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long sigh, he left the house without another word.
    Billy poked his head inside. He had a concerned look on his face. "Everything okay in here?"
    "I don't know,” I said honestly. "That conversation makes me wonder what else I don't know about what's going on in this town."
    Billy's face was unreadable. "Lukas said that you would need some time to get adjusted. Maybe, instead of doing your investigative reporting at the Summit, you should take his advice and rest." Billy closed the door and left me alone to my thoughts.
    No matter what they said, sitting around twiddling my thumbs was the last thing that I was going to do. That wasn’t what I though an alpha’s mate would do anyway.
     

CHAPTER FIVE – Lukas
     
    It seemed as if the moment I walked back into Greyelf, almost everything went wrong. I came back for the wrong reason. My brother had passed away. Everything about his death stunk like day-old fish. Then there was the alpha claim that I had to fight for that should've been mine. Everyone around town couldn't seem to put aside the man that I used to be.
    I should have forced the issue with Markus years ago to come back for Maren. Last night she had been taken away from me. Luckily, I had gotten her back, but would I be so lucky again? Now with Sheriff Monroe's death, all eyes and fingers would point back in my direction as the cause of it. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Everything was wrong. Everything except what I had somehow managed to repair with Maren.
    I thought about what Maren would do in this situation. It was simple. She would stay calm, and she would keep working her leads. She wouldn’t let one bad thing get in the way of finding out what she wanted to know. Now with this latest supposedly natural death on my hands, I felt more anxious than ever about keeping her safe.
    I called Billy on the cell phone. "Is she okay?" I didn't even let him get a word out in greeting because Maren’s safety was the only thing on my mind.
    "She's fine. Her father just left, though. I don't think that conversation went very well."
    I snorted. As if I expected anything differently. Old man Lene hated my guts. It didn’t surprise to hear that he probably pitched a fit that Maren and I were together now, and there was nothing he could do about it. It impressed me and gave me a welcoming feeling of warmth that she had told him what was happening so quickly. Hopefully, that meant she was feeling as good about what had happened between us as I did.
    "He’ll get used to it. Look, there's something that I have to tell you," I said. There wasn’t really any point in beating around the bush on the matter. "Sheriff Monroe is dead."
    There was nothing but silence on the other end of the line, and I thought that Billy perhaps had hung up on me, and I just didn't hear the click. Then he spoke, "How?"
    That was the question of the day. No one expected that Sheriff Monroe would pass away. The man had been in more fights than I was years old. He was a tough son-of-a-bitch. To have fallen victim to the wounds of our bear match seemed impossible.
    "This one stinks too, Billy. You can't tell me that it doesn't. I think I saw that guy that Maren saw out at Black Falls Cove coming out of his room when I got here. I didn’t recognize him until it was too late, so I don't think this is an accident. Just like I don't think it's an accident about what happened to my brother. It's time for everybody to come clean with me. How can I be the alpha and make good decisions if I don't have all of the details of what's happening in my town?"
    "I can't believe he's dead." Billy was in shock, not that I blamed him. I wasn't sure what kind of relationship he had with the sheriff. He had been on the Greyelf police force for the last five years. I was fairly certain the sheriff had recruited him personally. I know there was a great deal of respect between them.
    "We got to keep this thing in the inner circle for the time being. We don't want people in town to