Page 161 of Moonlit Nights & Northern Lights
“Are you trying to tell me your mum is involved in all this?” My brain felt like it was going to explode.
Atwisted smile curved her lips. “You could say that. She’s rather high up in GREY, actually.”
I blinked a few times. “Grey?”
“You know, G-R-E-Y, the unit Kit was part of. Mum was the one who organised for him to go, remember?”
“GREY? This… is all GREY? You’re GREY?”
Isla snorted. “I’m only a very tiny part of it.”
My head spun. The forest around us seemed to tilt sideways. “But… but… you’re meant to be studying medicine in Edinburgh. Why the fuck are you doing this, Isla? AndCallum?You broughtCallumin on it? I thought you thought he was a creep who was obsessed with you!”
Her face twisted with distaste. “He is a creep who’s obsessed with me! But I haven’t really been around the pack for years. I distanced myself when my mum came back. So I needed a solid link back in, and Edina trusts him.”
“So my mum has nothing to do with this?”
When Isla shook her head, I breathed out a sigh of relief. Small mercies, I supposed. My mother might be a terrible parent and an awful person, but at least she wasn’t a kidnapping, murderous psychopath.
“So you got him to get her to organise this multi-pack gathering tonight? So you could identify and capture prime candidates for whatever the fuck you’re doing? Were you just going to, what, walk up and grab them?”
“No, obviously there’s more to the plan than that,” she snapped. “But nobody from our pack will be taken,” she added. “Part of the deal I’ve made is that our pack will be protected.”
“Right. Great. Shame that warranty clearly didn’t cover ex-pack members’ ex-boyfriends.”
Isla flinched. “I am sorry about Dev.”
“Did you always know I was up here looking for him?”
“I guessed,” she admitted. “I saw pictures of you together when I did my social media crawl a couple of weeks ago. I couldn’t believe it. Such bad luck.”
“This isn’t bad luck, Isla!” I gestured wildly at Dev’s motionless form. “Is Dev even okay?”
She sighed, running a hand across her face. “I tried at the cottage to bring Dev back under GREY control, but it didn’t work. His system has properly rejected the chip.”
“Thechip?! Is that what you’ve put inside his skull?” I laughed, a horrible manic sound. “You’re putting chips inside wolves’ skulls to create controllable weapons for GREY.”
“Yes. And Dev’s chip malfunctioned,” she said, almost monotonously. Like she’d resigned herself to her fate of telling me everything.
“How did he even escape?” I demanded.
Isla glanced away. “It was a series of fuck-ups, honestly. Something went wrong with the sedation schedule. Two of the guards went up for a smoke break and decided to prop open the security door. They noticed a couple of hours later, but by that point he was miles away.”
“And what if he hadn’t escaped? What happens when the chip malfunctions? Because we found your burn site yesterday. There was a shit tonne of ashes there.”
Guilt flashed across her features. “That was all meant to have stopped by now. The compatibility tests aresupposedto be one hundred percent accurate. That’s what Meridian promised. But they’re liars. That’s one of the reasons Mum—”
“Stop. I don’t care about that right now. Why is Dev’s blood all over the cottage?”
“When Dev understood what I was trying to do to him, we both shifted and fought.” She pulled down her T-shirt—underneath, a horrible gash stretched across her collarbone, still slowly closing. “It was a pretty even fight, except that I’d tranqed him five seconds before I shifted. But he didn’t drop straight down. And I had to defend myself.”
From the buggy, crackling erupted from Isla’s walkie-talkie. Callum’s voice, asking, “Do you copy?”
“They’re close,” she said quietly, eyes scanning the treeline. “Rory, you need to run.”
“What? You’d really just let me walk away from this?”
Her eyes softened, and for a moment she looked like the girl I remembered from childhood—the one who used to sneak extra pudding to me when the adults weren’t looking.
