“Okay.” Jace nodded, obviously thinking it all through. “So, how many hunters are still out there?”
“As far as I can tell, four, counting Hargrove.” I dropped the wireless mouse into the box Isaac held out for me, then spun in the rolling chair to face my Alpha again. “Two of them live down south, near the border of the free zone.” The distance could explain why they hadn’t been killed by the vigilante shifter yet, as well as how they were able to target so many strays, with their operation apparently centered firmly in the Appalachian Territory.
“And the third?”
“His name’s Darren, but that’s all I’ve found on him. They don’t use his last name in any of the emails, and I haven’t found any reference to where he lives or works, or even what he does for a living.”
“That’s not a lot to go on,” Chase said on his way through the living room with another box.
“I know, but we could find more information at the other crime scenes.”
He shrugged, brushing dark hair back from his forehead. “Or beat it out of those other two hunters when we find them.”
“Well, we better hurry if we’re going to get to them before Titus does. Or before they get to him.” I turned to look up at Jace from my chair. “Your friend Titus is mentioned by name in a few of the emails. They seemed to think taking down a leader in the stray community would be a particular coup.”
What I’d left unsaid was that they’d actually been arguing over who would get possession of his stuffed and mounted head.
Although, truth be told, that was only part of what I’d left unsaid…
Hot water ran over my head and down my face in scalding streams. I’d long since rinsed the shampoo from my hair, but the memory of my face on that creepy bulletin board refused to be washed down the drain.
Whoever the photographer was, he’d been watching me for months. He’d seen me eat, and study, and swim in the school’s indoor pool. There’d even been a shot taken through my dorm room window—with some kind of zoom lens?—which had caught me walking behind Robyn and toward my closet wearing nothing from the waist up but my bra.
How could that have been going on for so long without my knowledge? Weren’t cats supposed to have amazing instincts? What good were my super-sensitive sight and hearing without the instinct to know I was in danger?
Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be an enforcer after all.
Frustrated, I turned off the shower and grabbed the towel I’d set on the counter before I got in. It was coarse, because both the bathroom and the cabin around it belonged to the enforcers, and no guy in the history of testosterone had ever taken the time to add fabric softener to a load of laundry.
Most of them would probably still be satisfied with beating dried sweat from their clothes with sticks if Jace’s mother would let them get away with it. But the laundry room was located in the lodge—the main house—and what happened there happened according to her rules.
That was exactly why I’d kicked my brothers out of their own room in the west cabin rather than stay in the lodge. I had the strong suspicion that neither Jace’s mother nor his sister really cared for me, no matter how polite they were to my face, but most of that probably had to do with the fact that my father had fought against Jace’s stepfather, Calvin Malone, in the shifter civil war.
When Cal was Alpha, two rapidly disintegrating trailers had sat where the east and west cabins now stood. They’d been propped up on concrete blocks, which had been clearly visible between rusted panels of metal underpinning. One of Jace’s first acts as Alpha was having the trailers hauled off, because he couldn’t stand to see them.
He’d lived there with his stepfather’s enforcers from the time he was twelve, because Malone couldn’t look at him without seeing Jace’s biological father—his mother’s first husband, and her true love, by all accounts.
Because Malone hadn’t liked or respected Jace, his enforcers didn’t either, and twelve is way too young for a boy to be kicked out of his own house. I could only imagine that Jace’s life was truly hell before he’d turned eighteen and gone to work for my uncle Greg at the ranch.
I wrapped myself in the towel and wiped fog from the mirror with one hand, admiring the craftsmanship of the rustic frame holding it in place.
The cabins that now sat behind the lodge were built by hand, by Jace’s men, under his supervision. When he’d moved back to Kentucky to run things, he’d taken a day job at a construction company and had risen through the ranks to become supervisor after just a year. Faythe told me that’s the way it usually went for Alphas—their instinctive leadership shines through in their daily lives, and most of them find success both at work and at home.