back to Shay. I don’t care what I have to do. I really don’t, because I’m never going to let anyone do that to me again. When this is over, I’ll be six feet under or I’ll be free. For good.”
Having said his piece, Lucas went very quiet, but his words hung in the air, reinforcing what I’d already deeply suspected.
Sending Lucas back to Shay or giving in to Caroline’s ultimatum didn’t just mean turning my back on someone who needed my help. One way or another, it meant sentencing Lucas to death, because if the psychotic werewolf-torturers and megalomaniac alpha didn’t do him in, Lucas had as good as promised to kill himself.
Between Keely’s power and the Weres’ ability to smell lies, I had to assume that he was telling the truth.
CHAPTER TEN
THIS TIME, I WAS THE ONE WHO RETREATED TO THE forest—and away from the rest of the pack—to think, and Chase was the one who found me. He’d Shifted back to human form, and I could feel him taking in everything: the way I was standing, the tilt of my head.
“You look like you want to hit something,” he observed mildly. “A wall. Possibly a tree. Something hard.”
“Lucas is going to kill himself.” I didn’t sugarcoat it, but my voice didn’t exactly reflect the black hole of emotion churning in my gut, either. “If I can’t work something out, if we don’t protect him from this family and from Shay, he’s going to die.”
If Chase found what I was saying at all surprising, he certainly didn’t show it, and the only thing I felt through his end of the bond was a brief surge of dislike for Lucas, distrust, pity.
“Don’t,” I said sharply before he could say a word. “Don’t tell me this isn’t my problem. Don’t tell me it’s not my fault. There’s an answer to this, Chase, and if I don’t find it—if I can’t find it—then whatever happens to Lucas damn well is my fault.”