Page 76 of Protected By Her Mate

“I’ll do anything.” Her lips are trembling and she’s putting on a good show, but I don’t need to read her mind to know she’s lying.

I stalk toward her, stopping before I reach her. “You killed Greystone Boulder-Wolf and Catherine Grant.”

Her gaze darts around me, but there’s no way past. “I had to,” she finally answers. “They were spies. They risked exposing the organization.”

“An anti-shifter organization,” I scoff. “I don’t believe you hold anything in common with ASHRA except your hatred toward me. Why did you infiltrate them?” When she refuses to answer, I add in a low voice, “You’re not getting out of this alive, Edith. You may as well tell me.”

She blinks rapidly at my use of her 19thcentury name. “They gave me access to you.” At my confused look, she explains, “I knew you would be lead investigator in any shifter-related crimes, so I affiliated myself with them almost at their inception. I convinced them I hated others of my kind and let them see my very real hatred toward you, told them I was planning on bringing you down. Then I laid low and waited.”

“Until I found my mate,” I conclude grimly.

She nods, her eyes reflecting pain as blood drips steadily down her neck and chest. “Boulder-Wolf wasn’t even my original target, but when ASHRA discovered he was a mole, I jumped on the opportunity. He gave me the vessel I needed to draw your attention.”

“That doesn’t make sense, I didn’t know Charlie until after Boulder-Wolf’s death. We met when we were assigned the case together. You couldn’t have known I had a mate.”

“Your twin found his mate,” she points out.

I shake my head at her logic. “While twins often find their mates close together, it doesn’t always happen.”

“I was willing to gamble,” she hisses.

“You were done waiting.”

“Maybe, but if you hadn’t found your mate, there were other ways to cause damage. I could have continued killing shifters, driving you insane while pretending to be an ally. I could’ve had one of your brothers killed, or one of their mates.” A gleam enters her eye when she asks, “By the way, what was it like in your head after your twin’s mate almost died? From all accounts, Keenan was inconsolable.”

I should have realized Edie was responsible. “You ordered the theatre bombing in L.A.”

She tilts her head, as if to say it was her pleasure. I dig my nails into my palms to stop myself from beating her to death before she finishes her confession.

“I was getting tired of waiting for my revenge. I knew Keenan’s despair would drive you insane, weaken you. I would have continued to wait for your mate to show up but torturing you in the process would have been a bonus.”

Her plan was to cause maximum damage to my life in as many ways as possible. It’s diabolical, but then, she had over a century to plan.

I try to reason with the woman who shared a bench with me in Central Park 140 years ago. “I was doing my job when I killed your mate.”

“You murdered him to makes humans safe!” she screams. “Humans are nothing to us and you betrayed one of your own for them. I will never forgive you, Lennox. Never.”

I watch her passion, feeling a hint of remorse. In the old days we put our rogue shifters down, thinking it our duty. A distasteful duty, but necessary. These days, we try to find other paths for containing our rogues, violence now a last resort. Perhaps if wolf shifters as a society had found our compassion for the more disturbed among us earlier, I wouldn’t be in this situation, faced with having to kill another of my kind.

Gently, I say, “You don’t need to forgive me, Edith. I don’t expect or deserve it. I killed the man you loved.”

“Love!” she shouts, blinking furious tears. “I still love him and living without him hurts every single day. I just want…”

“You want me to feel the same.”

She nods and pushes herself unsteadily to her feet. “Kill me. I’m ready.”

Even at the end, she has to be in control.

I square my shoulders, shoving my sympathy for her into a box and closing the lid. “You threatened my mate and her child, a grievous crime in our world. For this, and the murder of Greystone Boulder-Wolf and his human companion, Catherine Grant, I sentence you to death.”

“Jury and executioner,” she snaps bitterly, dropping her hand from her neck and allowing the blood to flow freely.

“It’s my job.” But for the first time I’m questioning it. Would we be here in this place if I hadn’t killed her mate? I’m a protector, but I didn’t protect Edie.

I shift to my wolf, my muscles tight, waiting for her to change to her wolf and fight me. She doesn’t. She continues to stare at me, her human eyes reflecting hate, her chin tilted proudly.

I’m sorry, I whisper to my old friend. I jump at her, knocking her over as I tear out her throat. Her body hits the wet pavement.

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