Alone • Liam Dunbar

Seven

Since Scott and Stiles unknowingly interrupted my dinner earlier, I was adamant with them about going to eat somewhere tonight. I didn't care where, I only wanted to guzzle down anything that was edible and tasted faintly of high cholesterol. They agreed, but it was contingent that I pay. Though, it's not like that was a new concept for us anyway.

We lingered around the station for a short period of time after the sheriff left, only to assure that he wouldn't double back and attempt to ditch his date. Once we were sure that wasn't a possibility, we headed out, climbing back into Stiles' Jeep. 

I sit semi-patiently in the backseat for him to start up the car and take us away from here, but he doesn't. His focus is on his phone that he'd left here while we went into the station, the device sitting in the cup holder of his middle console.

"You alright?" Scott asks him, voicing my own curiosity that breaks the silence.

Stiles was fairly easy to read, always having clear indicators for his emotions. When he was happy, his movements always resembled that of a hyperactive squirrel. When angry, he'd have deep frowns and balled-up fists. If he was scared, his eyes would always flutter as he tried to bite back tears.

His anxiety was his most obvious trait of all because it made his entire body turn to stone.

"Yeah," Stiles replies with a blank face.

Sitting behind him allowed me to see the tightness in his shoulders and the ironclad grip he had on the keys in his hand. Scott and I give each other a subtle side-eye, both aware that Stiles was not actually alright.

"It's anxiety," he sighs, making us look back at him.

"What is?" Scott says in an attempt to play off the fact that he was already aware of whatever level Stiles' emotions were on.

"The chemo-signals? Oh, I'm well aware of how you all monitor my emotional state," Stiles emphasized his words with pointed looks at each of us.

I wasn't a werewolf, but he was smart enough to piece together I had contributed to the plan of tracking his well-being. He was also smart enough to know after his recent scheming attitude toward Theo, that we would definitely be talking about him behind his back. At least for his sake, all conversations were done out of love.

"We're just worried about you, Stiles," I explain to him, Scott nodding along.

"What's going on?" I ask, wondering what was making him so uneasy.

Stiles is quiet, as if debating with himself whether or not to answer genuinely. He decides to eventually, grabbing his phone to swipe his fingers across the screen, pulling something up as he speaks.

"You know how you asked Braeden to help look into the Desert Wolf for us?" he directs his question to me, and I give him a simple nod in return.

Mercenaries gathered information for hunters all the time.

Over the years I'd gone to Braeden on multiple occasions, paying her to do something as simple as a background check, to tracking down the location of someone I was hunting. Her position as an ex-marshal gave her plenty of connections, and well, she was also just great at her job, especially when the pay was good.

When Malia came to us, expressing interest in discovering who her mother was, I sought out Braeden. That's when she revealed she was already acquainted with Malia's mother, the two of them having a score to settle that went back to a time when Braeden still wore a badge instead of a leather jacket. She waived her fee, offering to help us purely on the condition of finally finding the Desert Wolf.

"She sent me this a few hours ago." 

Stiles holds up his phone, revealing a gruesome image of a pile of bodies, all of them having deep gash wounds from claws that resulted in their deaths.