I dragged in a breath. My chest clenched before I forced it to release the words. “I’ve been worried about all the same things you have. Whether I can really help. Whether me being here is changing things for good or bad. And I’m still figuring that out. I didn’t even know I was a dragon shifter a month ago. I didn’t even know there was any such thing as shifters.”
Orion stared at me as if he couldn’t imagine not knowing. I guessed he probably couldn’t. “But you’re supposed to be leading all of us.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the sticking point, isn’t it? But I can tell you this. I’m doing everything I can to learn and accept my role as quickly as possible. I know I want to be the dragon shifter you all need. I’ll do whatever I can, whatever it takes, to see all of you happy and safe. And from everything I’ve seen, the rogues want the exact opposite of that. They’ll be happy to tell you otherwise so they can use you, but look at how they treated your colleague. He helped them, and they killed him to protect themselves. Maybe you can’t trust me yet, but you have to see you can’t trust them.”
He lowered his head. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. “So what do you want from me?”
Good question. I considered it. “I want to know anything you’ve found out about the rogues and their plans, so I can make sure what happened here yesterday doesn’t happen again.”
He nodded. “I can’t tell you very much. They wouldn’t tell me very much unless I proved I was allying with them. They approached us when we patrolled outside the estate walls, the times when we ended up on our own for a moment. I think they must have had people watching the area just for that—but maybe not anymore. The one I talked to was a fox shifter.”
“How were you supposed to reach out to them if you decided to join their cause?”
“I’m not sure.” He spread his hands. “They said they’d reach out to me. I don’t know how.”
“But if they did, you’d tell us now?”
He raised his head. “Yes,” he said. “I’d come straight to my alpha.”
I tasted the honesty in his words. He was still scared, still unsettled. But he was upset by what he’d seen the rogues do too. He truly hadn’t done anything to hurt us yet.
Maybe to trust me, what he needed was for me to trust him.
Chapter 6
Nate
Orion’s voice bounced off the close walls of the holding cell. “But I cooperated!” my former guard protested as one of my current guards jabbed him with a tranquilizer. “I answered her questions. I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“You talked with shifters you know are out to screw us over,” I replied, just barely holding my anger in check. “You didn’t tell me what was going on. You considered going along with them. Be glad that our dragon shifter is merciful, because believe me, I’d like to do a lot worse to you than this.”
The muskrat shifter opened his mouth as if to argue more, but the drug was already taking effect. His chin wobbled, and then his body sagged. The guard holding him let him drop onto the bench in the holding room. She turned to me. “Should I chain him?”
I shook my head. “If he comes to enough to shift, those things won’t hold him. Just make sure he’s kept tranquilized enough until I decide where he’ll end up next.”
She gave me a sharp nod and threw one last disdainful look at her former colleague. With a sniff, she stalked out of the room. Our would-be-traitor wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
I stalked down the hall, my muscles itching. I wanted so badly to shift. To shift and rage, clawing the floor, battering the walls, letting out every bit of the frustration that had been boiling up inside me since last night.
But I wasn’t just an animal. I knew turning into a raging bear wasn’t going to help anyone.
“Are you all right, sir?” the guard asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “Go on back to your regular duty. And thank you.”
No, I wasn’t all right, not at all. I’d misjudged my own kin. I’d brought my new mate, the mate I’d been waiting for from the moment I became alpha years ago, into the worst kind of danger. I couldn’t even promise her she’d be safe within my estate’s walls.
She should have been looking forward to a grand celebration tonight, one that would have rivaled the reception she’d gotten at the avian estate. Instead we were limiting the guests, checking them over for weapons, setting an atmosphere of anxiety. And everyone would have been anxious anyway after the other night’s attack. Word about that would be all over the countryside now.
We needed to shut those rogues down for good. Maybe we should have before we’d even found Ren.
It’d become easy to ignore the problem over the years. In the aftermath of the previous alphas’ murders, I’d been too busy learning my role to offer a counter-attack. Some of the old guard had tried to track down as many of the rogues as they could, but the perpetrators had gone into hiding. And they hadn’t stirred up much trouble since then.
Because they thought they’d gotten what they wanted, I had to assume.
I prowled through the halls of my home, not entirely sure where I was going but needing to keep moving. I stopped when I spotted one of my attendants coming around a corner.
“Vernon,” I said. “Is the avian alpha back yet? Aaron?”
The panda shifter blinked his big round eyes. “Not that I’ve heard, sir. I can ask in case I missed his arrival.”
I waved that suggestion off. If the avian alpha had returned, I couldn’t imagine he’d have been quiet with his news. “That’s fine. Just come find me if you see him.”
I stalked on, my feet carrying me without thinking to the wing that held my advisors’ quarters. The place where the other night’s attack had been the most brutal. My people had rushed to clean up as quickly as they could, but a bullet hole still marked one wall. There were scratches in the floorboards no buffing was going to erase.
My jaw clenched. I knocked on the first door at my right.
Yvonne opened it a moment later. The stately horse shifter had been one of the first of the former alpha’s advisors to really take me under her wing when I’d been hardly more than a boy. Now, her silver hair was slicked back from her face in its usual braid, but her eyes looked wearier than usual. Heavy with grief.
“My alpha,” she said with a dip of her head. “What brings you here?”
“I just wanted to check in on you. See how you’re doing.”
“Well, about the same. Do you want to come in?”
I accepted the invitation. Yvonne wouldn’t have offered it if she’d wanted to be alone, even when it came to her alpha.
The sitting room at the front of her quarters smelled the same as it had since I was a boy, like clover and sunlight. The coffee table that had used to sit between the two low couches was gone, though. I realized with a lurch of my stomach why. It must have broken in the skirmish.
“If you wanted to change rooms, there are a couple of suites unoccupied,” I said.
Yvonne shook her head. “We lived in these rooms for thirty years, and I’ll remain until you no longer have any use for me as advisor.”