“No.” I slid in next to Marc and pulled the car door shut, then rolled down my window as Jace started the engine. There were many things about Kaci I found hard to believe, but her name wasn’t one of them. “She’s Canadian. From Cranbrook, British Columbia. And you’re probably spelling her name wrong.”

Michael shook his head insistently, rounding the front of the car as Jace began to back out of the gravel driveway. “I tried K-A-S-E-Y and C-A-S-E-Y.”

“It’s K-A-C-I. And I think Dillon is with two L’s. Try it again.” With that, I rolled the window up and scooted closer to Marc, watching my brother in the rearview mirror until Jace turned out of the driveway.

In town, we found a small shopping center that held both a moderately priced department store and a general store. In less than an hour, we bought a week’s worth of clothing, shoes and toiletries for Kaci. And though the outing was a short one, the normalcy of a trip to the store—even a chaperoned trip—did wonders for my morale, simply because there were no Alphas around to remind me that each breath I took might be my last.

In addition to that perk, it was absolutely blissful to be surrounded by so many humans, who didn’t give a shit who I was or what I’d done. I hadn’t felt such freedom or anonymity since my last day of school, and wasn’t likely to feel it again anytime soon.

Back at the lodge, Marc helped me haul the bags up to Kaci’s room, then backed out after giving her a friendly smile. She returned his smile, and I couldn’t help a flash of frustration that she was apparently warming up to the one tom she might never see again.

When Marc left the room, Kaci dug into the shopping bags with enough enthusiasm to rival her appetite. She was laying the outfits out on the spare bed, mixing and rematching tops and bottoms, when a shout from outside drew me to the window over her bed.

“Grandpa! We found him!”

I peered down at the lawn, where Paul Blackwell’s grandson Nate marched across the dead grass alongside another enforcer I didn’t know, who carried an oddly stiff, furry black form in both arms.

That’s a corpse, if I ever saw one.

Twenty-Four

Kaci sat on the bed next to me and twisted to peer out the window, but I blocked her view with my body. “Hey, why don’t you try on some of these clothes, and I’ll be right back to see how they look.”

“Why? What’s wrong?” She frowned, standing to look over my shoulder. Fortunately, Nate and his partner had already taken their discovery around back, out of sight from Kaci’s room.