Page 17 of Villainous Mind

“What happened?” I asked.

His jaw clenched tightly, and his brows turned down as he stood up, wiping his hands on his shorts. “Thank you,” he said to the couple. “If you follow this trail south, it will take you back to the coastal path. You must have gotten off track.”

“A’r bwystfil?” the man asked, then looked at me, realizing I didn’t speak Welsh. “What happened?”

Rhys shook his head. “Sa i’n gwybod.”

The man took his wife’s hand, and they walked off.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,” Rhys said coarsely. “Look, you need to go. Your purse and keys are in the kitchen, and your car is under a tarp behind the main house.”

“That’s it?” I said.

“That’s it,” he answered. “Go back to London, and don’t ever come back here, Navy.”

I turned to leave, following the path back out to the main trail, my mind wrestling with the image of the mutilated animal and what had just happened between myself and Rhys. There was something not right here. Something was definitely wrong. So, I did the only thing I could think of.

I ran.

ChapterSix

RHYS

“The purebred bull had been drained of all its blood, and its genitalia had been cut off,” I said to the men around the table as they passed around the eerie photograph of the deflated cow. “No tracks leading to or from the animal could be found, no buzzards or other scavengers. It wasn’t shot, there were no lacerations or puncture wounds, not one drop of blood could be found.”

“It is suspicious,” Keir Wilson agreed. When I told him of the incident, he had called a meeting of the Circle of Kings at his office in London.

“Suspicious?” I stood up. “It’s more than suspicious. The animal was worth five thousand pounds. Stolen from a neighboring farm and killed on my property. It was a message.”

“You think it was the Dearg Due,” Aidan O’Donnell said. “The one that killed Sir Leonard?”

“Of course it was.” I put both hands on the table, leaning forward. “Enough with laying low. We need to be actively hunting her.”

“Sit down,” Keir said, running a finger along the bridge of his nose. “The Circle is not prepared for that. We are still down a man and need to replace Sir Leonard. If you are suggesting we wage war with an entity we don’t even fully understand, you are a bigger fool than I thought.”

“I mean no offense, but you are the fool. First the Patels, then Sir Leonard, and now this beast. Who is going to be next?”

“Who all knows about the animal?” Keir asked. “Were the police involved?”

“No.” I shook my head. “It was found by an elderly couple walking the coastal path. I sent them on their way and disposed of the carcass myself.”

“No one else?”

“A girl.”

“A girl?” Aidan questioned with a cocked brow.

“A journalist inquiring about the missing girls, but she won’t say anything.”

“Bloody hell.” Keir rubbed his forehead. “I told you to lay low, and you’re entertaining a journalist at your home.”

“I wasn’t entertaining her. I was detaining her. She was looking for information on a possible connection to the girls and a secret society.”

“That sounds like kidnapping,” Keir said.

“That’s rich coming from the man who forced a girl to marry him so he could be Grand Master.”