Fangs ⊰ d. hale ᴮᴼᴼᴷ¹

⊰twenty⊱

"See, the thing is they're all connected. I mean, the bus driver that got killed, he was an insurance investigator assigned to the Hale house fire," my dad continued.

I heard about the bus driver. Derek told me about the Alpha calling Scott out to try to get Scott to kill with him. Only, they hadn't succeeded the night the Alpha—well, Peter—wanted to actually kill the driver, and the driver died later in the hospital.

"'Terminated under suspicion of fraud'," my brother read from the file in my dad's hand.

"Exactly," my dad said, shaking his head.

"Who else?" my brother asked. 

He was clearly already onto something that my dad wasn't, so, I leaned in closer to read over his shoulder.

"The video store clerk who got his throat slashed...He's a convicted felon, history of arson," my dad explained.

"Oh. Oh, I see what's going on," I muttered to myself.

I knew what Peter was up to. It wasn't hard to figure it out now that we had the missing pieces we needed.

"What about the other two guys? The guys who got killed in the woods?" my brother asked our dad.

"Priors all over their records including..."

"Arson," my brother and I said at the time.

"So, maybe they all had something to do with the fire," my brother added to himself.

My dad started to lean back again in his seat as he put his glasses on the table and Stiles reached for the bottle of whiskey. "Another shot?" he asked our dad.

"No, no, no. No more," our dad protested as I tried to snatch the bottle from Stiles's hand.

"Dad, come on. You work really hard, all right. You deserve it," Stiles sweet-talked him, preventing me from grabbing the bottle as well.

So, my dad gave in to my idiot brother. "Oh, my God. I'm gonna have such a hangover," my dad said as Stiles reached for his glass again.

"You mean you're gonna have such a good night's sleep," my brother corrected. I glared at him as he turned away from our dad. "And I'm gonna have an eternity in the lowest circle of hell," he continued more quietly has he poured more whiskey to the top of the glass.

"Yes, you are. What the hell do you think you're doing, Stiles? Dad hasn't drank like that in years," I growled at my brother under my breath.

"It was the only way he was going to tell me what he was working on," my brother said to me under his breath before he turned around again and placed the glass in front of our father. "We need to know where his investigation is going and we just proved that."

I groaned and sat in the seat across from my dad when he grabbed the glass in his hand and started to drink it. He drank the whole glass in one sip.

I put my head in my hands and groaned. I hated that Stiles was getting our father to drink again. It crushed me, because it made me think back to when my mom died.

My dad had been straddling the border of being an alcoholic back then.

He drank a lot in that first year or so. He almost lost his job because of it. But after I did everything I could, I was was able to cut him back to one drink every few days or so.

And now, when he drinks heavily, it really upsets me because I know he's stressed about something. He had to be stressed about cracking this case if he didn't realize Stiles tricked him like that.