Page 34 of Pack Kasen: Part 2

“The girl?” I echo.

“Kat. I’m struggling to believe you thought she was a feral and locked her in your cage.”

“Well, I did,” I mutter, glaring at a piece of wood.

Everyone knows about the cage.

When I became Wolf King, everyone knows I made it my mission to solve the problem of ferals. The cage was a part of that equation. But it’s become a Band-Aid, a temporary fix, rather than the permanent solution I’ve spent years searching for. I’m not sure there is a solution, given that there will always be shifters who like to go around biting humans, and thereby creating ferals.

Not all bitten humans become out of control ferals who need to be killed, but enough do.

More than enough do.

Whatever the solution, Iwillfind it.

“Tell me the story and I’ll help you with that.”

I look at him. “And will you also leave?”

He shrugs and walks over to me. “Eventually. That piece is the left.”

“How’d you know?”

“The screw holes are on the inside.”

“They should have just sent me a tree with instructions to cut it down,” I mutter. “Hundreds of dollars, and they makemedo all the work.”

Tagge is more helpful than I thought he would be, given that I thought he was only up here to take joy in my misery. Because he is genuinely helping, I answer his question. “Someone was killing students at a college a few hours south of here. I thought it was her.”

“Ferals tend not to be female.”

I glare at him, though with his head down as he drills, he misses it.

“I am well aware of that,” I bite out.

“Did you try talking to her?” he asks, screwing two pieces of the bed frame together. The guy has barely glanced at the instructions even once, yet he already knows more about how to build this thing than I do.

“Three were dead. Another was killed as my men arrived. The situation needed to be handled.”

He nods. “Fair enough. I won’t ask why you sent your men out to bring her back and didn’t go yourself.”

“Because you know I’ll kill you?”

He lifts his head and meets my gaze steadily. “Because we all know what happened here. No one should lose family at the hands of a feral. And…”

“And?” I prompt.

“I heard about what happened in California.”

I had a run-in with a feral that looked so much like the one who’d killed my parents, and I lost it. It’s rare for me to lose control, especially to that extent. News like that would have made its way back to the Californian Alpha and to the other packs as well.

For the next several seconds, we focus on assembling the bed frame.

With two, the work is easier, but then again, that’s true of most things.

“The deaths were unusual,” I say, picking up the threads of our conversation. “Only men were being killed and there were days between the murders.”

I glance at Tagge.

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