Page 8 of Betrayed Auctioned Mate

I grunt my acknowledgment, then straighten, trying to pull myself together. The face in the mirror staring back at me doesn’t look like my own.

“It’s fine,” I say, before Aris can keep asking questions. I don’t want questions. I just want to keep working and act as if this isn’t happening. “Did you know?”

“Of course I didn’t.” Aris folds his arms. He meets my eyes in the mirror. “Is this going to be a problem?”

I know he isn’t judging me. He’s asking because he knows I’ll be straight with him about it and because he needs to know.

The only problem is that I don’t know. I have no idea what to say.

“I’ll work it out,” I tell him.

“Not an answer to my question.”

I turn to face him head-on. “It won’t be a problem. She’s a professional—so am I. It was years ago.”

Aris studies my face. Behind him, sunlight filters from a skylight in the hallway. I could navigate the pack center with my eyes closed, but now it feels like I’m at risk of forgetting where I am. Keira has unseated me from my own sense of familiarity.

After a second, my alpha sighs. He breaks the quiet.

“I would tell you that you can always talk to me about it, but you won’t listen,” he says. “So, I’ll take your word for it. But I hope you know how important this mission is.”

Of course, I know. It’s been my project since the beginning, since the fiasco with Olivia, Byron, Veronica, and Percy’s last mission left them all needing a break—not to mention the pregnancies. I’m more invested in this than anyone else. I know what’s at stake. And with two of the pack’s couplesdealing with newborns and another expecting later this year, I know I can’t drop the ball on this.

I try to convey my commitment to Aris, though I don’t have the words for it. I look him in the eyes. “Yes.”

He nods, satisfied with my answer, or perhaps just with the expression on my face. “Briefing starts in ten.”

He turns and leaves me alone, standing in the middle of the bathroom, hands and face still wet, questioning myself and everything else.

***

Halfmoon Lake is down at the Rosecreek Bottoms, a flat, green stretch of three or four miles of wetland nestled on our side of the highway, downhill about half a mile from the edge of town. The west side of the water is our territory—our people live down there, play down there, and bring their kids there to swim and relax. Nobody has contested it before, and most likely, nobody ever will.

On the other side of the lake is a dense, forested mound once known as Attlefolk. It used to be an unincorporated community of only half a dozen families, but nobody has lived out in Attlefolk for decades now.

Older locals of Rosecreek tell us, that it became unlivable a long time ago thanks to the ebbing and flowing of the water off the swampland surrounding the Mississippi River miles to the east of us, which causes Halfmoon Lake to rise unpredictably in the wetter months.

Those few houses which comprised Attlefolk were too close to the water, and they have long since crumbled into thelake, which swells high in the summer and saturates the hardier soil to the west, and erodes the land too soft to withstand it; as an ironic result, the half-moon of Halfmoon lake has been waxing for decades now, ever so slowly widening. Just like the real thing.

Attlefolk is the closest speck of civilization to Rosecreek by far, but as far as any of us are concerned, it’s been empty for years.

Now, we know that’s no longer true.

We call the traffickers the Attlefolkers for brevity, though we know it must not be where they operate from. Byron and I’s running theory is that they bring their captives—all of them women, almost entirely shifters, mostly wolves—up the Mississippi and through waterways from down the river, probably from a connected source in Fountain City or Winona, which lie southeast of us.

They dock across the lake in Attlefolk to refuel and hide their boats by daylight, and then, as far as we can tell, they set off again northwest toward Minneapolis to some secondary location, where we’re sure they’re selling the girls as brides; it could even be another paranormal town up the river, like ours.

We’ve received numerous tips—we even managed to contact an escapee last month—but we don’t yet know where the auctions take place. We’re getting closer to it, though. I can feel it.

As Aris explains all of this to the room at large, I watch Keira take notes as if I’m watching her for signs of life. I take in every scratch of her pen. I know she can tell I’m staring. I wish I could stop, but even as I try, I cannot rip my eyes away.

She raises her head when Aris is finished speaking, tapping her fingers rhythmically on the face of her notepad.

“These ‘Attlefolkers,’” she says, nodding. “We need to start with identifying them. If we can get even just one or two names on the books, we can narrow down their base of operations. How often are they docking across the lake?”

I answer before I can stop myself. “Once every ten days.”

Half a dozen people around the table look at me like I’ve just grown a second head. I never speak voluntarily at these meetings.

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