Fallen (BoyxBoy)

Chapter 17 - An Old Enemy

*****

"It's literally an exact copy of ours. Down to the chip, everything is the same, they have been using the suppliers we have," Ricky said. He was one of the heads of engineering, the best one we had and because we needed someone to have a look at the product quickly, we asked him to do it. He had taken apart the tracker Kraton released to examine it.

The three of us had been working for the past sixteen hours, everyone else had left a while ago to return home but we insisted on looking into everything further to try and solve issues as fast as possible.

"It's not anyone on the floor of the manufacturing or design teams because they would not have had details on supply or marketing. Vise-versa, it can't be anyone in lower-level marketing. Lots of the managers were kept in the dark too," Zev muttered, "so that leaves us with..."

My eyes shifted to the laptop as a message from Zev popped up. I clicked on it and read the list of fifteen names. It was everyone that had been in our top-level, secured meetings. Including me, him, Lyall and Ricky. Everyone was very important in our pack, half of them Deltas. All were very trusted and thought to be reliable.

"Disappointing." Someone on the list was going to have to leave the pack. "At least this narrows it down," I said.

"How are we doing on course-of-action?"

"It seems the best of the worst is if we try to get Kraton to buy from us. Anything else and we're losing much more." I clenched my jaw as Zev sighed. There was no way for us to win in the situation.

Kraton was owned by the Legacy pack. Lawrence was their Alpha.

We were not on good terms with Legacy at all, had not been for about fifty years. Years ago, when I was eight, tensions mounted and erupted in the war that resulted in the loss of most of my pack members including my father and my deal with the witch. They had lost fewer people, but it was devastating on both sides. Legacy's Alpha had been killed too, but my mother decided we should let the young Alpha live. She sympathised because he and I were the same age.

Our packs were worse after that war, before there had been hostile communication but afterwards, Legacy and Tala made no effort to even acknowledge the existence of the other pack. I guess Lawrence still held a grudge. I would be lying if I claimed not to have any animosity or resentment towards that pack, but my pack tended to keep away in order to prevent any more trouble.

"You're going to have to be nice, Kendrick," Zev said.

"But they stole our entire product, they're trying to sink our company. Why should we be nice?" Ricky asked.

"So we can get the stock we have off of our hands, cut our losses. We can think of retaliating afterwards," I replied. My eyes shifted to the tech that lay on the table in pieces in front of Ricky, an assembled version belonging to us was right beside it. "You know, we have one more option, less legal than the others: Distribute all of our stock in an underground market. It'll undercut their sales as well."

"Too risky." Right, we did not want to jeopardize our legal business by mixing into that.

"I know. We also need to shift the stores that preordered over to Kraton. We have no choice but to convince them to work with us right now." Sucking up to Lawrence for a moment seemed like a better deal than having to cancel all the orders and possibly lose thousands of loyal store partners by being unable to deliver the product we had promised.

I shoved out of the seat grabbing my car keys and Zev looked up surprised.

"Where are you going?"

"To see him."