Page 77 of Hunter

Hunter

When I walkedinto Wolf’s office, I found him sitting behind his desk, hands pressed in a steeple, eyes hard on the paper in front of him. He didn’t even notice I was there until I shut the door. It was unusual and downright unnerving.

“Prez,” I said as I stood in front of him.

“Sit down, Hunter,” Wolf advised, his voice flat.

“What’s going on?”

“Sit. Down.” A command this time.

I did as my president asked and settled into one of the two leather seats in front of him. My eyes stayed on him, caution making me unable to relax. Something was up. And I had a feeling whatever Wolf had to say, I wasn’t going to like it.

Wolf leaned back in his chair, his eyes meeting mine. No matter how bad it was, Wolf always faced me. He faced everyone.

“I told you before I didn’t want to go into this war blind,” Wolf began.

I nodded. “If this is about Mallory—”

“It’s not,” he assured me. “Not exactly.”

“What do you mean,not exactly?” I was beginning to feel uncomfortable with the conversation, and the direction it was going made me even more unsure.

“It means, I don’t want you going into this war blind, either,” Wolf stated. “There’s something you don’t know about Noble’s death.”

“Has this got something to do with why they’ve been so quiet since they ran my brother off the road?”

“Yes. And the reason they killed him. And the reason why Hell’s Runners want Mallory.”

“You told me Noble was killed because of the bad blood between the clubs.” I didn’t like this. I didn’t like where this was going at all.

“It’s a little bit more complicated than that,” Wolf conceded. “Noble had information on the Hell’s Runners. The kind of information that could put most of their members away for life. He agreed not to release the information if the club left us alone. It’s possible it could have been a bluff, but the Runners didn’t want to take that chance, so they agreed to Noble’s deal …”

“And then they had him killed,” I finished.

Wolf nodded. “But when they went to reclaim the information, Noble left them a message, saying if anything happened to him, the information was to be passed to the person he trusted the most. That’s when I found out they had threatened Noble before he revealed the information. They had a certain photograph of him and a red-haired girl.”

“They threatened him withMallory?”

“They thought she was Noble’s woman when they were spotted together a few weeks before,” Wolf explained. “Noble thought he’d had it sorted and didn’t think they needed to bring her in. But after the accident and Noble’s message, it wasn’t hard to know who they’d go after first.

“I could have brought her to the club for protection, but that would only be a temporary measure until the Runners brought a full-out war to our door. I didn’t want everyone to get caught in the crossfire.” Wolf intertwined his hands. “However, if Mallory were to run, they’d waste their time trying to track her down. Or, at the very least, be hesitant to act against the club on the chance that Mallory would release the information to the police before they could get to her. We knew Mallory didn’t have the information, but she would buy us enough time to find out who really had it and put the Hell’s Runners down once and for all.”

“What are you getting at with this, Wolf?” I growled, clenching the leather chair.

He reached into the drawer and pulled out an envelope. Then he threw it on the desk in front of me and gestured for me to pick it up. “Look at it.”

I reached forward and grabbed the letter. I slid my finger under the flap, pulled out the note inside, and looked at the contents. I felt my stomach drop.

“This is …”

“It’s a copy of the letter Mallory Ward received in the days after Noble’s funeral,” Wolf finished.

The words were exactly as Mallory had described them, and then some. It took me a moment to process, but when I came to the end of my thoughts, I didn’t like where it led me.

“Why do you have this, Wolf?” I asked, my voice becoming eerily calm.

Without batting an eye, Wolf turned my world upside down. “Because I was the one who sent it.”

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