Anya slid back to the side of the room and breathed out roughly as Brim stepped into the short hall.
“She’s taking over. She’s got the pack leaders panting under her thumb, and I’ll be damned if she’s not setting up quarters for the Coyotes heading here. She’s even suggested hiring a damned cook, Del-Rey.”
Anya bit her lip as she glanced over at her mate and smiled brightly.
She peeked her head around the edge of the wall and waved at Brim. “She’s still here too.”
He stopped in his tracks. He looked from Del-Rey to Anya, inhaled and shook his head wearily.
“Hell, she even smells like you now. How the hell am I supposed to be on guard for her?”
“Why would you have to be on guard for me?” She opened her eyes innocently and stared from him to Del-Rey. “You’re on guard for a threat, Brim, not a friend.” She sighed with false hurt.
“And here I thought we could be friends.”
Brim looked at Del-Rey with curious pity as he jerked his head toward Anya. “What did you do, let her use Ashley’s hair dye?”
Del-Rey’s lips twitched, and Anya’s flattened as her eyes narrowed back at the two men.
“Remind me not to do you two any more favors,” she muttered.
“I’ll make a note to do that daily,” Brim growled before turning back to Del-Rey. “We need to talk. Alone.”
And Anya felt her heart sink. Here it was. The end. She hadn’t stepped on anyone’s toes but Brim’s apparently, and he was second-in-command. He had the right to object to anything she had done. To cut her out of any meeting. To reduce her back to no more than caretaker when he and the alpha were absent.
“Alone doesn’t work now, Brim.”
Anya stared back at Del-Rey, shocked. “She’s not just a mate; she’s my coya. One whose responsibilities and duties will be discussed as time allows. Until then, she’ll be present for all meetings. She can’t make the decisions she needs to make should both of us be incapacitated for an extended length of time if she doesn’t understand the decisions that need to be made.”
He held his hand out to her. Such a simple gesture, but one that had her eyes dampening as she moved to him and laid her palm against his. She was his coya. He had made her status clear, and by accepting his hand, she accepted the position. And the man.
It was a step, she told herself. One step among many.
CHAPTER 16
Anya sat silently and watched through the two-way mirror into the interview room where the bartender was being questioned. His name was Ron Coley and he had been hired out of Dallas, Texas, for the party that had been meant to turn into a massacre. He didn’t know who had hired him, just that he was to provide a distraction while the intended target was murdered by another member of the party. He’d had her picture, her name, nothing else.
“Who hired the staff for the party?” Del-Rey asked the Wolves’ alpha leader, Wolfe Gunnar.
“A catering service out of Boulder,” Wolfe murmured. “We screened the employees. He was listed as contract labor but his name and picture didn’t raise any red flags.”
Anya continued to watch as Jonas Wyatt, head of the Bureau of Breed Affairs, continued the, so far, civil interrogation.
“What about other employees?” Del-Rey asked. “Have they been detained or questioned?”
Wolfe gave a shake of his head. “Jonas has surveillance in place on the employees, but they were dismissed after formal questioning. Law enforcement in Boulder as well as in town are demanding answers to his detainment and inclusion in the interrogation. They were denied.”
Breed Law gave the Breeds autonomy in matters of security and enforcement, to a point. Jonas’s arrival made the detainment official; his questioning of the bartender was merely a formality.
Notice of punishment, whether it was death or imprisonment, would go before the Bureau tribunal once he had his recommendations completed. That tribunal was twelve members, drawn from the four separate committees that made up the ruling body of the Breeds’ society.
“Jonas isn’t going to get the information we need here,” Del-Rey murmured as they continued to watch. “The city council was in on this, Wolfe.”
“We know that.” Wolfe nodded as Dash Sinclair sat at his other side, eyes narrowed on the interrogation.
From where Anya sat at the side of the small room, she could see each man’s expression. The alpha leader of the Felines had remained silent, but his gray eyes glittered with wrath as he watched.
“Don’t imagine this will be overlooked, Del-Rey,” Dash spoke up then, his voice cold as he watched the interrogation. “Your coya is no less important than the lupina or the prima. We won’t let this go.”
Anya stared at the Wolf Breed, father to the incredible young woman who had argued for Anya’s separation from her mate. Cassandra Sinclair’s father was strong, but that strength was tempered with compassion, though she could sense inside him an awareness that, sometimes, blood had to be spilled.
“We’re going to have to deal with the town before we go much further,” Del-Rey stated. “Raines is running unchecked. In the past days we’ve pulled in enough information on each man to fry them all. My soldiers have found evidence of the drug we’re tracking in Raines’s house as well as four other city council members’ homes. The Coyote Cabinet is convening tonight to prepare a proposal on how to deal with this matter.”
Wolfe glanced over at Anya. “I hear your coya ordered that move while you were healing. None of us considered the women’s bags and wraps that were left there, and the fact that the council members in on this may have stolen those items knowing no one would be there to collect them.
It was an ingenious plan.”
Anya’s gaze focused on Del-Rey. Male pride was a tenuous thing; she should have thought of that before having any military plan proposed. As Brim had told her while Del-Rey slept, she should have waited, presented it to the alpha then to the cabinet rather than ordering one of the soldiers to prepare the proposal.
Del-Rey’s lips twitched in amusement as he glanced at her. “She ran Base with the same dedication and commitment that Hope and Faith showed her was her due as they overlooked Haven. I have you to thank for approving the time Hope gave her.”
Anya sniffed at that. Damned manipulating Wolves and Coyotes. A woman didn’t have a chance against them. They even taught their women how to scheme and manipulate. It should be illegal.
She turned her gaze back to the interrogation, barely restraining a yawn as Jonas Wyatt, the badass of the Bureau of Breed Affairs, asked the bartender again who his contact was and how he received his assignments.
“Man, look, I told you,” the bartender sneered. “I ain’t no damned Breed assassin, and if I was, I wouldn’t get caught.”
“You stink of blood, Mr. Coley,” Jonas drawled. “I have your file; I know you better than you know yourself now. You’re one of those disposable little peons. But even peons have information, and you will tell me what I want to know.”
“Or what, you’ll snarl and growl at me?” Ron leaned forward, his arms braced on the table as his pitted face screwed into lines of disgust. “Or you gonna bite me?”
Anya barely saw the blurred movement of Wyatt’s arm. But a second later, claw marks, deep and bloody, swiped down the bartender’s face, and he squealed like a gutted pig and jumped back as far as the chains would allow.
He stared into the two-way mirror, seeing the blood dripping down his face now, the marks that extended over his eye, then below the eye and down the cheek to his jaw.
Anya had never seen anything like it.