Was the man in that bag the brilliant senior agent with the salt-and-pepper hair who had pulled Cooper into an empty hallway and hugged him tight when first-assignment nerves made his body shake? Was it the lover who’d traced cruel apologies on his wet skin more painful than anything they’d said or done while fighting? The mistake he kept making who’d found him in the Bureau’s fourth-floor bathroom, fucked him in a stall and made him promise not to leave—not this time, not again? The stranger who’d come looking for Cooper, glimpsed him slipping down the rabbit hole, tried to follow and lost his head?

Ryan was right. Neil was perfect for manipulating. Newly isolated after losing the only job he’d had for thirty years, already full of resentful hatred and obsession. One man with all the data, the other able to look at the same horrifying room of pictures that Cooper had and see a business plan. An opportunity.

Cooper would have liked to know what had nudged their paths together and got them talking about wolves. How Ryan had become aware of wolves in the first place. Not from Neil, so he’d claimed, and in this, Cooper was inclined to believe him. Ryan had said Neil was excited to meet someone who also believed. He’d also said this plan took months to put together, he’d started as soon as he became aware...

In fact, a lot of things seemed to have fallen in place a few months ago. James’s employment. The collaboration with Wild Nature...

Literally too perfect. Those were the exact words Ryan had used, and Cooper agreed. He frowned, thinking, until a second stretcher and body bag emerged from the back of the building and that long hall of cages.

“He lied about the Moon,” Alice said distantly, watching Ryan’s body being taken away. “And the Moon saw to it that he would not tell tales again.”

Cooper eyed her a tad uneasily. That...did not sound like someone whom he was going to be able to convince was wrong about him. Alice seemed fascinating, but unnerving, too. He felt distinctly aware he knew very little about the WIP. When Cola had invited him into the Trust she’d said the agents wouldn’t just be from the ruling packs anymore, but so far that hadn’t seemed to pan out. The only WIP member he’d ever met was Daisy, and he’d rather foolishly been thinking of them in terms of human equivalents. Anarchists, perhaps, fighting for the dissolution of what was to Cooper’s outsider eyes the more wolf-like traditions of packs and alphas.

But mere minutes of conversation with Alice was starting to tell him that being less wolf-like than the packs didn’t necessarily mean they were more human-acting, either. It would be a mistake to think of werewolves as nothing more than a neat brew of both.