Page 91 of Pack Kasen: Part 2

My only saving grace was I didn’t tell him about the hell that was foster care. I don’t need the Wolf King’s pity. I don’t need anyone's pity.

“You can’t keep sneaking out, Leo. Your mom gets worried,” I tell him gently. Mostly because anyone yelling at me just made me more stubborn.

Robert, the foster dad that bodega robbers killed in a robbery one night, was one of the few people who treated me like an adult.

I never forgot that, and I don’t think I ever will.

“We should go for a run.” He’s so excited that if he were a wolf, I’m positive his tail would be wagging right about now.

“I have to work,” I tell him.

Namely, get back to the problem of finding the Gregson College Killer.

The deaths have stopped since graduation, and that probably has to do with the fact that I no longer have any exes left for the killer to target. Cris was my friend. He didn’t deserve to die.

Everyone is dead.

Only Aren is left, and even I can admit that there’s something about that guy that seems invincible, and that was before I learned he can become a half-man, half-wolf beast thing that no one can take on in a fight.

“Have you seen Aren’s third form?” I ask Leo, curious.

He shakes his head. “I wasn’t allowed to go to the Wolf King Trials. No kids are.” He brightens. “Bet it’s really cool, though.”

Yeah, I bet it is.

I need to refocus. I should be trying to figure out who the killer is and what they want.

It feels awful to even think about, but if I’d had to guess who it might be, I’d have said Cris. That has to do with his disgusting herbal remedies for his allergies that make being around him for extended periods of time torture.

Made it impossible, I correct myself.

Because he’s dead now. He helped me into my car after Doug’s wake, and someone killed him for it.

“It’s just a run,” Leo says. “And I can take you to the butterfly place.”

The butterfly place?

“Can you even?—”

He’s a small gray wolf drowning in his clothes seconds later.

I shake my head. “It’s a good thing your pack is in the middle of nowhere.”

I don’t even want to know how Dania would keep the fact that Leo isn’t human a secret. If she could, it definitely wouldn’t be for long.

I pull his clothes free, move to scratch his ear, but it seems all that excited energy is too much for him to control.

He bounds around me, and I can’t help but laugh. “You’re going to make yourself dizzy and throw up.”

He runs around me again, trips, and tumbles into the creek.

I save him just in time, laughing as I haul him back. Not that he cares. He’s disappointed, and I have to wonder if the trip wasn’t accidental but a deliberate desire to go swimming. “Leo…”

Are all the pups like this? How does Gregor deal with teaching a bunch of them? Maybe that’s why he was so eager for me to sit in on another class. He’d have another adult in the classroom to control the chaos.

“It’s okay, you can take him,” a woman calls from the house.

I turn to see Dania, Leo’s mom, standing near the bunkhouse in a short-sleeved, ankle length light green cotton dress, her long hair in a braid hanging over her right shoulder, and a warm smile on her pretty face. “He said he wanted to show you the butterfly place.”

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