Exiled heir the empty th.., p.18
Exiled Heir (The Empty Throne Trilogy Book 1), page 18
Nia cleared her throat. She looked at me with a long, unblinking gaze. Strangely, even though she hadn’t said a word, I knew exactly what she wanted.
“Hey, thanks for this. We’ll have to get together soon. But I should probably get back and wait for Cade.” I gestured vaguely toward the stairs.
“Are you sure?” Jay asked. “Usually, the cook puts out a meal for us. We don’t get to eat during formal dinners.”
I waved him off. “I’m fine.”
The three of them turned, heading in the same direction as the rest of the wolves. I turned to Nia.
“Where did you stash him?”
She had stashed him in the same small reading room that I had been ambushed in. I wasn’t sure where she had gotten rope, but she’d tied Keith tightly to a chair. His eyes were wide, and sweat ran from his temples to his chin, dripping down onto his pants.
Nia closed the door behind us with a definitive click. Keith went pale, his breath coming in short gasps.
I sat across from him, leaning forward so my forearms rested on my knees. He inhaled sharply. “Keith, what I can’t figure out is who else is paying you. Because Petrona, Sonja, and Brett were all in the room. So who were you listening for? Who else wants to know the intimate secrets of House Bartlett?”
With the whites of his eyes visible, he looked so much like prey that the predator inside of me wanted to tear out his throat while he was weak. He opened his mouth a couple of times before swallowing. “I won’t tell you anything.”
“Interesting word there,” I said, my tone low and dangerous. “Won’t. It’s not can’t, so that means that no one put any magic on you that compels you to keep it a secret. It’s not even a denial that there is someone else paying you. Someone outside House Bartlett.”
“I spoke wrong,” Keith said. “There’s no one.”
“See, I just don’t believe you.” I placed my hands on the armrests on either side of Keith’s body and sniffed him. “You know what you smell like, don’t you?” I leaned in close, whispering in his ear. “Fear.”
He shuddered back, pulling himself away, but I leaned forward, grabbing his chin and staring into his eyes. “Keith, I want you to believe me when I tell you this. This is me asking nicely. The next step is I report you, and we see how nicely Prince Bartlett asks you.”
Keith laughed, a low sound. I could tell from it he wasn’t afraid of Cade.
“Or,” I said, “I can keep asking you, and when I get tired, I let Nia ask you. Who’s paying you?”
I sat back, watching him, waiting.
He shifted, and I kept still, like I could wait forever. Wolves were predators, predators used to stalking their prey, waiting for them to make a mistake.
Finally, Keith swallowed.
“House Morrison,” he whispered. “They didn’t give me a name. I meet them at a parking garage. They pay me for any information I can bring.”
“House Morrison,” I said thoughtfully.
It made sense; it was a puzzle piece that fit. Of course House Morrison would want to know what was going on with House Bartlett.
But it fit too neatly. It was too pat. It was like when Jesaiah claimed I had been an agent of House Morrison. Something about it fit perfectly, which made it sound wrong.
“Yeah,” Keith warmed to the idea. “House Morrison pays me to tell them what happens here.”
“And what have you told them so far?” I asked.
Keith went pale. “Nothing about the security. Just details about the people. Where they’re going. What they drive. What they want.”
“Details like when Cade went to the city? What car he was driving? Details that almost got him blown up and poisoned?”
“No, no.” Keith twitched his head.
“That sounds very… neat,” I said.
“It’s the truth,” Keith said.
I waited, staring at him. His pulse beat rapidly at his throat. He looked over at Nia, but she was on her phone, completely ignoring both of us, her back resting against the door.
The longer I stared, the whiter Keith went until he was a shaking, sweating mess.
“Or maybe it wasn’t House Morrison,” he blurted. “It could have been one of the other houses. It could have been the dryads. I don’t know. We always met in secret, and they paid me.”
“Where did you meet?” I asked.
“We met in a parking garage.” His head nodded up and down as he spoke, a bobblehead doll on the dashboard.
That was the second time he’d mentioned a parking garage, so either it was the truth, or when he imagined secret rendezvous with other houses, the only place he could think of was the televised version of Watergate.
“Which garage?” I asked.
“It was on Enterprise Street in Los Santos,” he said quickly.
“That’s a long street.” I waited.
“It was the one across from the theater. The old movie theater that they shut down.”
I knew the one. So, it was a lead to check out.
Nia was staring at him, and I rewound the conversation, realizing that she had looked up from her phone when he had mentioned the dryads.
“Why do you think it was the dryads?” I asked.
“They’re always on us, aren’t they? Always in our business. Coming into our territory.” Keith was getting heated, his voice rising.
Strange. For someone who was selling out his employers, Keith was showing a lot of loyalty to House Bartlett. All this our business and our territory meant that he was more attached to House Bartlett than he wanted me to believe.
If he was selling information, I doubted he was selling out the entire house. Perhaps just one person in the house. I remembered his words, his warning that Cade was getting people killed these days.
Standing, I looked over at Nia. “I need to inform Cade. Is there somewhere you can store him?”
Nia frowned before slowly shaking her head. She glanced significantly at the door, and I made some calculations. Who in House Bartlett would be able to handle this discreetly?
The answer came instantly. Isaac, the man whose job I was taking.
“Go get Jay,” I said.
Nia left. I turned back to Keith.
“You sure you don’t want to start telling me what’s really going on?” I asked. “This is the last chance you have. After this, I throw you to the mages, and who knows what they’ll do to you.”
Keith shook his head, a jerk of motion. “He’ll kill me.”
“Who?” I demanded, but Keith’s eyes swung to the door.
Nia opened it, letting in Jay before shutting it behind her. He took one look at Keith, bound, sweating, terrified, and said, “What’s going on?”
I filled him in quickly. “Could Isaac put him somewhere? Until I’m able to inform Cade?”
Jay looked over Keith. “Yes. I know where Isaac would put him. Let me handle it.”
He and Nia had a conversation in shorthand, and I got the gist of it. They were going to move him to an outbuilding that was warded. Who else did they keep there? Before I could ask, the two of them left, Nia prodding Keith in front of her.
For a moment, I stared at the seat that Keith had been sitting on. He. Keith was afraid of one person. Now I needed to find out who, and I had a feeling once I did, I’d know who was trying to kill Cade.
A small voice in my head wondered and then what? Once I knew who was trying to kill him, what did I do next?
There was noise as the dining room doors opened, the mages leaving their werewolf-free meeting. Slipping out, I searched the crowd for Cade and found him already mounting the stairs to his room. At the top, I caught up to him, and he startled violently when I touched his elbow.
I opened my mouth, but he shook his head sharply. Pointing, he gestured to his room, and I followed, waiting until the door had shut before I tried again.
“Cade,” I said. “Something happened.”
Cade spun, his eyes glinting and sharp as diamonds. No, not diamonds—his eyes were as sharp as ice sheered directly from a glacier.
“Who are you really?” he demanded. “Miles, I need the truth.”
Chapter
Twenty-One
I stared at Cade. For a moment, I thought about telling him the truth, stripping away all of the lies between us.
My name is Miles Castillo. I am the last remaining heir to the Castillo Pack. Eleven years ago, my parents killed your parents, and I’ve been on the run ever since. I’m here because I don’t have anywhere else to go to escape Declan Monroe and also because if I don’t find out what happened to my parents, I will never be able to live as a true alpha.
But telling him that was a death sentence, and I hadn’t gotten to where I was by taking long jumps off short ropes. If I hadn’t rolled over and let myself be killed when I was sixteen and had seen all my siblings but one murdered, I wasn’t about to start now.
“What do you mean? You didn’t need to know anything about me when you saved me from Declan. In fact, you chose me.” I crossed my arms, feeling the muscles tense and jump.
“You didn’t grow up in the church. Even I can tell that. So who are you? Where did you come from?” His eyes searched my face, but there was a blankness on his feature. He had all the excitement of someone asking their smart phone if it was going to rain.
“No. I didn’t grow up in the church. I grew up with Declan Monroe.” I threw it at him. “Is that what you wanted me to tell your high-society house members? That the consort you chose used to be a thug for the biggest crime boss on this coast?”
Cade’s nostrils flared, and he gritted his jaw before biting out, “And before that? Or are you suggesting that Declan raised you from infancy?”
I wanted to look away, give myself some space to think of a response. Instead, all I could see was my life before Declan. Six brothers and sisters, all of us laughing and playing out in the yard. We would trip over each other in the house and play so rough outside that Mom kept a hospital’s amount of Band-Aids on hand.
The property had been a farmhouse out on the edge of town, backing onto dry California hills and industrial farms in the distance. Every year or so, Dad would get it into his head to use the land for its intended purpose, and he would drag my older siblings into the venture. We would plant seeds in the ground and watch them sprout, spending hours cleaning them of pests and covering them with shade cloth.
The garden would inevitably be overrun by weeds or disease, and Dad would get distracted by some other project until he remembered we lived on a farm again.
My mother had been the most powerful alpha in the country. She had been on her way to reestablishing the long-dormant Emperor Wolf throne. With that title, she would have had as much power as the strongest mage house. She would have been able to make actual differences in the lives of every werewolf in the hemisphere.
“No, Declan didn’t raise me from infancy. I had a family.” I forced the words out, swallowing around the emotion that choked me. “They were killed when I was sixteen, almost seventeen. I ran away to Los Santos, and Declan found me. He saw my potential.”
Cade’s face was white, his blue eyes the brightest thing in the room. They were pools of water from a fae spring, ready to draw me in and drown me.
I saw a flash of empathy in his gaze. Then he shook his head, as though willing away whatever feeling had arisen.
“Who killed your parents?” he asked.
“Who killed yours?” I challenged. “My past is my own. You might have bought my service, you might have saved me from death, but you didn’t buy every part of me.”
Cade looked up at me, his chin tilted defiantly. “They know we aren’t joining. Somehow. I don’t understand how.”
“How would they know? I thought that’s what the tattoo covered up.” I gestured to my neck. “Basil should make it look like we’re magically bonded, right?”
Cade huffed out an unhappy breath and began pacing back and forth in the room, his tight movements speaking of irritation and anger. He stripped off his jacket and threw it to the ground near the bed, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt.
As he revealed his forearms, I couldn’t help but admire the muscles, the pale skin that was stained with tattoos.
“No, no one’s mentioned about the bond itself.” He turned to me, accusing. “I mean, they know we aren’t… joining. There’s been some implication that we, as you so eloquently put it, lay back and thought of England just long enough to form a bond.”
I laughed, a short bark of amused sound. I thought of how Coral had taken one sniff and known we hadn’t had sex recently, how Tyson implied that we weren’t intimate, even when he’d only known me for a few minutes.
Cade’s eyes flew to mine, and I was lost again in that blue, that endless ocean of blue. Shaking myself out of it, I said, “The scent. You don’t smell like me, and I don’t smell like you. So, all the consorts know we haven’t ‘joined’ recently.”
“So…” Cade swallowed, his throat working, and I watched the bob of his Adam’s apple. He cleared his throat. “Anyone who’s talked to their wolf would know we haven’t…”
“Probably,” I said.
Cade inhaled deeply, and we were standing so close again. I tried to remind myself his family had killed mine. His house was the reason I was an orphan. But a sneaking sensation crept up my back. The desire to bury my hands in his blond hair and see if it was as soft and silky as it looked.
A voice hissed in my mind. If he knew who you were, he would kill you on the spot. It sent a shiver down my spine, but somehow, that didn’t lessen the attraction.
“What… What do they smell?” Cade asked. I couldn’t drag my eyes away from his plush, pink lips. He licked them again.
“When you’re truly mated to someone, when you’re partners,” I said, “you smell like each other. You breathe the same air, you sleep in the same bed, your skin rubs together.”
I stared at his lips, which had parted just slightly, wondering if I dared tease him. “If you sniff deeply enough, you smell like each other’s come.”
Cade’s eyes widened, and then he glared at me. “Well, that’s easy enough.”
He moved forward, and I thought for a second he was going to touch me—he was going to wrap his arms around me and finally let me feel what those soft, pink lips felt like. I wanted to run my rough hands over his pale skin and find out exactly what it took to make him beg.
Cade nudged me aside, heading into the bathroom. He shut the door behind him, and I stared for a few long moments, gaping at the closed door. Part of me wanted to tell him I’d been joking, that I’d been pushing his buttons to see what he would do. But I still wanted to see what he would do. Would he go that far?
With a shrug, I shook off the feeling, the attraction that had sparked between us. I sat down on the bench, realizing that I had been so distracted I had forgotten to tell him about Keith.
Approaching the bathroom door, I knocked sharply, twice. “Cade? I have to tell you about Keith.”
Inside the bathroom was quiet, but I heard the soft sound of flesh on flesh. A muffled grunt, followed by a soft sigh.
My nose twitched. The heady scent of arousal was thick in the air. I could smell what he was doing. I swallowed, my voice rough when I said, “Cade? I was just… There’s an easier way to—”
Another grunt, this one sharper. I should walk away, give him a moment, give him space. But I wanted to know the expression on his face. I wanted to see his lips, open and panting, wet with spit.
I was almost pressed against the door, listening for another sound. Cade moaned, muffling a sharp cry of release. Then he was panting, the sound echoing in the bathroom. When I heard him straightening his clothes, closing his zipper, I stepped back, far enough away that it didn’t look like I had been listening at the doorway.
He opened the door, and the scent hit me: the warm tinge of arousal, the sharp, acidic hit of come. He offered over a tissue, and I stared at him for a moment.
“Just to be clear, you want me to rub that all over myself? That was the only solution you could come up with.” I sounded incredulous, an impossible laugh bubbling up into my voice.
Even as I tried to stifle it, something about the image hit me hard. I imagined dipping my fingers in and putting them in my mouth, tasting him. I cleared my throat, swallowing down the moisture that was accumulating in my mouth.
Shaking my head, I said, “I told you. There’s an easier way.”
I stepped close, watching as Cade went still like a rabbit in the forest who sensed a wolf nearby. He watched me with wide eyes. I reached forward, slowly enough that he would have a chance to move away if he wanted to. His eyes followed my fingers.
With one hand, I tugged his shirt collar down, pulling it so that his neck was exposed. He gasped, his chest rising and falling. Lines of tattoo swirled over the skin, fleeing when I pressed my wrist to his pulse point.
The flesh was warm and soft under my touch. I rubbed my wrist in a slow circle, then slowly raised my other hand until I was cupping his face between my palms, letting my wrists take on the scent of his neck.
He stared at me, eyes unreadable.
Slowly, I lowered my hands, trailing my fingers down his arms. The soft fabric of his shirt caught against my rough fingertips. When I reached his wrists, I gently wrapped my own hands around them.
His palms were smooth, without calluses, moisturized so there wasn’t a single bit of rough skin. His breath caught, but his eyes were somewhere on my neck.
I released his hands, reaching to the hem of my shirt to pull it off. I dropped it onto the ground, then trailed my fingers over the back of his hands again, feeling the delicate skin, the fine bones. Taking his palm, I lifted it to my neck.
For a moment, I thought about leaning over and kissing the lines of his palm, but instead, I rubbed his wrist against my neck.
He gasped, and I felt myself getting hard at the touch, the awareness of how sensitive my own wrist had been on his neck. I swallowed, and his eyes stared at my throat.
