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she’d set off after him, determined to track him down. Then she hadn’t come back.
    When a few days had gone by and her roommates hadn’t heard from her, they got in touch with Chelsea, claiming they were worried about their impulsive, risk-taking friend. Chelsea had been worried, too, while waiting for word from her sister...or a sign that she was okay and on her way back home. When her phone messages on Perry’s cell went unanswered for over a week, Chelsea left Smythe and followed Perry’s sloppy trail from one college party or nightclub to another, until her search eventually led to a strip joint right there in Wesley called Heaven and Hell.
    Unfortunately, by the time Chelsea had arrived, Perry’s short stint illegally serving cocktails in the club was already over. No one had been willing to talk to Chelsea or to give her any information, until she finally got lucky that afternoon and caught one of the girls, a hollow-eyed little slip of a thing named Maggie, on the way to her car in the parking lot. The girl had reluctantly divulged that a tired-looking Perry had hit the road after only a few nights at the club, when some guy she said she’d been looking for came in.
    Apparently, the guy—a good-looking blond who Maggie had seen before, but whose name she didn’t know—freaked out when he saw Perry working in the club. A fight started between him and the bouncers when he demanded Perry leave with him, but then they eventually told him just to get her out of there. She’d run in the back to collect her things, giddy with excitement, and told Maggie that her boyfriend was taking her home with him, to a place somewhere up in the nearby mountains.
    And that was how Chelsea Smart had ended up in Silvercrest pack territory. Chelsea had left Wesley not long after talking to Maggie, determined to search any towns she found up in the mountains until she finally located her sister. When Eric asked why she hadn’t bothered to go to the police, she told him she’d already tried that route, but there’d been nothing they could do to help. According to the officer she’d talked to back in Smythe, being stupid wasn’t a crime. Perry was a legal adult who was apparently acting of her own free will, and until they had reason to believe otherwise, there was nothing the cops could do.
    Considering that the private road he’d found Chelsea on led to Shadow Peak, and Eric was positive Perry wasn’t in the mountaintop town, there were only a few other possibilities, and none of them were good for a human female on her own. Just as the road split off from the main highway, there was a turnoff to an old dirt path that wound its way over to the opposite side of the mountain, and into the territory owned by the Youngblood pack. Though the pack itself, a relatively small, peaceful group who kept to themselves, lived in a town that had been built on the western edge of their land, there was an even smaller settlement over the border in West Virginia where the Donovan family lived. Known for their corrupt business dealings, the Donovans had been asked to leave the Youngblood Lycan homestead in the late seventies—and yet, they hadn’t been banished, seeing as how their Midas touch generated handsome profits for the pack.
    As far as Eric knew, the Donovans had never set up shop in Maryland, keeping their various ventures in West Virginian towns that were closer to their pack lands. But he’d recently heard a few of the Runners say that the Donovans had been sniffing around Wesley the past couple of months, and the prickling at the back of his neck told him the family might somehow be involved with that particular club.
    If he was right, there was a good chance Heaven and Hell was being used as a front for something far more sinister than peddling flesh. Over the years, there’d been rumors that the Donovans were involved with drug trafficking, among other illegal activities. From the sound of things, the guy that Perry Smart