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said, “Hey, Kel, it’s Secret. Call me back, please. Your pain-in-the-ass brother is looking for you.”
    My partner hit the end button and slid the phone back across the desk to me. “Are you worried?”
    “No,” I lied.
    “Then back to my first question. Does he have any enemies?”
    “He’s a werewolf king, a billionaire and an asshole. Of course he has enemies.”
    Keaty turned to the laptop in front of him and deftly typed something, his fingers flying over the keyboard with an alarming speed for a man I’d thought hated all technology. “I don’t see any hostile takeovers, bad business dealings or anything that would suggest this is corporate. Could it be Callum?”
    My uncle, Werewolf King of the South, hadn’t been a big fan of my marriage to Lucas, nor did he think the younger king could handle the territory he had. This had been made abundantly clear when he’d tried to steal some of our land and people. That territory dispute was what Lucas had been dealing with instead of showing up to our wedding.
    Callum had also been the one to force our hands and push us into the werewolf marriage ceremony. My uncle wasn’t my favorite person by far, but I did believe he cared about me in his own weird, twisted way. He also wasn’t the type to mix humans up with werewolf business if he could avoid it.
    “Kellen isn’t a werewolf. Callum wouldn’t touch her. It would be bad for his image.”
    Keaty nodded, trusting my assessment of my uncle’s motivation. “So there aren’t any obvious suspects, none that would make kidnapping appear likely. And without a ransom request, I think you’re correct. She’s probably on vacation.”
    “All the same, I’d like to use some of your less seemly contacts to make sure no one has seen her around or heard anything differently about her well-being. Just so I can put Lucas at ease.”
    “Why do you care how he feels?”
    I looked at my hands, rubbing my damp palms on my jeans before I spoke again. “I don’t care how Lucas feels. But I can’t change my ties to the pack. And he isn’t…right. I need him to get right so he can take care of his people. Otherwise it’s my job to make sure men like my uncle, and like Marcus Sullivan, don’t try to take advantage of a perceived weakness.”
    I’d killed a would-be usurper to Lucas’s throne once, over a year earlier, and it had given me the illustrious and unwanted title of pack protector. Supernatural job titles were like Pokemon to me, apparently. Gotta catch them all.
    I didn’t want to be queen, but I’d earned the pack-protector position in a legitimate way, and I took the role seriously. And with only a week until the next full moon, I wanted to be on good terms with the pack. When I’d been in Louisiana, I’d shifted form for the first time in my adult life. I didn’t know if the same thing would happen this month, but my ability to resist the change had been compromised. If becoming a werewolf was going to be a new monthly trend, I didn’t want to do it alone. I’d had a difficult time controlling my inner wolf, and the pack would be able to help me if things went badly.
    I needed them, so I couldn’t simply dismiss them now that Lucas and I weren’t together.
    That meant I needed to live up to my perceived duties.
    “Okay,” Keaty said. “I’ll ask about the girl. Now do you want to know what I need you for?”
    I’d almost forgotten this was a quid pro quo situation. “Sure.”
    He tapped something into his computer and spun it around.
    A glassy-eyed corpse stared back at me.

Chapter Seven
    “Whoa,” I cried. “A little warning next time.”
    The body was hardly the scariest I’d ever seen. My line of work meant I was constantly being shown the grim and bloody handiwork of any number of creatures, and I’d encountered everything from dismembered human corpses to rotting, dead vampires. But when you’re not expecting it, death has a habit of smacking you in the face.
    On Keaty’s