Inside, I hurriedly threw on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt in the guest room before forcing myself into a casual walk to the deck slider to open it for them.
“This is the best surprise,” I said, stepping out, then stilling. My wolf tensed.
Something about Ali’s scent was off. I smelled fear on her, and tension radiated from her face.
“What happened, sweetheart?” I opened my arms and drew her into them. “What’s going on?”
“You guys were right,” she choked, glancing up at me. I released her from the hug and she pushed past me to go inside.
I glanced at Holt, who shrugged.
I followed her in—taking a moment to check out how fine her ass looked in her jeans—and grabbed three beers from the refrigerator. Holt pulled a chair out for her at the kitchen table and she sank into it, her shoulders drooping. He sat beside her.
She lifted her chin, and fixed her gaze on Holt’s then mine, in turn. “They are cooking meth on the property.”
Holt stiffened ever so slightly, and I froze.
Shit.
I’d been right in my investigation these past few months. We’d known from the scent at the burned out cabin. Until the lab samples came back, we had no proof to arrest anyone. Last time I checked, shifter senses weren’t something that could be used as evidence in a court of law.
“Only, it’s not my dad,” she continued. “He’s not part of it. But he knows about it and is enabling it.” She looked down at her hands, which she was wringing in her lap. “He’s being forced into letting them do it on our land for some reason. It doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes sense.”
She’d said they and them.
Ali tugged the tie holding her long auburn hair in a ponytail and let it fall around her shoulders as if she couldn’t hold herself still.
I flicked off the beer top with my thumb, forgetting not to show my shifter strength, and handed it to her. In her worry, she didn’t notice my mistake. I passed the other beer to Holt and joined them at the table. “What did you see? Tell us everything.”
Ali’s beautiful brown eyes were swimming with tears.
My wolf howled at the sight. I reached out to brush them away, but didn’t interrupt. We needed answers. Her coming here showed she trusted us. She wasn’t keeping this information a secret and she had to tell us, to purge it to set herself free of its hold.
That was right for mates like us. This was her problem, but we’d take the burden of it on for her. Not only because it was our jobs, but because we were her mates.
“Today when I was on the ride with Ariel, I saw a trailer left way out by the pond.”
I set my beer on the table with a hard thud at the mention of my sister. I didn’t think I was going to like the way this tale was going.
Ali glanced at me, but continued on when I gave her a nod of encouragement. Yeah, I hid my wolf’s rage really fucking well.
“Later, when I asked my dad about it, he said it belonged to Tim Hollaroy, who was staying there because he’d had a tiff with his wife.”
I glanced at Holt again, knowing he remembered that Tim Hollaroy was at the helm of the wolf tracker business last year. He’d been nailed by the Fish and Game, which resulted in the loss of his hunting license for five years, and a fine of four thousand dollars. In fact, our friend Wade believed he was probably the rancher responsible for killing his mother years ago, when she’d been on a run in wolf form.
Yeah, that fucker.
“I knew that didn’t make sense,” she continued, the words coming out at a quick pace now. As if the dam had been broken on her story. “I mean, the trailer was way off the dirt road. Yes, it was by the pond, which might make a nice view from the trailer windows, but it would be a damn inconvenient place to stay when your own ranch was miles away. Why there, on the far reaches of our land? It makes no sense.”
I nodded and took a slow pull on my beer, letting her talk.
“I decided to go and check things out for myself.”
I stiffened in my seat, my fist tightening around the beer bottle. “You what?” I choked. My wolf snarled.
She nodded. “I needed to know what was going on. So tonight, I went out there after dark.”
“Fuck, Ali,” Holt spat. His eyes took on the glow of his wolf, as if the mere mention of a threat to her safety had him ready to shift. “That could’ve been dangerous. You should’ve called us first.”
She was too distraught to notice Holt’s eyes.