Page 43 of The Silver Pact
“Ah, good. I’m Detective Angel Montford.”
My stomach turns to ice. “Is she okay-”
“She’s fine. I’ve got her here. But she’s refusing to speak to anyone and won’t come out of the cell. Seemed the best idea to get the pack here. We saw the bonds.”
I snort a hysterical laugh and turn the car around. “Is she okay? Is she hurt?”
“No, she’s not hurt. A little bit upset, but not hurt.” Angel clears his throat. “Please be aware that everyone is on their way.”
“Everyone?”
“Um, most of the packs. Onyx put a call out. It's kinda how we roll now. If one of us asks, we just start jumping.”
I groan. “Fine. See you in a few minutes.”
The drive flies past in a blur, and then I’m inside the station, asking a very annoying, pimple-faced kid for Detective Montford and getting this little shit try to give me the runaround.
Angel opens a door and looks out. “Thought I heard you.”
I huff and give the kid a narrow-eyed warning look before returning my stare to the alpha. “Angel, you look well fed.”
“You calling me fat?” Angel glares.
I side-eye the detective and shrug. “I was being polite with small talk, and I guess I’m not good at it.”
The detective is not fat at all. He’s fit and dangerous looking. If he wasn’t a cop, I might think he was some kind of boxer or fighter.
“Why wasn’t this picked up when Treyfield did their background checks?” I snap as he leads through a heavy metal door and into the back of the station. Cops look up, watching me pass.
“How do you know they did background checks?”
“They do checks on everyone, it's common knowledge,” I snap, impatient with this entire conversation.
Angel rubs his jaw. “The cop who took the original report lost the file. It never went into the system. The only copy was a paper copy, and that vanished a week after she lodged it. I managed to get it out of a retired friend of mine. He told me about a lot of files that had mysteriously never lodged themselves.”
I let out a growl.
“And the other stuff, the whispers on the street, all that?”
“Yeah, well, I did grill Treyfield. He said the PI they hired was sketchy. They had the basic information; that was enough at the time. Treyfield made a decision to fire that particular man a few months later after another issue came up, but no one thought to check. They had Onyx, everyone was happy, and Silver was gone.”
I close my eyes. “It didn’t matter because she was at the refuge learning a lesson, and out of sight, out of mind, right?”
Angel gives a tight nod. “Yeah. Something like that.”
He leads me through a room, and I come to a corridor full of people. Hazel, Onyx, Missy, Scarlet, and Jade stand together, talking.
I shake my head and edge past them. As soon as I get to the cage she’s sitting in, I grip the bars.
“Do you know what this is?” I ask and stroke the bond mark on my chest.
Her eyes jerk open. “Quint?” She starts to shiver violently, and a low whine escapes.
Onyx tries to come towards us back. I glare at her, and she backs off.
“Do you know what this is?” I ask her again in a hard voice.
“It’s a bond mark,” she says in a voice that sounds exhausted and so heavy with grief.