Pack Ruin (The Splintered Bond #3)

38. Answers

38

Answers

FINNICK

D rop the blade. Claws and teeth.

The words that had spun through my mind the day before still echoed now, as I stood before the doorway to the lower levels once more. This time, Father had returned my access so I could go in alone, keying my fingerprint in on his way to a final meeting in the city with the heads of Imregin.

“I don’t know why your mother thought you’d gone soft,” he’d said the day before, as I’d come up from killing Trevor Blackside. “I’ve never seen anything more brutal than what you did in that cell. It made me proud.” Of course he’d watched on the cameras.

I couldn’t care less what he thought of me, though I was glad to have my access restored to the lower levels, and to the main tech room for the entire Mansion that was at the end of one of the locked halls. Since Mother had not returned my access to the Mansion’s computer systems, I had to use the computers down here to contact the pack who’d promised to help rescue Tana. I might even have a moment to speak with the Hilliers. I’d pocketed a few supplies, though I wasn’t certain I’d be able to deliver them without being noticed.

Proud of me. I’d wished for so many years for him to say those words, and he never had. And of course he didn’t understand what had happened down there. Why I’d dropped the scalpel and used my hands to finish the job.

Claws and teeth.

My parents believed that silver was a more civilized way to deliver pain and death, and it left a lasting memory for the scarred souls left alive. I’d gone into that room ready to skin the one who’d hurt my mate with silver, the weapon of choice in Eastern’s torture rooms. But Flor’s voice had changed my plan, somehow making the murder I’d delivered cleaner than any of the ones that I’d committed before.

I lifted my fingers to the keypad and waited for the soft click. My first stop was the tech hub of Eastern. Two of my father’s favorite Enforcers guarded the room from the inside, but I knew neither of them had any idea what I was doing when I sat in front of the desk and logged in. They were, in human terms, goons. Muscle that knew their place, but never aimed any higher.

The only one who would have known I was up to something was my mother’s favorite, Torran. And perhaps Niall, though he was still recovering from the wolfsbane-laced coffee I’d had delivered to him that morning. He’d been shadowing Tana as often as possible, even following her to school until I asked Father casually if Niall didn’t have enough to do, that he could haunt our pack’s school when the rest of us were working. He had not been pleased to hear of Niall’s dereliction of duty. He’d probably laugh if he knew I’d poisoned him. Maybe even be proud of me.

With Mother away, Father was the only one who might come down and discover what I was doing. I typed quickly, writing up reports for Mother about some new tax laws that we could use to our advantage for long enough that the two guards stopped paying attention. Then I began recording a video loop of the empty hallway outside where the Hilliers were being kept. I’d need that for later.

While the recording ran, I opened a new window and spent the next few minutes making certain everything was lined up for Tana’s rescue, and leaving precise GPS coordinates for where the body of their Heir was buried behind the Mansion. It would be up to them to exhume him, but I’d given them enough details to satisfy them.

Tana’s extraction had to come first, of course, before I could even try to rescue the Hilliers and escape. She would be taken from school the next day, and the Italians had assured me she’d be kept safe. I hadn’t told her anything about it, except a general warning to be ready for anything at any time, but I’d given her rescuers the private code words we’d used for years, between the two of us. I hoped it would be enough.

After a few more moments, I saved the video loop, then cleared up as much evidence of my online activity as possible—though I knew a skilled hacker would be able to see I’d done something unusual—and spent the last few minutes rebalancing the pack’s investment portfolios.

I was almost certain my financial acumen was the only thing my parents valued me for. At least their paranoia about security meant I had access to this room, and that meant I could visit the Hilliers without being discovered. I grabbed a bottle of water from the minifridge in the corner, opened it, and pretended to drink.

The guards grunted at me as I left, not bothering to notice that I turned in the direction of the cells rather than the exit. In a dozen steps, I stood in front of the Hilliers’ cell. This could go so wrong, but I had to try.

Everything I did down here, including my entrance to the cell, would be recorded in the electronic logs. I hoped I could make them understand what I was going to say, and get what I’d brought in to them.

The door opened with a soft click. Margarette and Bradley looked even worse than they had before. The silver chains were obviously taking a toll. Margarette’s hair was limp and hung around her eyes, and she shook incessantly.

Bradley wasn’t any better. He held her, stroking her arm gently, though even that small effort was costing him. The water bottle I’d seen before was empty, and there was no smell of food at all, only blood, silver, and urine from the pail in the corner.

“What a lovely sight. The devotion of true mates,” I gritted out with a sneer. My eyes pricked with tears, and I circled the pair, moving between them and the metal bucket. They’d used the rough toilet paper to make a flimsy barrier between their skin and the chains, along with strips of their ragged clothing, but blood still seeped through. Stopping with my back to the camera, I waited for them to look at me.

“You bastard,” Bradley muttered.

I wish, I mouthed. Bradley’s eyes widened for a moment. His hand tightened on Margarette’s arm, and she looked up at me as well.

Then I said clearly, letting the truth of my words sink in, “I had no idea you two would end up here. No idea you would put yourselves in the position to be brought so low.” I let a tear fall as I went on, knowing the camera wouldn’t capture it. Not ashamed for these two to see my pain. My grief. Margarette stifled a gasp. Bradley’s eyes warmed.

Knowing they would scent the lie, while the recordings would not, I went on. “But I’m glad I finally get to see you getting what you deserved. It was becoming impossible to pretend that I enjoyed being at your pack. That you or your shifters would have anything to teach me about being ready for leadership. My parents are ten times the leaders you could ever be.” As the familiar, acrid scent of deception hit their noses, I pulled a thin package of what looked like chewing gum out of my pocket. I pretended to put a piece of gum in my mouth, then balled up the package and tossed it on the floor by Bradley’s foot.

It wasn’t trash, of course. I’d placed small strips of a special tape inside an empty pack of gum, an invention Father’s spies had come up with to help conceal silver blades.

The tape was lined with a thin coating of lead, but was flexible enough to bend. If they put it on under the cloth and toilet tissue, they shouldn’t feel the silver. I’d worn it more than once, when I’d gone on hunting trips to do jobs as the pack’s torturer. A layer stuck to the skin, and another on top of a hidden blade, and not even the keenest shifter’s nose could tell where the faint scent of silver was coming from.

It wasn’t much to give the Hilliers, but Tana came first. I tapped my wrist subtly, then lifted an eyebrow at the wrapper.

Bradley’s gaze flicked to it, and his lips parted. For a second, I thought he might thank me, but he went still. “I’m ashamed I let you past my pack’s borders, Finnick. You’re never welcome there again.” The stink of lies almost covered up the silver, and I swallowed hard.

Margarette cleared her throat and spoke, her voice raw. “We obviously didn’t teach you about honor, or what it means to be a decent Heir. I may have treated you like a son, fostered you with my own, but I never loved you, Finnick McDonnell. I never truly thought of you as my own.”

I almost sneezed from the pungent odor. I did smile a little, and saw an answering gleam in Margarette’s eyes. Be ready. Two days, I mouthed, before I muttered a few more insults, tossing the bottle of water at her as I left. I’d done what I could for them, and given them the hope and answers they needed.

Now I needed to get a few for myself.

I was only a few steps outside the room when I heard a voice inside my head. GET HER OUT!

I staggered, catching myself with one hand on the wall. What in the hell? I shook off the sense of doom that threatened to drag me under, and stalked down the hall to the room next to the one where Trevor Blackside had spent his final moments.

The window in the door of this one had been blacked out, and there hadn’t been a camera feed, at least not one that showed up on the monitors. I was almost certain it was occupied, though. The day before, I’d seen a maid coming down to the lower levels with food, then going back up, looking like she’d been attacked.

I had a feeling I knew who Mother had hidden in here, and when I pressed my fingers to the keypad and opened the door, I discovered I was right. “Hello, Callaway.”

The old Southern Alpha cursed when I entered. “Dammit, I was hopin’ you were that sweet little female they sent me yesterday. Day before yesterday? Fuck, the days are runnin’ together. What day is it?”

“Thursday.” I blinked as the door slammed shut behind me, shocked at the room. They’d given the Hilliers a bucket and silver chains. Callaway had a queen-sized mattress, a sofa, and a table with two chairs, where he sat now, holding a tablet that was emitting the unmistakable sounds of sex. There was a long table against one wall covered with snack foods of every description and cans of beer and soda.

He’d been watching porn when I came in. But now he stood, tucking his dick back into his dark blue sweatpants and crossing his arms over his burly chest. In the months since he’d vanished, he’d grown even less impressive than he had been before. He smelled sour, worse than ever.

And when his eyes rose to my face, there was a sly, feral glint in them, though he didn’t meet my gaze for more than a second. Perhaps he wasn’t able to.

“So this is where you disappeared to,” I remarked, trying to put it all together. There were no cameras in here, from what I could tell. It was as close to a comfortable hotel room as one of our cells could appear to be.

“Where I got disappeared to, ya mean,” he grumbled, wandering over to the food table and grabbing a purple bag. “Want some a these Takis?”I forced myself to shake my head politely as he popped the bag open, and began eating and talking at the same time. “Yeah, your bitch of a mother had her Enforcers on my ass before Trevor could get me out of Alabama. Threw me in here, keeps coming down and making all sortsa pretty promises about putting me back in power, but I’m startin’ to think she’s full of shit.”

A few orange pieces of chewed chip fell onto his belly. He picked the biggest piece up and ate it, then went on. “I been through your mama and your dad. Is it Junior’s turn to grill me, see if I know anything else I ain’t told them?”

“How did you know?” I pulled up to the table and forced myself not to react as his peculiar, foul odor washed over me when he did the same. “If I can get more from you than they did, maybe I can talk them into letting you move up to the main house. There’s really no reason for you to be down here, is there? The Mansion is safe enough, and you deserve so much more than this.”

“You want secrets? If you can get me outta here and the kind of set-up I deserve, I’ll give ya secrets I ain’t told nobody yet.”

I grinned conspiratorially at him and described the elaborate meals we had upstairs. “Steak, lobster, everything you could desire. And all of it presented beautifully by lovely young females.”

Halfway through my description of the maids who served in the dining room—and who I would never, ever let this piece of breathing excrement get near—he was cursing and rubbing his dick through his pants. “All right, all right. Let’s get this done. Long as you get me out of here. Swear it.”

I told the absolute truth. “Once you tell me what I need to know, I will make sure you get everything a man like you deserves.”

That was all it took. Before I could take another breath, Calvin Callaway, deposed Alpha and absolutely delusional idiot, started spilling his darkest secrets.

And they were dark indeed.

“You know about the Southern Conclave, the one forty years back? We used to call it the Betrayal, before everybody stopped talkin’ about it, and about the pack that started all that shit.” I nodded, knowing he meant the Western pack. He got up and grabbed a beer, and popped it. “Well, they was ‘sposed to be killed, right? We cut ‘em off, the rest of the packs did. Forbade ‘em to come back to Conclaves, forbade our shifters to go out there looking for mates, and vice versa. My uncle was the Alpha after that mess, and he told me all about it. It should have worked. It mostly did. But some of them sneaky fuckers came across the whole country, lookin’ for trouble.”

He went quiet, and I said, “Looking for mates?”

He swallowed, and the scent of menthol and sour laundry got stronger. Suddenly, I remembered where I’d smelled this before. Years ago, a rogue wolf had been caught skulking around behind the Mansion. Nobody had any idea how he’d gotten that close, but Father had captured him, and taken the rogue into the lower levels to do experiments.

It had smelled like this. Sour, putrid. Did my parents know Calvin Callaway was going feral? I focused on his story again, looking for more signs of madness.

“...was out with my pack huntin’ some rogues northwest of the compound, with my uncle. We heard somethin’ coming across the woods, a whole lot of wolves, and the rest of the Enforcers went after them. They were rogues, for sure, but they’d been chasin’ a girl.Well, a witch.”

I must have reacted, because he smirked at me. “You heard me. A witch, from the dead pack. Look at ya. You look as shocked as I felt when I found it out. Not that you should be, with that mama of yours, and her witchy fuckin’ ways.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Witchy ways?”

“You can’t think a low-class wolf like her got to where she is without some sorta dark magic, can ya?”

I almost choked. It had only been six years since I’d learned where my mother had come from before she mated with my father at an Eastern Conclave. Father had been drunk, and forgotten himself. How had this man known? “Low class?”

“Hard to forget, your mama, even if she don’t look much like she did back then. She was sweet, skinny, a dime a dozen on the outside. But that power—she had it even when she was a girl. It just oozes off her, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” I agreed, and wondered, not for the first time, when she’d learned to control it. Now, her power only showed when she wanted it to, though she stayed within our pack’s borders as much as possible for an Alpha Mate. “So you know she’s from Georgia. The St. Mary’s River Pack that was eradicated by rogues.”

He laughed for a long minute. “That’s what you heard? Boy, that may’ve been her pack before ‘rogues’”—he made quotation marks in the air—“killed them off. But the river has two sides, and your mama’s packlands spanned both.” He rubbed at his ragged beard. “Fuckin’ Florida. Not a damn good thing ever came outta that state.”

I felt something in the bond then, a sharp feeling that had to be fear. Intense fear, coming from Flor.

I ignored it for now. “Enough about my mother. What happened to the girl you found? The witch?”

Callaway grunted. “Speak of the devil and she may appear, eh? Well, that’s the truth.” He rubbed his chin. “I should’a known what Lily was when she popped up outta nowhere. One second, the forest was empty, and the next, she was running at me. Bitch threw herself at me. Lit up the bond with her dark magic, and before I knew what was happening, we were ruttin’ right there in the woods.” For a split second, the stench of him abated slightly. His bloodshot eyes softened, as he was caught in the memory. But then, the moment was gone.

“I nutted and bit her neck, but when she tried to bite me back, I smelled something. My uncle had warned me about the stink of magic, how it was like lightning and fire. He’d smelled it at the Betrayal. So I pushed off her, and looked down in her eyes. They weren’t regular. They were red and blue, fires blazing inside. She was a fuckin’ witch.”

“Is that why you hired Verbena Flock, from the coven, to sever your bond?”

He looked confused for a moment. “Verbena Flock?”

“The witch.”

He grunted. “Never could remember her name.” That was the truth, but the next words he said were a lie. “Sure. I needed to cut the bond.”

Sniffing the air, I stood. “Try again. You can’t lie your way out of here.”

His face went red, and he seemed to swell up, fur prickling over his skin in an odd wave, then subsiding. “Fine, ya little shit. I took Lily back to the compound and stuck her in my room. My uncle came draggin’ ass in an hour later, giving me shit for running off, bitching about how the rogues had killed his top Enforcers, and I could have made the difference. He tried to knock me around, but he couldn’t even look me in the eye.” He let out a short laugh. “For the first time in my life, he dropped his gaze. So I challenged him, right then and there. He died, and the Alpha power came to me.” He went silent.

“But you knew you couldn’t have a wolf from that pack as your mate,” I finished for him. “She was your true mate, and very powerful. So when you claimed her, her power came to you. That was why you were strong enough to defeat your uncle.” I fought to hide my disgust. “You claimed her, but instead of owning up to it, you hired a witch to sever your bond.” He twitched, and I knew I was almost right.“To sever the bond and kill her.”

Calvin hung his head. “There was no way they’d let me keep my spot with her at my side. I had to do it. It was the only way.”

I didn’t remark on the scent of deception this time. Something terrible was happening in my bond, and I couldn’t afford to show any weakness in front of this male.

“But it didn’t work,” he said, his tone bitter. “When it came time, Lily was already knocked up. The witch didn’t have the juice to sever the bond and kill both of ‘em, not without taking me out along with them. She got all worked up, made me promise all sorts of shit if she tried to just sever the bond anyway.”

I had exceptional control of my wolf, but hearing his mate spoken of this way was testing the limits. He longed to rip this male’s throat out for what he’d done. “What did you promise?”

“She made me swear it on the moon. Did some scary blood magic shit, too.” He rubbed at the palm of his hand. “First off, I had to make a vow I wouldn’t kill the pup when it came. And I’d name it after her.”

“The pup?”

“Some sort of magic thing. And I did, didn’t I?” He started to laugh like he’d just told a joke. “Even though that bitch died doing the spell, I did what I promised. Never did kill the pup. And named her—well, I never could remember that gal’s name. But I got close enough, I guess.”

“Florida?”

“Florida Witch,” he finished, then collapsed in laughter that held more than a hint of madness.

I stood silently and glided to the door, pressing the keypad to let myself out. By the time Callaway heard me, it was too late. I was outside, and all I could hear was the muffled thumping of him throwing himself against the wall.

A wall I was clinging to as agony wracked my body.

She had been injured. Attacked by an entire pack, it felt like, from the searing phantom pain all over my body.

The pain abated for a few seconds. Then, a thousand miles away in Alabama, all hell broke loose.

But I felt every lick of the flames in the sterile, quiet hallway where I lay.