"Do you think he knows?" Liam asked.

Yep.

I turned my key in the door. "No. I mean, I'm not sure, but probably not, right?"

He didn't look convinced. He was filling up with nervous energy, and it was going to spell trouble if I didn't distract him soon. "What did he do after I left? Did he look pissed?"

He took it out on me. "Well ... nothing much. He just went back to the pack house."

I was a good liar. I knew that nonchalance was the key to it — if you didn't sound interested in what you were saying, they wouldn't be interested either. But it was Liam, and he knew me almost better than anyone. He paused a bit too long before answering.

"Really?"

"Really," I sighed. "I think you're the least of his problems right now."

We went into our room. It wasn't even lunchtime yet, but it had been a long morning, and I for one needed a break. I saw the bed, and I flopped down on it. Liam sat on the edge, bouncing his knee in that way he did when everything was getting too much.

"Eva," Liam said.

I made an indistinct grunting sound.

He'd gone very still, and his eyes were wide, which was a sure sign something was wrong. "The bed's made."

"So?" I demanded, burrowing deeper into the duvet cover. It was warm in here, and it was nice to take the weight off my feet for a minute. I was taking great care to keep the pressure away from my ribs and shoulder. They were still throbbing at regular intervals.

"We never make the bed."

I eyed the sheets beneath me. It was true — they were usually creased. "Huh."

"And those drawers were open when I left," Liam went on.

"Were they?"

"Someone's been in here."

I sat up sharply. Now that he mentioned it, the room did look ... tidier than usual. The clothes on the floor were in a single heap instead of strewn over and under the furniture. It looked like someone had searched the place and then made a lazy attempt to replace everything.

"Who cares?" I said eventually. "We've got nothing to hide. I didn't bring anything that—"

Liam pressed a hand over my mouth. I was so astonished that I shut up, and he left his hand there a moment longer to make the point. I was kinda tempted to lick him to make a point of my own.

"Sorry," he said through the link. "But we can't talk in here anymore. It's bugged."

Well, that stank of paranoia. I made a face at him and switched to the link, too. "Is it, though?"

He must have caught the teasing note in my voice, because he sighed heavily. "Yeah. They really do that. Especially when they think someone might be a sleeper. I helped sometimes."

He got up and went over to the coffee table, probably to start searching. I sat on the bed with my legs crossed and watched because I was still sceptical. It only took him a few seconds of fumbling under the rim before he swore.

I craned my neck to see. Sitting on his palm was a small plastic object-device-thing. It was only about the size of my thumb, and there was a blue light on the near side. So much for paranoia, then...

I swallowed loudly. "Okay. Now I believe you. Shit, Liam. Can we flush it down the toilet or something?"

For once, he wasn't listening to me. Instead, he had started shifting on the spot, and I closed my eyes tightly to be polite. By the time I opened them again, there was a rather large wolf standing in the living room where he had been.

With his nose to the ground, he could pick up the scents that were too faint for our shoddy human senses. It took me a minute to realise he was trying to work out who'd been in here.

When he was done, he came padding over to the bed and jumped up onto it. The whole damn mattress rocked under the weight, and I couldn't help grinning as he turned a tight circle and then curled up around me. Wolves were large. It was easy to forget exactly how large until you saw one indoors. I was engulfed by fur and warmth and the distinct smell of wet dog.

"Felix," he said through the link.

I nodded along. "He definitely thinks we're sleepers."

He rested his head on my knee, those big eyes staring up at me. "Well, that's fine. We really don't have anything suspicious in there."

And it was true. We had a burner phone to call Mam if we needed to, and we had a bottle of unmarked pills, but neither of those things were inherently suspicious. For once, I was glad we had been so careful.

"So we got away with it, but now we can't say anything out loud anymore?" I sighed. "Yuck. Is there somewhere we can talk? I'm too tired for this."

"Common room. It's always quiet this time of day."

"Okay," I said, but I didn't move, and neither did he. One of my hands had come to rest on the scruff of his neck. I scratched the skin beneath, and I felt him leaning into my hand. "Don't suppose we could have a nap first?"

His answer was to close his eyes. Smiling, I lay down. I felt him wriggling not two seconds later, and I had a wet doggy nose pushing at my shoulder. He licked at the tooth-marks and the blood. It would have been sweet, but he got too close to the mark on my neck. It was so unexpected that I let out a little squeal.

"Hey," I said, shoving his chest. "Cool it. I don't need slobber all over me."

Liam flopped back down onto the bed. This time, his front half was crushing my legs, and his tail was swishing back and forth at lethal velocity. I smoothed the fur down his back and felt him relaxing under my hand.

"Good dog," I murmured.

I closed my eyes again. For once, we didn't have anywhere to be. I'd been given the day off to let my broken bones heal. Liam's entire patrol was off duty until Will could be buried. I happened to love naps, and I was very, very good at them, so I was asleep before Liam had even put his head down.

When I woke up again, it was getting dark out. The wind was howling through the open windows, and there was a fine drizzle soaking the carpet beside them. I groaned a little, because I must have been asleep for hours. If there was anything I loved more than napping, it was having an entire afternoon to do nothing. And now it was gone. Wasted.

I rolled over in bed. And that was when I noticed Liam wasn't lying beside me anymore. In fact, he wasn't even in the room. I scanned the whole place twice just to be sure, and then I wriggled out of bed.

"Liam?" I called down the link.

There was a moment of horrible, horrible silence, and then the bathroom door opened. Liam poked his head out. Evidently, he'd shifted back. His hair was soaking wet, and he wasn't wearing a shirt. It took me a few blinks to process that.

"You okay?" he asked with those big, worried eyes.

I let out a long breath. "Yeah, I guess. Just didn't know where you'd gone."

He nodded towards the shower. "I was covered in blood. So I was just ... yeah. Sorry."

I was covered in blood, too. But that was different — it was my blood, and it wasn't reminding me of a dead friend. I sat down on the bed heavily and crossed my legs. "You apologise too much. Can we go to the common room now?"

"Sure."

I made a face at him. "Maybe put some clothes on first."

He rolled his eyes and came to get his jeans. I tried to look anywhere except that toned chest and the towel around his waist, and I could just sense him smirking at me in that gentle, teasing way of his.

Be cool, Eva. Geez. Just a boy. You've seen one of those before.

"You going to turn around?" Liam asked. "Or do I have to walk all the way back over there?"

Oh great. Now I was blushing. I shuffled around until I was staring at a blank wall and tried not to fidget. If I took my shirt off, he'd probably stop breathing, and that thought was enough to comfort me.

"All done," Liam said eventually. "You can look now."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Let's go."

***

The common room was deserted. It wasn't quite dinner time yet, and most people were still on shift. I picked a sofa by the window and curled up on it. Liam sat down opposite me, and we both looked around carefully for witnesses before opening our mouths.

"So ... Will told me that you were passing out and shit," I said.

No point beating around the bush. I didn't make it accusatory. He hadn't told me for a reason, and that reason was probably that he knew I'd kick up a fuss, so I was going to prove him wrong. We had royally sucked at communicating these last few days. Time to fix that.

Liam took a sudden and inexplicable interest in the floor. "Oh."

"I'm getting worried, not gonna lie. You haven't kept a meal down the whole time we've been here."

He nodded. He still wouldn't look at me, but that was nothing new. It was rare to get eye contact when we were having anything which remotely resembled an argument.

"Look," I sighed, "I ain't mad at you or anything like that. I just don't think this whole vomiting thing is sustainable. What do you think about lowering the dose? Half a pill. We don't need your wolf fast asleep, like he is now. We just need him drowsy."

There were two ways to get Liam to do what you wanted. The first was fast and messy and sure to work. And all you had to do was raise your voice a little. Act like you were angry. I wasn't going to do it that way, because that was screwed up, and it was what his brothers had beaten into him.

The second way was to be like ... nice to him. Not even a lot. Just the tiniest bit of 'nice' was usually enough. It had worked for me all these years, and I was willing to bet it would work again today.

Eventually, Liam looked up at me, and I could see the decision in his eyes long before he said, "Okay."

"Awesome. We could put the morning runs on hold — at least until you're feeling better. You have to do enough running on patrol. And it's not like I'm going to enjoy myself if I'm worried about you the whole time anyway, so don't feel guilty."

"Okay," he said again. It was more reluctant this time. "But I have a suggestion too, I guess..."

I was a little bit surprised, but I crossed my legs and looked at him expectantly. "Shoot."

"You said your job is cleaning up after Mason?"

"Well, yeah."

"I don't like that," Liam told me. "It isn't safe. Now more than ever."

I sighed. I could take care of myself. Well ... mostly. I took a moment to contemplate that and decided that he'd probably felt the same way ten seconds ago. We were compromising here. And more importantly, we were looking out for each other.

"So you want me to work somewhere else? Where, exactly? And doing what? Please bear in mind that I don't want to put in any effort whatsoever. Bonus points if it's outdoors and gold star if I get to run."

Liam shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. There aren't many things girls are allowed to do. Maybe something closer to me."

"Well, I guess I can ask around about different jobs. I do overhear some useful shit, mind," I told him. "Mason was talking about getting signatures from the other Alphas today for some anti-rogue project. I can find out what that is before it kills everyone, and I heard all that stuff the other day about the guy who was murdered..."

He started picking at his fingernails, and I could've sworn I saw his chest hitch.

"Which reminds me," I said, careful to keep my tone light. "There is a quarry here. Felix told me."

Liam did a shitty job of looking surprised. All he did was raise his eyebrows and blink a few times. "Really? Where?"

I'd been so ready to believe him when I'd first asked. But this ... this was a harder lie to swallow. The quarry must have been here a century at least. It was on the path he'd walked down every week to get home from the sanctuary. And those gaping holes in the ground were pretty hard to miss.

I leant back and wrinkled up my nose. "If you're going to lie, at least put some effort into it. For me?"

It didn't matter how nonchalant I sounded. Liam was on the edge of his seat. He swallowed hard, fumbling for the words, and the panic rolling off him was damn near tangible. "Eva, I never meant—"

"Hey. It's cool. I'm not mad," I said quickly. "Just tell me this much — there's something in the quarry that Mason wouldn't want me knowing about ... right?"

Liam nodded without meeting my eyes. "I guess."

"And you don't want me to know either, do you?" I finished, much more quietly.

He hesitated. And then he shook his head ever so slightly. Maybe I should have been hurt by that, but I just felt a gnawing worry. If he didn't want me to know, it must have been something pretty awful. He'd been okay with me knowing everything else.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"Well, yeah. I'll leave it alone."

Liam ran a hand through his hair, which was still wet and dripping down his neck. His eyes were wide and worried. "Why? Why the blind trust? I could have done something really bloody awful. I could be protecting him."

"Are you?" I asked.

"Sort of," he murmured. "It's screwed up. I get that — honestly, I do. It doesn't change anything."

I was beginning to realise just how complicated his relationship with his brothers had been. He'd been quite happy to let us kill Mason this morning, but this ... this was crossing a line somehow. I was trying to understand. Yeah, chances were I'd never really get it, but I was going to keep trying anyway.

"We're all a little screwed up, Liam." I shrugged at him. I was now having to make a significant effort to be chill about this, but it was still worth my while, because he was edgy enough as it was. "But I happen to trust you."

It was an easy thing to say ... but a harder thing to mean. I didn't like that he was keeping things from me. By the look of it, it was harder still for Liam to hear.

Liam finally seemed to snap. "This is what I don't understand, Eva. How can you? Mason is my brother, and I was raised hating you all, same as him. All this time ... I could've been a sleeper for the wrong side. Don't tell me that's never crossed your mind."

"It did," I said. "To start with. But you're still with us, seven years later, and ... like, why? By the time we realised who you were, you'd been with us ... what? A couple months? You already knew enough to wipe us out."

"I don't know. Maybe," he murmured.

"Definitely," I corrected, offering him a tired smile. "I know who you are, Liam. Flockie royalty and all that. But you know who I am. And you know — probably better than anyone — what Mason would do to me if he ever found out. Is that what you want?"

"No," Liam said without a second's hesitation. He sounded hurt that I would even suggest it. "Of course not."

The smile became a fully-fledged grin. "There you go, then. It doesn't matter if you're protecting him, because you're protecting me too. And when push comes to shove, I know you're on our side. Not his."

I was pretty sure that broke him on some deep, molecular level. He cleared his throat, the muscles in his jaw working away like he wanted to say something, but nothing came out. In the end, he just settled for looking at me in that quiet, adoring way of his.

"Hey, guys," someone said from behind us. We pulled muscles in our hurry to see who it was, and then a scowl crept across my lips. Charlie Owens. I still didn't trust the guy. "Fancy running into you again."

Liam leant back in his seat, visibly relaxing. "Hey, Charlie. You alright?"

"Yes, thank you," he said, but his eyes had inevitably stuck on me. "But uh, you're covered in blood. Is everything okay?"

I forced my mouth to smile, sickly sweet as I could manage. If he'd run me into me before our nap, he might have caught some hands. "That's really none of your business."

"Eva," Liam murmured. "Play nice."

"This is me playing nice. You want to see nasty?" I asked, cocking an eyebrow.

"No," he said, and then he gave me a look. It wasn't often he needed to remind me that he was higher in the pecking order, but that did the trick today. I squirmed in my seat and dropped my eyes within a heartbeat. "I don't."

"You know that's cheating, right?" I muttered through the link.

That easily, Liam was grinning. "We're rogues, Eva. No such thing as cheating."

"Ain't that the truth."

Meanwhile, Charlie was stood there, looking distinctly uncomfortable. He must have known we were linking, and he was probably feeling left out. Once we resurfaced from the link, he offered us a slightly uneasy smile. "So, um, what're you doing out here?"

"Our room's bugged," Liam said without even ... like ... hesitating. I stared at him, trying to convey my disapproval through the power of eyebrows alone. Charlie might be one of the Vaughan family's rejects, but he still worked for them.

"Oh," Charlie said. He was shifting his weight from foot to foot, wrestling with some decision. "I guess ... if you wanted, you could come down to my office. That might be bugged too, don't get me wrong, because Mason doesn't trust me one inch. But they would have to listen to hours of me talking about expense reports to find anything ... so I'm not too worried."

His office, not his room. If we were caught in there, he could claim that it was for business reasons. And more importantly, that he had no idea who Liam was. I wasn't going to start trusting him over ten seconds of light-to-moderate bravery.

"If you're sure," Liam said.

I didn't argue.

***

Charlie's office was nice, I supposed, but I had no real idea of what an office was supposed to look like. It was a little cramped maybe, and there was paper piled sky-high on every surface. The desk had three separate computer monitors.

"Have a seat," he said. "Make yourselves at home."

There were only two chairs, so I pushed a few papers aside and hopped up onto the desk. I was in the perfect position to keep one eye on the door and the other on Charlie, whom I still disliked on principle.

The boys sat down. I rested my feet on the edge of Liam's chair and scanned the papers around me absently. Reading took more effort than I was willing to give, but I could see the numbers easily enough, and most of them had a scary amount of zeros.

Charlie reached straight for his keyboard, and he was typing even as he said, "New pack members usually get an advance on their salaries to keep them going. That's why you're here, if anyone asks. In fact, I'll do that now. You're working on patrol, right? That'll be a grand for the month."

Liam and I exchanged a disbelieving look. In the commissary here, that might buy us a few months of overpriced, unnecessary luxuries like conditioner. But if we could get that to our family, it would make a world of difference.

"You're giving us a thousand pounds?" I asked slowly. "Like ... just handing it over?"

Charlie nodded. He clicked a few more times. "Yep. It's very standard — don't worry. No one will bat an eyelid. The money comes straight back to us if you kids screw up your probation. And it can't be withdrawn as cash, just in case you get any clever ideas."

Well, shit. The hardest part about this would be getting the money out of the pack. I supposed they'd get suspicious if I bought a dozen phones from commissary all at once, but I could get away with one or two, surely. And hey, maybe they sold laptops...

Liam was thinking on an entirely different track, as it turned out. "Don't bother then. We're not going to pass probation. Mason knows I'm here now, and he looked relatively pissed about it."

"But you're still alive? That's promising, right? He can't be that mad."

His answer was a shrug. I was surprised that this topic of conversation wasn't upsetting him, to be honest. I'd been avoiding it all afternoon for that very reason. But if anything, Liam seemed calmer now that Mason had seen him.

"You know..." Charlie said, "this might explain why he came into my office demanding the names of every female who left the pack in the last twenty years."

Liam and I exchanged a puzzled look.

He shrugged at us. "He also wanted to know if our father ever visited New Dawn Pack. And he could do all that himself probably, but he doesn't know how to work the databases."

"He thinks your dad had another kid, doesn't he?" I demanded of Liam. "That you're just another half-brother. Got some girl pregnant while he was visiting New Dawn. Or she was from here and ran off straight after."

I didn't dare hope. It could be that he was just ruling out other options — making absolutely sure. But maybe he hadn't recognised Liam, after all. Maybe it had been the family resemblance which had caught his eye.

"We can only assume," Charlie said steadily. "It took me a few hours. And it was a waste of time, because he took one look at the list and then gave it straight back."

A strange expression crossed Liam's face. It was somewhere between a frown and wariness. "Can I see that?"

"Sure," he replied, digging out a single piece of paper from the nearest stack. "Maybe you can work it out. I just don't understand."

Liam spent nearly a full minute staring at the piece of paper. He swallowed visibly, and then he pushed it back towards his brother. "He wasn't interested because he knows they're dead."

"What?" Charlie demanded. "No, they're not. I've got discharge requests for all of them. They left the pack."

"Yeah," Liam said. "It's an easy out, ain't it? You get angry and kill someone. Maybe by accident, maybe not. But you're in charge, so you hide the body, and then you write out a quick discharge request. Fake a signature. Say they left in a hurry. Most people know it's bull, I guess, but the ones who complain are the next to disappear."

I felt sick. Not least because it would be an easy way for Mason to get rid of us, if he wanted. But there was also something about this corruption which stank to high heaven. It was like the whole damn pack was rotting from the inside-out, and I reckoned it had been that way for quite some time now.

By the look of it, Charlie thought so too. His eyes were wide and horrified, and he was frozen in his chair. Apparently, this surpassed the Vaughans' normal levels of depravity. "Who was doing this, Liam?"

Liam leant forward and tracked down the list with one finger. "Who do you think? Dad. Dad. Dad. Adrian. Dad."

He'd paused slightly before that last one, and it wasn't hard to see why. The final name on the list was Ida Kendrick. I hadn't even known that his mother was dead, let alone that his father had been the one to kill her. Goddess, that was screwed up — no wonder he hadn't told me. Five dead women. I was willing to bet these were the ones who'd dared say no to Silver Lake's Alphas.

"If this is true..." Charlie began, only to trail off. "I mean shit, Liam. This is beyond illegal. Olivia's mother is on here, and yours... And if you've known this whole time, why didn't you say something? Why didn't Mason?"

Liam shrugged again. This time, it was more of a refusal to answer than anything else. Charlie must have noticed that, because he changed tack.

"Who else knows about this?" he asked.

"Me and Mase, obviously," Liam murmured. "Felix. Micah. It wasn't exactly a secret."

"Not Olivia?"

"No. Not as far as I know." He leant forward in his chair, all of a sudden. "Where is Liv, anyway? I haven't seen her once since I got here."

"She was shipped out to Lowland Pack. The Alpha wanted a mate from a good bloodline, and Mason wanted an alliance, so..." Charlie trailed off helplessly.

"So she's a Luna now?" Liam asked, picking at his fingernails.

Charlie nodded.

"Good for her, I guess. She got away."

"She didn't want to go," he said sadly. "She found her mate, you know. Except he was a rogue, so he had to be executed, obviously. She didn't argue, but she was never right afterwards."

"Who are we talking about?" I asked. The name was nagging at my memory, because I was sure I'd heard it somewhere before. The whole rejecting-your-mate-just-because-they-were-rogue thing wasn't news to me. Flockies had been doing it for years — they were so afraid of us that they were willing to sacrifice their soulmates.

Liam and Charlie exchanged a look, and then Liam told me, "Olivia's our sister."

"Right," I said. It was a distracted answer, because I'd just remembered where I'd heard her name. They went back to talking about her, and I tuned straight out to let my brain work.

Liam had been willing enough to talk about the murders because he didn't think either of us could make the connection to the quarry. But I was working with puzzle pieces he didn't know I had, and now things were starting to fit together.

What had Felix said? Something like Olivia might know something because her mother was there too? And he'd seemed to mean the quarry when he said 'there.' Was that where all the bodies were hidden? If so, I was going to take a wild guess that Mason had put someone there, too. Maybe several someones. And that was what Liam was trying to hide.

Why, though? He'd been like ten years old. Surely, he couldn't have been complicit in the murder. He'd been perfectly willing to throw his oldest brother and his father under the bus just now. Why not Mason, too? I didn't understand, and I didn't like it.

If only I could go and dig those bodies up... It might be enough of a scandal to unseat Mason, especially if the other Alphas caught wind of it. Murdering your own pack members was generally frowned upon. But I'd just promised Liam, hadn't I? I'd said I would leave it alone.

He was looking at me now. He'd noticed me go still, and he'd noticed the look on my face and the tension thrumming across the link. And those dark eyes had me freezing like a mouse beneath a hawk.

"Everything okay?" Liam asked.

"Yeah," I said, my throat dry and tight, all of a sudden. "I think so."

Liam didn't look convinced, but he did turn back to his brother. I kept on staring, because I was now remembering our conversation in the lodge. The conversation when he'd all but told me that he'd put a beating on someone who didn't deserve it. I remembered, and I stared, and I wondered how well I really knew him.