Page 3 of Haze

His hand returns from the top desk drawer and, with it, an Ardelean blue envelope. Magnus tosses it on the desk in front of me before leaning back into his chair.

As I collect it, rage makes it difficult to slide the letter free from the envelope.

Magnus explains, “Evidently, The Leviathan doesn’t quite know what the late Alpha Regent was doing. But our shipping company came up in the books, and The Leviathan is inviting us to the table as a show of good faith for the future.”

Robert was breaking the centuries-old armistice by doing business with Magnus. When The Leviathan slayed his brother to take back the throne, Magnus was left holding the wrong end of an under-the-table deal. It’s been months of cleaning up the mess.

“Sending me because I won’t be associated with you any longer. Then you’ll have no reason to comply in the future?” I laugh, shaking the envelope at him. “Is there a level you won’t stoop to?”

Magnus leans back in his chair. “If you don’t want to go, I will. But maybe you’ll like America permanently. There isn’t a place in Ireland where you can hide, not with the blood on your hands. Without your jacket or the family’s protection, there aren’t many places in this world you’ll be safe. But The Leviathan’s pack seems like a good place to start asking for amnesty.”

He makes a valid point, and it’s another douse of fuel on the fire.

I grit my teeth. “Fuck you, Magnus.”

He nods his head. “Wedding is this Saturday with the Equinox. Anything you don’t take with you, I’ll have shipped. I’ll get your recent take disbursed to you. It’s what’s fair.”

Backing away, I make it only a few steps before Magnus says, “You walk out of this life, Finn, and there’s no coming back. Blood or not, you walk out the door, you won’t walk back in.”

With a nod, I walk backward, retreating from his office, not willing to turn my back on him. The hallway, despite the scattering of the Quartermasters, is empty.

I refuse to be complicit in The Hellhound’s apathy for the lives he’s responsible for. I can no longer be the devout Enforcer, the good soldier Magnus needs.

God help me make up for the blood I’ve spilled in the name of my brother. I was misguided and refused to acknowledge the devil within him. It ends today. I won’t be able to make those lives right. Thousands of people have suffered because of my involvement. But I can sever my ties to that role. Withdrawing my hands — the learned skills used to further Magnus’s agenda — is a start to atonement.

Why did it take losing those boys to see it? The purpose of their deaths isn’t something I want to know. There’s so much I’ll never learn about what madness Magnus is creating.

Ma will keep Magnus honest in paying out death benefits. Not that he’s ever gone back on the rules we’ve lived by. We may be brothers, but the blood of the covenant isn’t thicker anymore.

Chapter 1

Lena

“Do you know how much I fucking hate social events?” Deacon, my older yet somehow less mature brother, walks backward through the hotel room door.

Pulling on his tie and loosening it quickly, he pulls it off over his head. He’s already got three buttons of his dress shirt undone.

“Yeah, Deacon. I know.” I sigh.

He made his complaints well-known to me all night.

As I slip my hotel key back inside my clutch, my fingers brush against the placeholder cards I swiped off the table. They read ‘Lena’ and ‘Deacon.’ It’s ridiculous and sentimental, but being invited to something formally by the names we’ve chosen and not bestowed on us by our parents, it’s healing. These could have easily read ‘Kathy’ and ‘Jimmy.’ That thought, the one taking me back to being called Kathy, makes my stomach lurch. It’s been twelve years. When do I quit feeling this angry?

Carrying my heels and the extra fabric of my dress that I had to hitch up to walk flat-footed, I follow Deacon into our hotel suite. It was his idea to share one to keep us from making bad choices and bringing a random hook-up back to our room.

Unprotected for far too long, my wolf chimes in. As I pass over the threshold, she stops cowering. Leaning back against the door, I draw a deep breath and let all the tension fade away.

Making my way deeper into the suite, my wolf makes the most obtuse observation, our mate though, he was handsome.

I ignore her. It’s bad enough she wants to find a quieter place in the pack hierarchy, but now she’s decided she found our mate. It’s the wedding experience that’s confused her. I can’t blame her. There were so many shiny and elegant things to enjoy.

Deacon shakes out of his suit jacket, like a snake shedding his skin in an uncalculated flail, before undoing his belt and fly and then flopping down on the couch. Like the deviant he is, his feet, still in their shoes, go up on the coffee table.

No more pack events. Not until we hunt our mate back down. The coward whimpers. Apparently, seeing Cade and Thalia happy and mated makes her believe that she can have it too.

She’s wrong. It will never be safe to even debate looking for that. I’ve done the math and calculated the risk.

Deacon lets out an exasperated sigh while unbuttoning his cufflinks. “Damn shame a bunch of the packs didn’t come to make it a full gathering.”

---