Page 11 of Protection of the Pack

Steve continued. ‘Mark was seen buying it, but not in big enough quantities to distribute it. By the time we got round to a sting operation, Boost had been taken off the market so we just kept an eye on him and a few of the other customers. Boost was expensive, though – crazy expensive. The question is, where was Mark getting the money to buy it on a park ranger’s salary?’

‘A little recreational drug use is hardly the smoking gun we need.’

‘No, but drug users can be unpredictable and Mark was mixing with them.’

‘So I need to question the pack about drug use?’

‘That’s probably not a bad place to start. See if any of the others were enjoying the highs and lows of the pink powder.’

‘What else?’

‘Well, I’m sorry to ask, but where were you?’

‘Me?’ I replied incredulously.

‘It’s well-known that Mark was eyeing the alpha role, then in swept an unknown – you,’ Steve commented. ‘Honestly, if it was you that killed him, the Connection would just close down the investigation and pass it to the werewolf council. Pack politics are something else.’

‘I’m not going round killing my packmates.’ Mutilating sociopath exes is different, right?

‘It will be easier if I investigate and clear you, then leak it to the pack “accidentally” so they know you’re not involved. Where were you?’

‘At Rosie’s with Maxwell. All night.’

Steve nodded. ‘Great. That’s easily verified.’

‘There’s a fly in the ointment,’ I admitted. ‘Manners slipped out to meet an … old friend.’

‘What time?’

‘Between 1am and 3am.’

Steve sighed. ‘That’s right in the window.’

‘I know,’ I grumped. ‘This is who he went to meet.’ I pulled up Mindy’s details and Steve jotted them down.

‘I’ll contact Mindy and Maxwell and get you two alibied asap,’ he said.

‘How are you going to let it slip to the pack?’ I asked curiously.

‘I’ll tell Marissa. We’re friendly and she’s … loquacious.’

Loquacious was fancy talk for a gossip. ‘Are you now?’ I queried with interest. Marissa was a total two-faced bitch to me: she smiled and then spat in my coffee. I changed the topic. ‘Tell me about Mark’s ex. What is she like?’

He snorted. ‘Bat-shit crazy. She wanted kids but she and Mark never managed to have them. They tried but she had a lot of miscarriages. It’s much harder for werewolves to conceive successfully.’

‘She’s a werewolf too?’

‘Yeah, she’s in your pack. Cassie Oates. She’s kept her married name, even though they’re divorced.’

Great. I hadn’t even known that Mark had an ex-wife within the pack. What kind of shitty-ass alpha was I? ‘All those miscarriages would be hard on anyone, but that hardly makes her crazy.’ I glared at Steve. The feminist in me hated the label that was applied to women all too often: guys were berserk, women were crazy.

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘After all the heartbreak, Mark tried to persuade her to adopt but she wanted a child of her own. She didn’t think an adopted child would count as really theirs. ’

That comment stung because, even after all this time, it struck a chord. My mum and dad adopted me when I was three. They already had a biological son, Ben, who was five at the time, but I’m as much a part of the family as he is.

There were times when I’d thought about my birth parents, but for most of my life I’ve carefully shut them out. I’m happywith my family; they are amazing, and they are everything I need. I don’t need my birth parents to be part of my life. I don’t feel less for being adopted because my mum and dad love me as much as they love my brother.

Of course, I’ve had wobbles occasionally, especially when I was a teenager. It bothers me now and again that my birth parents saw fit to put me up for adoption. That’s such an innocuous phrase – ‘abandon me’ feels more accurate. But I try not to be bitter because I was adopted by a wonderful family. Who knows what my circumstances would have been otherwise? My parents might have been druggies and I could have been raised in a crack den. Perhaps giving me up for adoption was the best thing that could have happened to me. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

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