Willow froze. The anger on her face crumpled into terror. “Caleb,” she whispered.

“Yeah.” He must want to discuss what we’d decided in the forest. Shit, he couldn’t have chosen a worse time. Willow’s face was turning white. She was scared out of her mind.

“Dinnae worry.” I stood and took a step toward her. “I’m here. You’re safe.”

“He can’t see me here.” She scrambled off the bed and sunk onto the floor, grabbing her clothes from the pile beside the bed.

“What are you doing?” I hissed as she got on her hands and knees. ”Are you going to pretend to be the maid, because if Caleb sees you scrubbing the floor without your clothes on, he’s going to want to hire you.”

“What do you think I’m doing? I’m hiding under the bed.” Willow rolled her tiny body into the gap under the bed, dragging her clothes in after her. “Pull that corner down for me, and try and stop him from coming in here.”

I did as she asked, not bothering to tell her that Caleb would probably be able to smell her if he entered the room, then went out into the upstairs landing and leaned over the balustrade. Caleb stood in the entrance hall, his face stony. “What’s taking you so long?” Caleb growled as he started up the stairs toward me.

“Sorry, I’ve been running errands. There’s a lot to prepare.”

“Where’s Willow?”

“She’s running some wedding errands for Alex.”

“You have a train to catch in …” Caleb glanced at his watch. “An hour and forty-five minutes. You’ve got the first meeting with the Lowell pack this afternoon, so you can’t miss it.” He jogged up the stairs and frowned as he noticed I was shirtless. “Look at you. You aren’t even dressed yet. Have you even packed?”

I grabbed my crumpled shirt off the floor outside Willow’s room and pulled it over my head. “I was just saying goodbye to Willow. It’ll only take me a couple of minutes to grab my stuff. Relax, I’m nae going to let you down.”

“You’d better not, not again. We’ve got a lot riding on this alliance.” Caleb’s eyes burned into mine. “You could be a little more grateful, man. It wasn’t easy organising this at the last minute, and after the way you’ve been acting and all the trouble you’ve brought down on my pack, I could have just as easily left you to fend for yourself.”

“I ken that. I’m just a bit distracted at the moment.”

“Don’t be distracted, Irvine. Just get this done. And I think it’s best if you avoid Willow from now on.”

“Aye?” I took a step to the right, placing my body between Caleb and the bed, hoping he wouldn’t see Willow under the bed.

“I’ve found out something about Willow that you need to know. While I was away, I asked Rosa to have a look into Willow’s background, see if she could find something that might explain this stalker. She was thinking it was connected to Willow’s career, so she plugged Willow’s name into a search engine, just to see some of the other weddings she’d done in London. And do you know what she found?”

I shook my head, my stomach tightening.

“Nothing. Because Willow Summers is not her real name. There’s no record of her business in London, or any online presence at all before she set up a new website a month ago.”

“That cannae be true.” How would Willow run her company without a website?

Caleb shook his head. “And that’s not all. Rosa found an article about another London wedding planner, Carol Winters. Apparently, this wedding planner is blonde, but she has an uncanny resemblance to Willow and a prosthetic leg – one that she’s used along with an interesting story to get PR for her business. She was attacked by a werewolf when she was a girl, you see. She’s in the tabloids and on YouTube videos all over the internet talking about how evil werewolves are and how much she wanted them all killed.” Caleb frowned. “Irvine, Willow is the daughter of Helen Winters.”

What?

That was insane. That didn’t make sense. Helen Winters was the publisher behind the Werewolf Watch website, which attempted to reveal the crimes of shifters and other supernatural coverups. There wasn’t a shifter alive who hadn’t seen Helen Winters’ ridiculous so-called news stories. Sometimes, her guesses about national news stories were spot on. Just last year, she correctly guessed that a scuffle with a wolf at a Ryan Raynard exhibition opening was actually a shifter attack and not the performance art the media claimed. Luckily, the site also included articles about other conspiracy theories, like the fake moon landing and the earth being hollow and filled with Nazis, so a lot of the truth got lost in the noise.

Helen Winters was a nutcase, and she hated shifters. Willow couldn’t possibly be her daughter, could she?

From beneath the bed, Willow gasped. Caleb didn’t seem to notice.

“That dinnae make sense,” I said, even as the pieces of Willow’s story started to fall into place. She’d spoken about her overbearing mother, and I ken she was hiding her past from me, but I thought it was an abusive stepfather or just extreme loneliness. Never could I have imagined this.

“I’ve seen the footage, Irvine. She’s a blonde in the pictures, but there’s no mistaking Willow’s face. Her story is all over her mother’s site. Don’t you see what this means? It can’t be a coincidence that she’s here, trying to get everyone in our pack to hire her for their weddings right when we’re planning the big reveal.”

I reeled at his words. “Say what you mean, Caleb.”

“Willow Summers, or Carol Winters, is here to expose our secrets. She’s feeding information back to her mother. There are articles on Helen Winters’ site that contain bits of information about us, about a plan that’s afoot, about Robbie’s appearance at the party. Where do you think she’s getting this information?”

“It cannae be from Willow. I havenae told her anything.”

“Don’t be so sure. You might’ve said things in the heat of the moment that you don’t even remember—” Caleb’s eyes fell on the prosthetic limb at the end of the bed. Fuck. I couldn’t believe Willow had forgotten it. He looked up at me and raised an eyebrow. I averted my eyes.

When Caleb spoke again, his voice was hard. “Tell Willow when you see her next, that the Lowe clan doesn’t take kindly to infiltrators, and that no one else will be hiring her for their weddings.” Before I could reply, he pushed passed me and thundered down the stairs.

Caleb slammed the front door behind him, leaving me alone with the woman who’d done nothing but lie to me.