The plan made sense. Everyone said so. They were chasing shadows, preparing for phantoms. They needed someone in Pierce Point. And Alison was more than capable. It was only for a few days. It made sense that she should go.

His wolf hated it.

It went against every part of his instinct to have his mate leave him—actually leave—less than twenty-four hours after the mating. But it was decided that it was best to get her to Pierce Point as soon as possible, so she went home and packed her bags while Tessa booked her a hotel and Ian got her fake identification.

Then she kissed him goodbye, and said This is the right thing, Brody. Believe me. And then she was gone.

His Alison.

He couldn’t think, and he couldn’t bear to change and run, so he did what was familiar—he went to the Four Spot diner. He sat in his usual booth. He hadn’t been here much since he’d hired Alison, because they did a lot of business in his living room, and he thought it might be strange for her to come back here. But now he came, and ordered a Coke, and looked at the menu like he always did, pretending to read it.

Patty had hired a new waitress, a fortyish single mother named Trish. She wasn’t as good a waitress as Alison—she tended to forget things, and she always called Brody “handsome,” which grated on him—but he didn’t mind, because Trish’s presence meant that Alison wasn’t a waitress anymore. Alison would never be a waitress again.

It took only a few minutes for word to get out that he was here, shifter information traveling like vibrations on a spider’s web. His first visitor was Quinn Tucker, who was chief of police alongside Nadine. Quinn was already chief when Nadine came to town, but as a former sheriff Nadine was more qualified. Quinn was a bear shifter and Nadine was human. Since he couldn’t decide which of them should have the job, he’d given them both the job and told them to get along or else. One of his spur of the moment decisions, but it was working well so far.

“What can you tell me?” he said to Quinn as he cut into the pork chop he’d ordered. He didn’t really want the food. Patty’s food was good, but his wolf preferred to hunt and eat wild. He’d only come here because of Alison, he realized now. All those days sitting here, not wanting to go anywhere else. What an idiot he’d been. If she ever came back, he’d tell her.

“Everything is quiet,” Quinn said. “But I heard something you might need to know.”

“Yeah?” Brody took a bite of his pork chop.

“You remember Carson Dunne?”

The pack’s former medical man. The man who had doctored Charlie’s postmortem after taking a pile of Brody’s money. He ate his pork chop and kept his face impassive. “Yeah, I remember.”

“He left town right after Charlie died,” Quinn said. “We all figured he was gone for good, but it turns out he isn’t.”

“Yeah?” Brody said, keeping his voice to a casual grunt. Inside, his wolf paced, caged and miserable. “He’s in town?”

“Weirder than that,” Quinn said. He motioned to Trish for a coffee and dumped one creamer into it, then another. Quinn was Native American, a tall, dark bear shifter who had become chief of police after vowing to turn his life around. When Brody had given him the job, he’d had no idea how long the man would last, but Quinn had taken to the work like a duck to water. “I just got word that Dunne was arrested in Denver three days ago.”

Brody paused. “Arrested? For what?”

“Malpractice,” Quinn said. “Giving his patients drugs under the table for cash. Meth, morphine, Fentanyl, whatever they wanted. We always knew he was a crook and a hack doctor. Looks like leaving town didn’t make him change his ways.”

“I guess not.” Carson Dunne was a human, but he’d done well when Charlie was pack alpha. He’d been given a plum position and a lot of perks. Pretty strange work, when shifters were immune to both injury and disease and never needed medical attention. Part of the work, Brody knew, was tending to the strippers and hookers Charlie kept in his stable. But the other part of the work, not surprisingly, must have been connected to Charlie’s lucrative drug trade. A trade Brody himself was busy stamping out of Shifter Falls.

Fuck you, dear old Dad.

“So Carson Dunne was dealing,” Brody said, looking at Quinn’s serious expression. “So what? That’s nothing to do with us. They can lock him up forever for all we care. So why are you here?”

“Because something’s going on,” Quinn said. “They didn’t just arrest Carson and make him post bail, the usual shit. They arrested him and let him go almost right away. Scot free. But first, they put him in a police van and took a trip to Pierce Point.”

Brody put down his fork and thought it over. “You think he offered someone information in return for a deal.”

Quinn nodded. “Someone in Pierce Point,” he said. “And the mayor of Pierce Point is giving press conferences about his big hard-on for shutting down shifters. I think that to save his own skin, Carson gave them some kind of information about the pack. What do you think that could be?”

Brody adjusted his baseball cap and looked at Quinn. It was an honest question: What do you think that could be? Not a loaded cop question. Still, Brody felt a prickle down his spine. Well, Quinn, it could be about the fact that Charlie’s skull had an ice-pick-sized hole in it, and I paid him to shut up. He’d learned to school his emotions since he was a boy, but in this moment he nearly opened his mouth and said it. Opened his mouth and gave Quinn the whole fucking thing.

He was tired—that was part of it. Tired of carrying around the heavy burden of that death. He wanted to put the bag of rocks down off his shoulders and walk away. But when you’ve killed your father, you don’t get that choice anymore.

He wished Alison was here. She hadn’t lifted all the rocks from him, but she’d made a start. She crazily didn’t think of him as the killer and the liar that he was. She saw something else when she looked at him. Sometimes, he wished he knew what it was.

“I don’t know,” he said to Quinn. “Carson was in my father’s confidence, so he probably heard a lot of things over the years. If Pierce Point’s mayor wants ammunition for his fear campaign, I bet Carson has plenty to sell—for a price.”

“It’s hard to pick,” Quinn agreed. “The drugs, the hookers, the murders—I mean, if Carson wants to spill his guts, where does he start?”

Brody felt his jaw harden. “What do you know about the Pierce Point visit?”

“It was brief,” Quinn said. “One of our guys has a human cousin on the Denver force. He says they put Carson in a van, drove him to Pierce Point to talk to the new sheriff, then turned around and came back to Denver, driving Carson home. He’s under house arrest now, but my guess is his lawyer is setting up a deal. The information for the charges to go away. I don’t know why humans think their justice is so much better than ours.”

Brody put his fork down. He couldn’t eat any more.

The meeting was brief. That meant Carson had given them something, but not much yet. He was waiting for the deal to come through, waiting to know he was on his way to being home free, before spilling everything.

Carson knew about the murder. That was a problem. But that wasn’t the biggest problem.

No, the biggest problem was all of the other dirt, as Quinn had just pointed out. If Pierce Point was looking for a reason to fear shifters, Carson could hand it to them on a silver platter. All of the nasty wrongdoings Charlie had done over the years, yes. But Carson knew about Charlie’s final plan. The plan to move in to Grant County and take it as pack territory, at any cost. Charlie had written it out—each step, what it would take. Brody himself had seen that written plan. So had Carson. The step-by-step battle plan to kill their neighbors.

If the humans found out about that, Shifter Falls was finished.

In short, Carson Dunne could start the very war that Brody had killed his father, and sold his soul, to avoid.

He closed his eyes briefly. The last time he’d seen Carson, he’d been sending him on his way, getting a solemn vow that he’d never come back to Colorado again. That was a mistake—he should have killed Carson there and then. But he’d been so tired of death, of murder, he hadn’t had the heart. He hadn’t been alpha then, and he hadn’t learned to see far to the horizon, to the places others couldn’t see. He hadn’t been able to see that this would happen.

He could see it now.

Brody opened his eyes again. “I’ll take care of it,” he said to Quinn.

Quinn didn’t move. He didn’t nod. He simply sat, his eyes locked to Brody’s, unwavering. One of the best things—and one of the worst things—about Quinn was that he picked up so fucking much behind his quiet, dark demeanor.

“Let me help you handle it,” he said.

Brody shook his head. “No.”

“One of your brothers, then.”

They would. To prevent a war, they would help him do it. He knew that now. But letting them in meant telling them everything, and it was too late for that. Too late for a lot of things.

“I’ll handle it,” he said to Quinn again.

Now Quinn had a glint of uncertainty in his expression. “You’re sure there’s no other way?”

He thought that over. He saw Alison’s face in his mind’s eye, heard her voice, knew exactly what she would say. Brody, no. There has to be something else you can do. Anything at all.

She’d say that, but she’d be wrong this time. Just like Quinn was wrong right now.

“It’s taken care of,” he said. “Are we done?”

Because an alpha had to make decisions, and some of those decisions were hard. And the only alpha worth respecting was the one who did his own dirty work instead of sending someone else.

That was Charlie’s lesson. After all, he’d snapped Brody’s mother’s neck with his own two hands.

Now, all these years later, Brody had to stop Charlie’s war.

Which meant Carson Dunne had to disappear.