19. Quiet Suspicion

19

Quiet Suspicion

FINNICK

S leep eluded me. After the conversation with Glen, I hadn't been able to concentrate on anything but Flor. Not that that was anything new. Even when I'd tried to avoid her, my mind had been fixed on her.

The part of my heart that had splintered when I rejected her back at Southern was still aching, like a blistered wound, seeping into my thoughts. My soul.

Even now. Even after she'd been claimed by Brand.

I'd spent weeks immersed in the Northern pack's library, and I headed there again tonight, using my senses to find my way in the near-total darkness. With the exception of the sections covering true mates, mate bonds, and shifter fertility studies—Margarette's obsession—the library here wasn't as extensive as the Eastern collection, but the main texts dealing with Pack law and history were well represented.

Once inside the library, I flicked on a lamp and pulled a book from the shelf I'd located the day before. I flipped idly through the pages, on my own personal hunt, as usual. At first, I'd been seeking an answer to how one woman could be a true mate to more than one male. But for the past few days, I'd been obsessed with a new question. I had to find something about mate bonds to help me understand why I wasn't free. Why I still longed for the small, boyish Flor, who was already claimed.

Not that she is boyish, I admitted to myself. When my wolf had heard her cries with Brand, when Glen and I had interrupted their mating, I'd seen her body.

She'd been naked after her first shift at Southern as well, but covered with blood. I hadn't truly registered her shape, her slight curves, her rounded, tight breasts. The gentle slope of her neck, and the stubborn tilt of her chin. Most shifter women were long, lush. She was like a fairy, some sort of pixie-shifter blend. Magical.

But when Brand was moving inside her, when she was crying out... Hell, even just the memory of her tight, feminine body made me hard. She was more than magical. She was strong and fierce, angry and intelligent, generous and good, even after all she'd suffered. When she'd fallen apart in my brother's arms, I'd seen why he'd fallen so hard for her so fast. Her soul had shone around them, transforming her, and him. She was miraculous, a goddess on earth.

I pulled out another text, appropriately titled The Magic of Mating, and began to read theories about how precisely the mating bond developed, and how it could be damaged. My mind kept returning to Flor, though.

Had the years of the Hunt done something to her? Suppressed the natural urge to bond emotionally and physically with one other soul? Perhaps the sheer number of males who'd preyed on her had damaged her psyche somehow.

Perhaps those males had given her that scar on her chest—the small, five-pointed, jagged star that began at her heart and ran up toward her collarbone and down to the bottom of her breast. She'd obviously been injured in some way, perhaps when she was very young.

The whispers of witchcraft bubbled up in my mind. It wasn't possible, was it? Had she been attacked by someone with magic, and come so close to death that her... soul had splintered?

Callaway had no magic; I knew that. But Brand had murmured something about the black wolf, Joaquin. He'd seen him use magic at Southern, before the great battle. Perhaps he was a witch, one of the witches from the remains of the last known coven in Florida, coming back to the scene of a magical crime. Maybe the money Callaway had paid to break the bond with his mate hadn't been enough. Maybe he'd offered up a child from his pack.

Or a baby.

My wolf went still, scenting something. A clue, a hint at what lay at the heart of all these mysteries. Luke had claimed that the witches had been employed by Callaway to break his true mate bond over twenty years ago. What if Luke had been hiding something, a secret, to protect Flor?

He'd been adamant that Flor should leave Southern. Had seemed almost panicked that she might not get away, though with Margarette's invitation, there should have been no issue at all. Flor had been unranked, after all. There was no reason to worry that an unranked female might slip away from a pack.

Unless…

The only shifters who could never leave home, not even if they won every Enforcer Game in the world… The only rank a shifter could hold that would bind them to their pack so tightly, they could never escape… " Fuck. "

I knew who Flor was.

I sat down before I fell, my breath coming fast, my heart racing. I wasn't absolutely sure. I would need Luke to verify my guess, or Flor herself, but if it was true, she was far more important and powerful than anyone suspected. And I could never, ever let my parents find out who she was.

I closed my eyes and forced all thoughts of Flor's suspected identity to the back of my mind, placing them in a mental box and shutting them away. If my parents questioned me together, if they tortured me, I needed to know she was safe.

Once I'd regained control of my emotions, I returned to my reading, looking for more clues about mate bonds.

Flor was bonded to more than one shifter. There was no longer a question about that, only as to how it had occurred at all. But more important was to know if my brothers could be saved—Glen from a life mated to a woman he could never love, and Luke from almost certain death from mate sickness. If she could save them.

Was it possible she could truly develop a bond with more than one mate, making Glen and Luke into co-mates with Brand of some sort? It had never been done; shifters were beyond possessive. But the thought of her with Brand alone, and my brothers suffering, was what drove me to read deep into the night.

In another life, I would have been searching for myself as well. The thought of her turning from the embrace of Brand's massive arms to my more elegant ones... That thought did not repulse me at all.

My heart ached again, and I pressed a hand against my chest. That I still desired to be with Flor, to share her, shocked me to the core. My brothers had teased me over and over about being sexually repressed. I was, but by choice, and only Luke knew the reason, though Glen had his own quiet suspicions.

Quiet suspicions. For some reason, those words triggered my wolf to alert inside me, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up as a feeling of wrongness, of danger, pulsed in the air. I stopped breathing, hearing something on this side of the house. A servant?

A dragging sound. Not of a piece of furniture, but the sort of slow, uneven pull of something softer, like a heavy sack of laundry. Or a body.

As I listened, I knew it was a body.

Possibly one of the younger wolves escorting a drunken pack member back to their bedroom. But shifters were rarely drunk enough to need help, even if Glen had proved it possible earlier tonight.

I set the book down soundlessly, reaching for the light switch when I heard something else: the side door to the Lodge opening. The main exit that led to the garage.

The desk clock read 2:17 a.m. Who would be going for a vehicle at this time of night? The person dragging the "laundry" right past the library? Opening the door, I took a quick breath.

Chemicals assaulted my nose. Some sort of medicinal smell. Blood, though not a lot. Adrenaline, fear, and cloying roses. And then, underneath it all, cinnamon and jasmine and a faint hint of pine.

She was being taken.