Page 83 of Feral

“Brother, ya know not every Mundane woman is like Silvia, right? What if Daphne is different? What if you two could be happy?”

“It’s just a cover story,” I snapped, mostly to remind myself. What Liam was saying was far too tempting. “I promised her I wouldn’t take advantage, but the bite is making things more difficult than I’d anticipated. I need your help. Please, brother?”

Liam exhaled long through his nose and nodded.

“I understand, I really do. But the answer is no.”

“Liam—!”

“Ya can’t hide from love for the rest of yer life.”

I raised my head, looking my nose down at him to hide the way his words had rocked me.

“Who said it was love?”

Liam snorted.

“Don’t insult my intelligence. Ya look at her like the moon rises in her soul, brother. I would be nauseated if I wasn’t so happy for ya.”

I looked away, arms crossed and tried to stem the tide of rising panic inside of me. Liam wouldn’t help me, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t just lock myself up anyway.

“I forgot, I wanted to show you something.”

Liam got up slowly, wincing as he did so, and I tried not to notice. Instead, I glanced at the papers on his desk while he searched his desk drawer. Liam handled most of the financials for the family business and he often preferred to work out here than in Dublin, which had been how he was injured in the first place.

Odd that he has no aversion to this place. I wouldn’t want to be in the same place where I’d almost been shot to death.

I was just about to ask him about it when a file caught my eye.

“What’s this about?” I asked, picking it up.

“Oh, that’s…damn! I thought I put that away. Angus will have my head for letting ya see that.”

“Why?”

As I flipped through it, the answer appeared very quickly. My eyes flew up to Liam’s and he pressed his lips together as if he were truly annoyed with me now.

“These are a list of thefts.”

“Aye.”

I looked quickly through the dates and my hands tightened on the delicate paper.

“Please don’t rip that,” Liam said, snatching it from me.

“Those go back at least a year. And the most recent one was only a few weeks before all this trouble started.”

“Aye and? What’s yer point, Fraser?”

I ran my hand through the fur on the top of my head. If this were Angus, I’d have to come up with a clever lie, but Liam had guessed the truth; he was already looking into thefts. Did he know if it was Ruben or not? Did he know there had been an artifact smuggled in with the general goods we usually transported?

“From what Daphne and the director know about this artifact and how it might’ve gotten to our clan, I think our company might have been used to smuggle artifacts into Scotland.”

“Whoa now, we never agreed to anythin’ like that!” Liam said, hands out.

“Naw, I know, and I said as much to Daphne. But I think what’s happened is that whoever has stolen all this stuff over the past year also got their hands on one of the artifacts that was being smuggled. And that’s what’s responsible for all of this. We have to find them, Liam.”

I didn’t see a reason to name Ruben quite yet without any proof. It may not even be him, his odd behavior notwithstanding.