Page 15 of Pack Kasen: Part 2

He hadn’t said a word about me stealing his Jeep, and I’d been ready to laugh in his face if he tried to get me to replace his car.

But he hadn’t even brought it up.

Finan had been right. He doesn’t care about the vehicle.

I’ve seen no sign of him so far today, but a guy who breaks into the faculty building to find out where you live before letting himself into your apartment and getting into your bed doesn’t seem the type to give up easily.

A dark-haired man in his late thirties, wearing a navy suit and white shirt, with a gold badge clipped to the front of his black leather belt, strides this way. A detective. Someone in charge of the investigation rather than one of the uniformed cops hunting for clues.

Handsome, but, as much as I hate to admit it to myself, he has nothing on the Wolf King.

I climb out of my car before he reaches me.

“Miss…”

“Meadow,” I say, slamming my car door shut. “Kat Meadow.”

He stops feet away, giving a probing, indecipherable look through light brown eyes. Wolf eyes. If I wasn’t smelling a human, that sharp gaze would have me believe I was looking at a shifter. “But that wasn’t it before, was it? Rylie Cooper.”

It’s a battle to hide my hatred of that name.

I haven’t been Rylie since foster care and high school, where an old ex made my senior year hell by stabbing me in the back when I refused to sleep with him.

All the men I’ve had interactions with have turned up dead. The cops would have eventually figured out the connection, even if it looks like an animal did the killing.

“You’ve been digging into my past,” I say calmly.

“I’m a cop. We don’t like coincidences,” he says, his tone amiable. “You were in foster care.”

His expression doesn’t change, but if he knows my old name, he knows what happened to my parents, and maybe even about Robert, my foster dad.

A trail of dead bodies litters my past, more than I would like, and probably enough to be suspicious. I sure as hell would be looking into me if I were this cop.

“If you looked into me, you’d know why I’d want to change my name and start over. Are you here to arrest me?” I’m not worried. They have no evidence. The thought of being locked up alarms my wolf and me, but it won’t happen.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Robert, it’s the value of silence.

The more you say, the more rope you give someone to hang you with. If this cop wants to accuse me of something, I don’t intend to do his job for him by incriminating myself.

“I’m not interested in locking you up, Miss Meadow. I’m curious if this name change was a result of some other problems you might have had.”

“What kind of problems?”

He’s worked out that the Gregson Campus Killer is not a wild animal escaped from the zoo. Maybe it’s someone from my past, and I changed my name to escape them. That’s what he’s thinking. Whether he has the evidence to prove any of this is another thing entirely.

“The kind that might necessitate you changing your name and moving cities. The kind that you might go to the cops for help for.” There’s no judgment in his voice, but I hear it all the same.

“I had no problems like that. Just wanted a fresh start is all.”

His expression sharpens. “You knew Cristofer Schuyler?”

This cop knows even more about him than I did. His last name is something I definitely didn’t know. “He was a friend.”

“Justa friend?”

“Look. I don’t know what is happening here. I just know that now any time a guy tries to talk to me, I instinctively want to run away from them because I don’t want to wake up the next morning and find out that something killed them.”

His stare is probing, and I withstand it calmly.

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