Page 39 of An Unending Claim

I sat forward in my chair, about to demand she tell me what she knew, but she didn’t let me get that far.

“I won’t break my friend’s confidence, but you and I both want her to stay. And I want to help you. There are things you need to know to tip the scales in our favor.”

“And just how will you do that if you can’t tell me anything?” I asked with a frustrated sigh.

Savannah came right up to the front of my desk and gained another notch of respect from me when she boldly met my stare. “You aren’t thinking hard enough, Alpha. She’s actually told you enough to put the pieces together, if you just collect them and recall examining them.”

I frowned and tapped my fingers on the desktop before grabbing a hair band and twisting the thick mass up into a bun on my head. “Can you at least explain a little more so I know what I’m looking for?”

Savannah pressed her lips together and thought for a few moments, then shook her head. “I’m sorry. To be honest, she didn’t even tell me everything, I put it together. But I didn’t have all the other bullshit going on to make the puzzle pieces look like insignificant details that could be dealt with later.”

“AAlright, Savannah. Thank you for trying to help.”

She cocked her head to the side and looked at me curiously. “Why don’t you simply look inside my mind and find out?”

I didn’t answer right away, trying to put it in the right words. Finally, I just said, “We all have lines we won’t cross because what’s on the other side is a slippery slope to someone we don’t want to be. That someone would never make Peyton happy, he’d send her running with one thought.”

Literally. If I dug into someone’s thoughts beyond the parameters I’d set for myself, Peyton would never see me as any different than the Alpha, or Alphas, who had put the fear of the hive mind in her head in the first place.

Savannah nodded. “That makes sense.” She turned and took one step, then twisted around. “When I first got here, I heard a rumor.”

Tired, I ran a hand down my beard and exhaled slowly. “Oh?”

“I was just curious what you knew about it. I think they said it was around twenty years ago. About a child. I guess she was abused and then one day she just disappeared?”

I wasn’t sure why she wanted to know about that situation, but I proceeded to tell her what I knew. “Although”—I stopped and gave her a questioning look—“I hadn’t heard that it was a girl.”

She shrugged. “Maybe I’m mistaken.”

“Well, we’d heard rumors of a child who had mixed blood and was being ostracized and abused by their pack. Once I found out which pack, I was quite shocked the story had ever surfaced. Xavier Castile keeps a tight rein on his pack through fear and his abilities as the Alpha. By the time I figured out it was his pack, the kid was gone. There was talk of her escaping and other stories concluded that she’d been killed. But I could never get proof enough to take to the Council and call Xavier out about it.”

Twenty years, and it still enraged me when I thought about that poor—

Son of a bitch! Could it be?

I’d been staring off at the wall as my revelations became clearer, but I swung my gaze back to Savannah to ask her a question. Only to find her gone.

Puzzle pieces.

I closed my eyes and tried to recall every little detail Peyton had told me about her childhood. I began to fit them together and when I used the story about the Castile child as the board, they formed the same shape. Fucking hell.

Peyton is a Castile?

Xavier Castile is her grandfather?

Fuck.

Her comment about our child floated in to take its spot. If Peyton was half wolf, our baby was only a quarter panther.

This is what she’s been hiding from me?

Finally, the picture was complete, with the exception of a few edge pieces.

No wonder Peyton had been so shocked when the pack had been so accepting of her.

I saw so many of the things she’d done and said in a different light, and fuck… her fears stemmed from truly horrific circumstances.

The bullets used in the deaths of all the shifters suddenly popped into my mind as well. The ones with the jaguar etching—Lincoln had confirmed that they were the same ones used to kill Geoff. At the time, I’d been one hundred percent sure that it had nothing to do with my mate, but now… I was becoming convinced of the opposite. Not that Peyton had been involved in the killings, but that someone was targeting her. This was about more than a serial killer trying to silence her. I needed to go over the situation with Tanner, and once I had his insight, I would decide on the next steps.

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