Page 3 of Cruel Revenge
“Well, with what Davor is doing, we should eventually have the information we need to track down their other locations,” I pointed out, hoping to lift the mood. We’d done another successful raid on the witches.
“They talk about their orders and work in codes, and the more data we have on those codes, the more likely we areto discover who is who and where they all are,” Davor said, nodding. “Just keep collecting these data points for me.”
“It’s a shame our interrogations haven’t worked out.”
“It’s smart of our enemies to pay their people handsomely and tell them nothing,” Hasan said, not showing his frustration, but we could smell it.
I could only nod. None of the dozen witches we arrested today were going to have any pertinent information. They used the codes without knowing the truth behind them. If one of their clients was called Red, they only knew the name Red. They had no idea who the real person was. They didn’t know where other groups were, either, since each of these ground-level resource buildings was coded as well, giving nothing away to outsiders or even others in the organization. It made for a difficult task to even find what we already had, using every shred of knowledge we had to track down even the general areas of these locations. Then we had a small team try to find the witches in the area. Heath, Corissa, and Hasan coordinated with the werewolves on that team until enough information was gathered to do the raid.
Heath was a part of every raid, leading from the front, which meant that was also when I finally joined. He and I promised to fight together after everything that had happened. Neither wanted to get the phone call that something terrible had happened. If misfortune was going to come for us, we were going to be together to face it and dive in headfirst for not just each other, but for every moon cursed who needed us to do it.
Silence descended on us until Davor was finally ready to move everything to a secure location. Without words, we helped him pack and move everything he brought and all the devices that we confiscated. We helped Davor and Hasan take it into the Tribunal offices that Davor was working in, then met the raiding team back outside.
“Time to head home, everyone,” Heath called out, making werewolves snap to action, jumping into the fleet of SUVs we borrowed for the raid. All our gear was already loaded and ready for the drive back to the local werewolf pack. We were in the Rocky Mountain range, the closest pack being in Denver. It was a solid two-hour drive we had to get through.
“Home sounds nice,” I said, smiling as I took Heath’s hand.
2
CHAPTER TWO
While getting back to Denver was a long drive, once we got to the pack house, it was fast getting home. We’d taken a Tribunal door to the pack house, and now we could use it to get home. Heath talked to the Denver Alpha for just a moment, out of earshot of everyone but me, though I was surprised to realize the Denver Alpha, whose name I couldn’t recall, didn’t know this. While they talked, the werewolves turned in all the equipment we borrowed from the pack, making sure everything was accounted for. I was the only one who got to sit down and relax after the raid, a perk of being the only werecat in the building, perhaps the city at all.
“Heath… we just need a little bit of money. We’re not a wealthy pack. I would have better vehicles and gear for everyone if I had some extra funds to spend on them.”
“It can be arranged, but Callahan and Corissa implemented the accounting for those types of gifts and loans. You balked at the idea of that oversight.”
“It’s just foolish. I’ve been an Alpha for a long time and never needed help like this or oversight. Why can’t I just have the trust of the Tribunal, who is supposed to look out for us?”
“Those are just the rules,” Heath said mildly, and I couldn’t smell him. I wasn’t too far away, which meant Heath was keeping how he really felt to himself, letting his relaxed body language and perfect, benign poker face do the talking for him. Anyone who knew Heath knew he was the most dangerous when he seemed the least threatening in these moments. Not everyone knew Heath that well, though. He was certainly very famous, but most people only shook his hand a few times, promised to continue behaving as he entered the Tribunal, and moved on. They didn’tknowHeath Everson the way I did.
“Well… maybe there’s something we could work out,” the Alpha said, clearly not realizing he was dealing with a brick wall of an Alpha.
I knew the truth, which was that Heath didn’t like the werewolf. The reasons why I didn’t know yet, but that was only because we had been too busy in recent days for Heath to explain his distaste for the man.
“Has everything been given back to his second?” I asked Livia nearby, not bothering to try to keep my voice down for the quiet mood that had descended on the werewolves.
“Yeah, everything is accounted for,” Livia replied, looking over her shoulder at me.
“Heath, we’re ready for you to get us out of here,” I called out toward my mate, breaking the Alpha’s train of thought, making him narrow his eyes on me before he could try to offer my fiancé a deal.
“Wonderful. We’ll continue this conversation later, once things have finally settled down with our enemies among the witches.” Heath patted the Alpha on his shoulder once before turning away, firmly dismissing the man. “Everyone gather around,” he said, not raising his voice. Thanks to me, every werewolf was ready to leave, waiting for his call to go.
I ignored the stink eye from the Alpha and left first, entering the pristine, expensive space of the Tribunal, the small world removed from the rest of the world, created by powerful fae magic. It was a place I was growing more familiar with than I ever wanted to, but it wasn’t as uncomfortable as it had been the first time I had seen the space—at my trial, the one that forced Hasan back into the public eye to keep me out of trouble.
And look how far everything has gone since then… It’s like I half live here now, like he does. The only thing stopping some of us from staying is the lack of beds at this point.
There were no bedrooms in the Tribunal unless a room was quickly made into one, thanks to extenuating circumstances. It was always active here, a place that never slept. There were always staff members on duty, dealing with requests, looking into different problems around the supernatural world, and coordinating the Tribunal’s rule over the entire planet. Each Tribunal member brought in their own staff, carefully chosen and paid by them, and then they came together, started a fund that was the Tribunal’s as a collective, and paid staff through it as well, runners who worked for all of them. It was a complicated system that was only replicated once with the Market, the fae black market that became an everyday fact of life for all other supernaturals, which was the reason it couldn’t be shut down, no matter what the fae royals wanted.
It was a well-oiled machine, yet it was also bogged down by silly idiosyncrasies and bureaucracy, like every government. Here, policy could be decided by a few shared glances between the immortals who have known each other for hundreds, or even thousands, of years. Or an entire war could be fought and decided before anyone summoned an army. On the other end, there were cases of things taking months or even years to move into the next stage or make any progress because whena supernatural ruled the world, no one could stop them from being petty.
It made sense to me that Hasan spent most of his waking hours here, dealing with the endlessness of it all, constant emergencies coming up that required his input, things he never spoke of to the family unless it impacted them directly.
Once inside, I left behind the werewolves, planning to meet with Heath later. I went straight to Hasan’s office, hoping to use it.
“Hey, can I get a door to check on my siblings before I head home?” I asked as I walked into the office, completely ignoring whatever he had been doing.
“I am in the middle of a conversation,” he said very carefully.
