Calla
My wolf nearly jumped out of my skin when I opened my office door first thing in the morning to find it already occupied.
"Good morning, boss." There he was, looking pleased with himself, his chest puffed out behind his tailored suit like he was a cock parading for his hen du jour.
"Holy shit, Rhys." I brought my hand up to cover my heart and calm it. "What are you doing here?"
"It's my office."
"You mean Our office. What are you doing in our office before me?"
"Obviously, it's because I'm such a hard worker."
I clucked my tongue. "Be for real."
"I am being for real. That press conference is weighing on me. Lots to think about there." He swiveled in a circle and when he stopped, brought his feet up and placed them on his desk. Hard worker indeed.
"Then there's this new development." He ran a hand through his thick, wavy black hair. "Not sure what to make of it."
"A new development?" I frowned. All we needed was something else to go wrong. "Did one of your brothers kick a kitten in front of a troop of Girl Scouts or something?"
"Nothing like that."
"What's going on then?"
"Have a seat." He motioned to my desk like he was offering it up to me out of the kindness of his heart. "I had an interesting phone call last night with Detective Rachelle Anderson. Do you know her? Nice woman. I hope her father-in-law's angina clears up soon."
"Rachelle Anderson...no, not really." Enough to say hi, not enough to know her father-in-law had angina, or that she had a father-in-law, for that matter. "Only that she works with Dev."
"Yes, with Dev. Who you do know. Very well."
"Don't say it like that."
"Say it like what?"
"With one eyebrow raised and a smirk on your lips."
"I would never! Smirking causes wrinkles."
"Well, you were inwardly smirking, but that's beside the point. I'm not going to get into an argument with you about Dev. What did she want to talk with you about?" I swallowed, knowing very much what the topic of their conversation had been.
"Right. What did she want to talk about with me, of all people?" He drummed his fingers against his desk. "Ah, yes, I remember now. It was a long conversation, but in a nutshell... A human woman went missing during the full moon. She'd met someone online, made plans to meet, and as it turns out, the man was allegedly an Apex shifter. Her phone was at one point located here and now there's been no trace of her."
"That's awful."
"Calla, Calla, Calla." He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. "You're not very convincing."
I wrapped my arms around my torso. "What are you talking about?"
"You're supposed to sound like you were hearing the information I just rattled off to you for the first time, but your response, well...it fell a little flat. Not to mention that you didn't immediately jump on what this would mean for our redemption in the public's eye."
"A woman is missing! That's more important than Apex's reputation."
"No doubt to you it is."
My heart thudded in my chest. "But not to you?"
"That isn't the point." He swung his legs off the desk and leaned in towards me. No more smirk, inward or outward, as he spoke. "She's not just a random woman to you, is she?"
"I...I don't even know her name."
"Yes, you do. Would you like me to say it?"
Shit. I had practically begged Dev not to trace this back to me and here I was, being grilled about it by the person I'd been most afraid would find out. "I'm sure you'll tell me regardless of what I'd like."
"Vicki Anatoli."
Her name on his tongue made me want to vomit. Had he said it before? Had he picked her from a dating app because he'd already made a connection between Vicki and me? If so, why?
"What, no witty comeback?" He didn't look surprised. "How stupid do you think I am?"
"You aren't stupid at all, but sometimes your ego overshadows your intelligence."
And now the surprise did show up. "I disagree. My ego is as robust as it is due to my intelligence."
"Let's call it a lack of self-reflection, then."
"You're good." He waved a finger at me. "I'll give you that. You know how to turn a conversation. Even a conversation pertaining to your missing best friend."
I winced. There was no denying it now. "How'd you find out?"
"Detective Anderson told me her name. I'd never heard of her before, and contrary to your low opinion of me, it does matter that something bad might have befallen her at an Apex shifter's hands. So, after the phone call ended, I looked her up online. And this is where I have to question your intelligence, Calla, because it took me all of two minutes to locate a picture of both of you, together, on one of Vicki's friend's profiles. Some guy named Brett."
"What?" I had a strict no social media policy, outside of what Crown's publicity department pushed for promotional reasons. "I don't believe you." Or, I didn't want to believe him, but he had said Brett's name—Brett who knew my rule and had broken it. Damn it.
To prove me wrong, Rhys brought out his phone and showed me the picture. It had been taken at Vicki and Brett's apartment a month ago for Vicki's birthday dinner. In the photo, I leaned in so my face was next to my friend's, both of us smiling widely, golden paper party hats adorning our heads.
I blinked away tears.
Rhys took his phone away, his swagger evaporated. "Are you okay?"
"Not really. My best friend is missing and I'm sitting in a room with someone who may know what happened to her and he has the gall to harass me about it all. What a dick, right?"
"I said I cared. Wait—I see." He tapped on his desk again. "This explains a lot. You think I tried to date your friend and then ended up kidnapping or murdering her or both."
"I'm not thinking that. That's too many assumptions at this point. You are a prime suspect, though."
"A prime suspect, huh? And here you are, having to spend all your time with me, act like you don't despise me."
"You're wrong. I'm not that good of an actress."
"So, you still hate me, and you've decided I'm guilty...with no proof."
"I said you're a suspect. See, this is the problem, Rhys. This is why I wouldn't let Brett file a missing person's report. You could have torn my friend's throat out and no one would ever dare trace it back to you and your precious pack."
I could sense the irritation rolling off him. It took a lot to get under his skin, but I seemed to be managing it just fine. If we weren't discussing the fate of my best friend, I would feel damned proud of myself for vexing him so completely.
"Your logic is wrong on several levels," he said. "For one, the incident of the human attacked on the same night Vicki went missing has already been traced back to Apex, and there's been immediate backlash." He pointed to one of his bruises. "We aren't as untouchable as you think."
"Maybe not Apex as a whole, but you in particular are."
"And another thing," he continued, ignoring my last statement. "We aren't mindless beasts when we transform. We have control, or this whole vigilante situation we have going for us would never work. We'd have been vanquished from human spheres millennia ago. So why would you presume I'd harm a defenseless human woman? Do you honestly think that lowly of me?"
"I'm not saying it happened like that. Maybe there was an accident of some kind—before the transformation. You didn't mean to hurt her, things got too rough. Or maybe you're into some dark, kinky shit where you squirrel women away somewhere to use whenever it suits you."
"That's worse than your first suggestion." His countenance darkened. "You think that I killed your friend out of carelessness, or I'm holding her prisoner against her will. Jesus, you really do hate me."
I shrugged. "Dev says you're a good guy. I want to believe that's true." Did I though? It was easy to hate Rhys if I could keep thinking the worst of him. But if he was the person Dev claimed him to be and truly was innocent, then my emotions became so much more complicated. My wolf strained at the walls of my consciousness. She wanted that complication, but my rational mind wasn't ready to go there.
"That's why you sent me down to the car ahead of you—so you could tell him about Vicki."
By now he was standing in front of me. I got up from my chair to even the playing field, but still, he towered over me. I refused to be intimidated. "His office will investigate fairly. You don't have to worry."
"I'm not worried because I haven't done anything," he growled. "I would never harm a woman. I would never do anything to her she didn't want me to do. And I would never invite a human protected by another pack to come to my headquarters on the evening of a full moon for fuck's sake. That is incredibly dangerous. Almost as dangerous as accusing an Alpha of that behavior when standing on that Alpha's home turf."
His words implied a threat, but his tone carried another connotation with it, one I couldn't quite wrap my head around.
"I will take my beliefs were the evidence leads me."
He nodded. "And what then? When I'm exonerated of this, and...wait, do you think I harmed the Crown man as well?"
"I told you, you're a suspect."
"Oh shit." Understanding lighted in his eyes. "You think I did something to your friend, and the trauma of it made me go wild. Really, Calla?"
"It's not the most outlandish theory."
"No, it's not." His body language shifted from defensive to resignation. He still loomed over me, but the fight in him lessened.
"Are you agreeing with me, Rhys?" Our office seemed to have shrunk during our argument. The walls were closing in on me. Was he delivering a confession before he tried to do to me what he'd done to Vicki?
"You've pieced it together, haven't you, Calla?"
I swallowed. "Pieced what together?"
"I targeted Vicki because she's your friend," he said. "I wooed her online, met her, seduced her, kept my hands pressed to her neck a little too long, a little too close to moonrise and then transformed, out of my mind, out of control, ran all the way to Crown territory, attacked a human and participated in who knows what other sort of carnage. Maybe there's a few more human corpses lying in alleys yet to be discovered, with their throats mysteriously missing. Maybe I'm a monster now. Maybe I've been waiting to see if Crown's Luna will figure it all out so I can have the thrill of seeing that knowing look in her eye, that look where she realizes I'm untouchable and will never be held accountable for my heinous crimes."
He was right beside me now, the heat from his anger pouring onto me, his smell overwhelming my ability to think clearly. He remained where he was so he could see the very look in my eyes he'd just described. But I wouldn't give him what he wanted, not when I could peer into his own deep brown eyes and the emotion behind them. I knew what he was doing. A wiser woman would have put a stop to it, but in that moment, I let him inch his way past the barrier I'd put up against him the moment we found ourselves in that elevator together.
I let myself feel his emotions—raw, raging, undeniable. I gasped as he grabbed both of my wrists, and for his part, he barely seemed able to keep his feet under him, the connection I'd allowed him to make just as intense for him as it was for me. All the while, I refused to break eye contact because those eyes, more than anything else, would tell me what I needed to know. They weren't the eyes of the psychopath he'd just described. Behind those eyes...was a deep, penetrating pain.
I stood my ground. "All right, you've proved your point."
"Say it then."
I blinked. "You're probably not guilty."
"Probably?" He let go of me and threw his hands up. "You're unbelievable."
"Maybe you're just a very convincing actor." No werewolf could fake his pain, not even an Alpha, but he could be genuinely hurt that I'd think he was a wilding murderer, while also being that wilding murderer he didn't want me to think of him as.
"Well, I guess probably is the best I'm going to get now." He looked me up and down and his expression shifted again, but he turned away, pulling back both physically and emotionally before I could get a new read on him. "My family can't find out about this."
"I see. You don't want your father to know what you might be. It would destroy him."
He let out an exasperated sigh. "Again, I'm innocent, so no. I don't fear my father will find out I did something I didn't do."
"Then why not lay it all out for him, and your brothers too."
"It's not for my sake that we need to proceed with caution. Do you not understand that?" He dared to look at me again then, and when I did, I saw the thing he'd been trying to hide, something I had never imagined I'd see from Rhys Rawlings: uncertainty.
"Do you understand the danger you've put yourself in, Calla? If they realize you're here because you're trying to reveal to the world that I have done not one but two horrible acts in one night, they won't treat you kindly."
"They already don't treat me kindly."
Electricity shot through me as he reached for my hand. It was wrong to saver that touch—the touch of someone I couldn't bring myself to trust, and yet, I didn't just want to grasp onto him, I wanted him to pull me towards him, tell me I had nothing to worry about, that he would find Vicki, alive and well, and that he would bear no grudge against me for thinking so ill of him.
"You think you have to fear me, but the truth is, I'm the Rawlings you should fear the least."
"Is that so?" I fought the urge to believe him. If I had any friends here at Apex, it certainly couldn't be him. "And what do I have to fear from the others?"
"What comes to your mind first? A werewolf tribunal, right?"
I cocked my head from left to right without answering because of course, that's exactly what I'd been worried about most.
"They'll claim you're out to get me to save your own pack. Hand you over to let our brutal system bring you to justice." He stroked the inside of my wrist with his thumb. The sensation made my wolf howl. "That's the situation you should be begging for though, Calla."
"Are you saying there's a darker alternative than being sentenced to torture by a tribunal?"
"You don't truly know what it means to piss off Gerald Rawlings, or my brothers, for that matter."
I made a half-hearted attempt to pull my arm away from him, but he held it firmly, a growl emanating from him that made my wolf want to charge, while also revealing how much his own wolf was savoring this connection.
"What if, in your quest to demonize me," he said, "you end up stumbling upon the truth. And that truth? If it implicates any of them, or anyone under our protection, Crown Luna or not..."
Swallowing down bile, I latched onto his gaze. "They'll kill me for it, won't they?"