Page 59 of A Bear's Secret

Trevor feltlike he waited for an eternity. They’d taken all the wolves from his father’s pack that they could find and then stuffed nearly fifty of them into a couple of small holding cells. The Ponderosa County Sheriff’s office wasn’t made for that kind of volume, and Trevor wound up sitting on the floor, his back against the wall.

He didn’t speak to any of the other wolves. He didn’t want to. Instead, he just watched the men in suits take them away, one by one, then return them later.

The men in suits weren’t Ponderosa County deputies. He didn’t know who they were, other than the officers seemed to be deferring to them.

Something very bad seemed to be happening. In Trevor’s experience, men wearing suits were almost always sinister, signs of something bad to come.

Then, at last, it was his turn. This time it was a woman in a suit, a human, and she walked into the cell, looked at him, and said his name.

“Trevor Reynolds?”

He got to his feet, towering over her, even as she straightened her backbone. She had a helmet of blond hair, tucked into a perfect bun at the nape of her neck, and everything about her screamed no-nonsense.

“Follow me,” she said, leading him into an interrogation room.

He sat at the metal table and she sat as well, facing him.

“So you’re Buck Reynolds’s son,” she began.

“That’s right.”

“And a member of the Ponderosa wolf pack,” she said. “Though is it fair to say you’re not a member of the inner circle?”

“Very fair,” he said.

“And what can you tell me about the events of last night?” she asked.

Trevor looked at her and paused. She stared back, a pen poised above a yellow legal pad.

Then he took a deep breath, and told her everything: the surprise meeting, the teenager, the running, ending up at the Double Moon, ending in a confession that he’d spent the night there.

The human didn’t particularly seem interested in that detail, beyond double-checking Austin’s name.

“What can you tell us about your father’s plans to raise a militia and incite a revolt?” she asked.

Trevor stared.

She raised her eyebrows.

“I’m sorry,” Trevor said. “What?”

“What knowledge did you have of his… activities?” she asked, tapping the pen against the paper.

Trevor looked at his bandaged hand and then his other hand, totally dumbfounded.

Then, things began trickling back into his head.

“My sister shot that kid that Sloane found in the woods,” he said. “There was a tranq gun in the workshop, and Tim — my nephew — was playing with it.”

He licked his lips, more coming back to him.

“They had an arsenal in there,” he said softly. “I don’t know what or how much, but there were a lot of guns. Sometimes I’d come in, and he and Scarlet would be looking at something and hide it real quick.”

He shook his head.

“That’s it, though. I mostly kept the ranch running, tried to keep my mom sober, help Lizzy and Tim out with their schoolwork, all that stuff,” he said. “I just didn’t pay them too much attention.”

The woman nodded, very officially, still writing things down. Then she flipped backwards through the notes she’d made, as if considering them carefully.

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