Dark Fates (A Paranormal Anthology)(45)

He didn’t torture anymore. Even if the world could be potentially crumbling around them.

Thankfully, Cyrus didn’t hold enough clout to force him to come east, and without an Alpha Prime to rule them all, Hayden didn’t have to take direction from anyone. Still, he might be able to help from a distance.

Cyrus, he wrote.

Not going to happen. Lucian is dead, and until someone makes you Prime, I’m not going anywhere to do that. You, Alexie, and Travis aren’t without your own skills. If there is no information flowing, I’d guess there’s nothing to get.

Maybe I can help in a different way. Someone’s got to follow the money. They’re getting funding from somewhere. This much power wasn’t created in a vacuum. Let me see what I can dig up.

-Hayden

He hit Send before he could change his mind and decided to be helpful in the way Cyrus wanted. Standing up, he stretched his arms over his head. He rubbed his itchy nose. His bones ached, and he didn’t know what that was about. At sixty years old, he was still a baby in werewolf years. He couldn’t be developing old-age problems yet.

A knock sounded on his door, but it was just a formality. His pack knew they could come and go as they wanted. They’d all lived through the hell of Lucian’s special training together. The Alpha Prime hadn’t thought they’d make good leaders—but good wolf soldiers? Yes, that had been all he’d believed them good for—fighting, bleeding, killing and dying.

Whether or not they’d prove him wrong still remained to be seen. However, if this year’s Pinot Noir turned out the way Hayden thought it would, they’d be well on their way to distancing themselves from those years that needed to be forgotten.

“Come in, Sal,” he called out to his second-in-command. Sal entered, closing the door behind him. Unlike Hayden’s, Sal’s body didn’t retain permanent reminders of their time with Lucian. Hayden’s skin had been torn up so much during those years that he’d eventually developed permanent scars he’d never be rid of no matter how many Full Moon shifts he made.

Sal, taller and broader than Hayden, had skin the color of milk chocolate. The man had generations of half-human ancestry, but Hayden would never know it from how completely wolf he appeared every time Hayden looked him in the eye. He was a man who wore his animal like a protective coat, and Hayden couldn’t blame him.

The local women loved him.

Or so Sal likes to say.

“Everything all right?” Based on the high-pitched laughter downstairs, there was an abundance of women in the place getting tipsier by the minute. Sal should be in his element. Unless there was some problem with getting set up for that evening’s Full Moon. Had something gone awry? Lately the whole thing had been running like clockwork.

“Well, my Alpha.”

Sal and the others had insisted on the term the second Hayden’s brother had handed him Napa to run. Hayden had always suspected it had more to do with not wanting the survivors of Lucian’s special training in his own pack than any belief his brother had in his ability to lead that had propelled Savage’s act of generosity. Alphas didn’t usually give up territory, not even to their own brothers. But Hayden had never questioned him. He’d been glad for the space. Big city life didn’t appeal to him. Napa had always been quieter.

“Yes? Something wrong with the wine? The underground tunnels?” With no real wolves running around Napa or Sonoma to cover their tails, he’d had underground running paths created from the wine caves all up and down the property. It wasn’t ideal. His wolf self hated being contained on the few nights a year he got to come out and play, but as long as they stocked it with prey, no one complained. Manufacturing things to make their lives work proved to be the name of the game these days.

“There’s a woman here. She’s not making a lot of sense. I initially thought to send her on her way because she’s clearly out of it. I’m not smelling drugs, but something is wrong, and then I decided maybe she should get to see you.”

“Why?” They didn’t get a slew of crazy humans running around. Most of the ones who came for appointment only tastings tended toward the sophisticated, happy variety. If they had issues, they left them at home. It certainly didn’t fit Sal’s modus operandi to bring them to Hayden.

“Because she keeps insisting she has to see you.”

“Specifically? Did she get my name off the website or something?” There’d been a brief write-up in Wine Spectator Magazine that could have garnered the unwanted attention.

“At first she asked for you by name. She kept saying she needed to see Hayden, and then it changed. The last time, before I shut her in the back office, she told me she needed to see my Alpha. None of the other humans heard her, or I would have reacted faster.”

Hayden nodded. “You did the right thing. I can’t have some human who shouldn’t even know we exist running around spouting off at the mouth. You did check her for explosives?”

If she was a True Believer, she could be there to blow the whole place up. Weapons he could handle without Sal’s interference. He’d never met a human he couldn’t disarm. But if she’d come to bomb them, he didn’t want her inside. He’d end her outside where she couldn’t damage any member of his pack or any of the vines in the fields.

“I smelled no explosives on her.”