Chapter 202

Grace

Something in me snarled. No, he wasn’t right. He was just trying to trick me. I pushed those thoughts away. He was just trying to make me forget the fact that he was hiding this woman from me, that he was protecting her, that she was more important than me. It didn’t matter if I always thought he was going to go see his mate. It was probably true, but this had nothing to do with that and everything to do with the fact that he was hiding her from me.

Just like Devin, but worse.

Amy, at least, had never threatened my children directly.

"I’m not running from anything. I’m just—"

“If I told you that Alpha Shadow is a man,” Charles said. “Would you feel any different?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “I know you’d be lying. You wouldn’t be so protective of a man.”

“You think you know me well enough to say that?” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “ After everything I’ve done for you, you still think me capable of betraying you in the worst possible way. I’d argue that you don’t know me at all.”

“Hard to know a liar.”

He scoffed. “All right, Grace. Have it your way, but I’m not protecting Alpha Shadow. As I said before, you’d be eaten alive, as would anyone else in the werewolf states. Not just by the one I know, but probably many of the others, too.”

“So, the one you know is a woman.”

He smiled. “What difference does it make? If I gave you enough time, you’d convince yourself Alpha Shadow is a man, and I’m gay… Maybe I’ll run off with Eason, hm?”

“Are you?” I narrowed my eyes. “Would you?”

He snorted. “There are so many responses to that, and none of them are polite.” He sighed again, put upon and a little frustrated. “For a few moments, think beyond your own trauma. Before I even told you that that man was only one Alpha Shadow, we’d already talked about how Alpha Shadow is more of a collection of people, an idea that Sean has been using to keep control of the Werewolf States for years by allowing various people to do horrible things under the banner of Blood Moon and WSU’s beliefs. Can we at least agree on that?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. It felt like a trick. And while he was right, the. We had talked about it.

“Things are different when you know her personally.”

“Are they? Or do you just want them to be different? Why is it so much more important that one person I know has won? That’s my ask when. Hundreds, if not thousands of other people, have worn the same ask and done far worse?”

“I don’t care about whatever else has been done. The problems of Alpha Shadow and Blood Moon outside of the attack on Mooncrest have nothing to do with me.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Is that so?”

“Of course, it is.”

“You sound a lot like the senators who you already hate and didn’t send you any aid.” I went stiff. “More importantly, how can you be so sure that it attacks somewhere else? It would stay contained. It clearly didn’t. What if I didn’t know this Alpha Shadow personally? Would you feel different?”

“That doesn’t matter because you do.”

“No, Grace. You just want it to not matter because I do.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe that the woman who voluntarily sent aid to the Duncan Pack, not planning to get anything out of it, could possibly truly believe that the only thing that mattered was the damage that she personally suffered. You can’t make me believe you really believe that. Why send the aid then if all you cared about was protecting your own ass?”

“I thought they were the same person.”

“Bullshit. You really suspected they were different. We talked about them being different people.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Now, who’s lying?”

I scoffed. Stung and still fuming. “You’re avoiding the problem. Are you going to give me her name or not?”

“The answer is still no.”

I hissed at him. “Then we don’t have anything else to talk about.”

“Fine. That’s your prerogative. I’m not going to push it any further.”

“That’s it.”

“We’re at an impasse, Grace. This is just one of those things you’re going to have to get used to. Not every conversation ends in a resolution.”

I set my jaw and crossed my arms, glaring at him. He had to tell me. I couldn’t let him be without him telling me. It would keep me up at night, wondering if every time he got on the phone, he was talking to her.

“It's not just about her name, Charles," I said, my voice choked with emotion. "It's about the fact that you’re hiding things from me."

“Honestly, Grace, you haven’t given me a single reason to believe that you could handle the information. I’ve told you what is really important for your purposes.”

“How do you get to just decide that?”

“It’s my information to tell. I didn’t leave out anything pertinent to your path forward. Though it was my miscalculation to bring this up now, not doing so would have made me feel guilty and made us waste a whole hell of a lot of time. So, I’m sorry for bringing this up now. I’m sorry that you feel bad about the fact that I didn’t tell you earlier and won’t tell you what you claim to want to know. I…”

He shook his head, his gaze distant.

“That’s not an apology for lying.”

“I didn’t lie to you. And I’m not going to apologize for exercising good judgment.”

“I have the right to know.”

“Actually, Grace, you are one alpha of a pseudo-fledgling pack inside of the Werewolf States. You’re not even a Senator yet. You have no military force. You have no power outside of Mooncrest. Such information would be a matter of international and interspecies interest. You aren’t important enough to have a right to know."

I flinched at his tone. It stung more than before, reeling that he would talk to me like that. There was a hard, unyielding edge to his voice that I had never heard before, and I hated it. It felt high-handed. It reminded me of Devin.

You’re better off at home, Grace.

Shouldn’t you be more worried about the children?

“You Have a tendency to focus on the small details. The smallest details rather than the big picture. I made a judgment call about what would serve you, and I was right because here you are, focused on something so insignificant to you, to Mooncrest, to what you say you want to do because you’re jealous. Your judgment is clouded by your emotions more often than not.”

“My judgment is not clouded! You’re the one—”

“Grace, you haven’t even healed from the chase. I doubt you can even run half a mile before you’re winded and on the verge of passing out.”

I flinched. That couldn’t be true. I felt fine. I have been fined for the past couple of days.

“Yet, here you are talking about charging after a witch with more magic and more connections than anyone you know on a suicide mission because you’re jealous. Meanwhile, you refuse to think about the fact that three different people using the moniker Alpha Shadow have already attacked three different locations in the States, and there would likely have been more if you hadn’t put out that statement.”

I frowned. “What?”

He groaned. “You didn’t lie to the constituents of Mooncrest or the world. Don’t you remember the debrief?”

I blinked at him. He nodded, looking a little grim.

“An Alpha Shadow is dead. The only thing that could be done from here is to put a new person in the mask or retire the mask altogether. Picture this: finding another member of the WSU to disappear from the public eye will be hard with all the scrutiny they’re facing right now. You’ve bought us time because every other terrorist using the moniker isn’t going to try and debunk the death story. If they do, the Interpack police will be forced to act or risk completely losing control over the moniker because of the people at the scene. The people who were in contact with the man I killed are definitely all WSU members.”

I blinked at him, trying to absorb all the information. But slowly, I could understand. It was dripping through the anger very, very slowly. But it was there. We had unmasked an Alpha Shadow and killed him verifiably. It was throwing a lot of bad light on the WSU. Sean would have to plot and lay low for a while, and that would give us time. It would give me time to get through the challenge, mostly out of real danger.

I wanted to be upset. I was upset. It was just hard to try and argue around it when it made so much sense. His expression softened like there was a bit of hope there. I scowled at him, and he looked amused.

Damn, him.