Chapter 11: Under My Protection

Calla's POV

Jasper's truck came up the drive at dusk, and he got out with his right knuckles split open and did not say where he had been.

I met him on the porch with the phone in my hand.

"I listened to it," I said.

"I know."

"Where did you go?"

"Brennick Ridge."

I stopped breathing.

"What did he say?"

"That he'd trade ten daughters for her."

He said it flat, and he looked past me through the screen door.

"Something's wrong," he said.

The house was too quiet.

Every wolf in Stonegate stood in the great hall, shoulder to shoulder, and they were all looking at a laptop on the long table.

A video was playing on a loop.

It was security footage from the hallway, gray and grainy, time-stamped the afternoon before.

It showed Jasper carrying a bleeding woman up the back stairs and kicking a door shut behind them.

The woman was me.

"Somebody sent it to the pack chat an hour ago," said the Beta, white-faced, at my elbow. "From a number nobody knows."

At the head of the table stood a thin gray-haired woman in a black cardigan.

She held a framed photograph against her chest.

It was the laughing boy from the gate.

Mark's mother.

"My son's killer," she said, in a voice that carried to the rafters, "sleeps in my son's brother's bed."

A growl ran through the hall.

Forty heads turned to look at me.

"I will not have it," she said. "Jasper, give her to the Council tonight. Send her back to silver, or I'll take this pack out of your hands."

"Sit down, Mother," Jasper said.

"I will not sit."