Chapter 58

Pick up the phone. Just once! You owe me that!

—Message left by Heenali Roy for Trey Gunther

GEORGE’S SHOULDERS SHOOK, a sob breaking out of his mouth. “I swear I didn’t know.” He wiped his nose on the back of his arm, the checked shirt he wore woefully inadequate for this weather. “I thought it was about money and stealing scientific breakthroughs. Things that would hurt BlackSea but not any person. I didn’t know they were the ones taking and killing our own.”

Agony gripped Kaia’s heart. “How did you find out?”

“I never betrayed anyone.” He stared desperately at her. “I never gave my contact any coordinates or even spoke to him about specific people in the clan. I just passed on tech data and they put money into a hidden account.”

Blood cold, Kaia somehow managed to keep her voice soft, gentle. “Then why do you think your buyers are behind the vanishings?”

“Someone made a mistake.” George swallowed hard. “I got paid twenty times what I should’ve been, and when I queried it because I didn’t want to end up hounded for it, my contact slipped up and said my payment had been confused with that of another informant in BlackSea.”

Hugging the pack, he carried on. “It was two months ago, right after we lost a swimmer in the Arctic. I knew, I knew what it must mean, that one of us was selling out clanmates, but I didn’t know how to tell anyone. And I had no details.”

Just confirmation of what they’d all begun to suspect. That in itself was enough. It backed their decision to look within, dig out the poison that threatened their family. Kaia was trying to find a way to say that to George without making him feel bad about having withheld the information—she knew what it was to be frozen by fear, would never judge him—when Bowen spoke.

“But you don’t consider BlackSea clan.” His voice was quiet, the question in it devastating.

George’s head jerked toward Bo before he returned his frantic gaze to Kaia. “I would never allow anyone’s family to be targeted. I would never leave a child without his parents, without safety.” His voice sang with anguish. “I just wanted to make BlackSea hurt in other ways. I wanted to destroy the cooperation agreement with the humans and the alliance with the leopards and wolves. Make everyone feel alone and powerless as I felt alone and powerless.”

“Who is your contact?” Kaia was having a difficult time keeping her distance. Every part of her strained to go closer and grab hold of George, give him the comfort of clan.

“All the information is in a file on the organizer inside here.” He tapped his pack. “I thought I was dealing with a conglomerate tied to a pharmaceuticals company, people who wanted to co-opt our research.” Fingers trembling, he moved his hands from the pack. “I didn’t know it was the Consortium.”

Kaia’s breath caught, her body bunching almost before her brain processed the meaning of his actions, but George was already turning toward the rocky danger of the ravine—even a small jump would send him crashing onto the lethal edges and sharp corners of those rocks, his body gaining momentum as it careened down.

He’d be dead long before he hit the bottom.

“I’m sorry, Kaia. I never intended for anyone to die.”

Even as Kaia screamed and attempted to move fast enough to grab him, George jumped—or he tried to. Because, at the end, he’d forgotten about Bowen and that Bowen Knight wasn’t a scientist or a cook. He was the security chief of the Human Alliance and it turned out he could move a lot faster than a cerebral sea creature stranded on land.

He wrenched George from the edge, dragging the crying, screaming man back until there was no chance George could escape and make another suicide attempt. Ignoring the pack that held the data and the precious compound, Kaia all but jumped on top of her clanmate at the first glimmer of a shift. “How dare you try to end your life?” she yelled, successfully startling him into staying human. “You’re part of my family, George! You don’t get to just give up!”

George’s sobs turned even harsher and he tried to curl into himself, but Kaia was having none of that. Dragging him to her, she let him bury his face against her neck, his arms locked tight around her, and then she rocked him as he cried, a broken child in a man’s body.

Her own tears fell above his head as she watched Bowen walk to the edge of the drop-off and retrieve the pack.

Sixteen hours to go.