The Wolves and the Vipers

Chapter 59 - False Truths

A big shiny gold star if you can work out who Emma is talking to at the end :)

I had a memory stick in my hands, and I was having the time of my life. Taking the lid off. Putting it back on again. Spinning it around on the desk. Anything but watch the computer buffering while it tried to retrieve Jace's search results. We had come to this distant corner of the pack house because it was the office of an accountant who had the software we needed. He had shown Jace how to use it, and then he had been sent on his merry way. We didn't need any extra ears.

Tyler came into the room and shut the door behind him. "Well, I checked. I know you said not to, but I did. They think he'll survive."

Jace gave him the barest of glances. "Fine. I thought he would."

I couldn't tell if he was happy about it or not. It would be simpler in many ways if Bradley had died, but equally, he was good at his job and a fearsome fighter. If he could fall in line — and I suspected he would, after coming so close to death — he could still be useful to the pack.

"You had every right to kill him, Jace," Tyler murmured after a moment's pause. "Why didn't you? Syd Jacobs, I understood. He was your cousin, and his mother still had influence in the pack. But then you kicked him out ... and you haven't done that with Bradley."

"Syd would have tried again, if I had let him stay. Bradley won't," he said, shrugging. "As for why I didn't kill him ... it wasn't a kindness. It was for my own sake. If people are afraid to challenge me openly, they'll do it behind closed doors and in whispers."

"You're so keen to fight to the death?" I asked him, finally setting the memory stick down.

"I'm keen to settle grievances quickly and publicly. That's all."

The computer had finally stopped loading. I swung my chair around to face it properly, and Tyler came to stand beside the pair of us. The list of results was fairly short. Jace had looked for everyone with between nine thousand and ten thousand pounds in easily accessible accounts at the time of the fire. It comprised six names. I only recognised a few of them, but Jace scanned the list in a few heartbeats and shook his head.

"There's only one useful name here. Two of them are elderly women, one was a child at the time... This one here is a widow. The rogues said they were talking to a man, so that rules her out. This man was in his fifties at the time and working in logistics — I doubt he ever met Jaden. So that leaves us with—"

"Greg Pritchard," Tyler murmured. "He had a run-in with Jaden, didn't he? It got physical."

Jace nodded slowly. "Yes, when they were on the same patrol unit. I can't remember how it started, but Greg lost a few teeth. Maybe he was holding a grudge. It must have been about six months before the fire?"

"About six months, yes," Tyler agreed.

"And after six months, he was still angry enough to spend nine thousand pounds to have Jaden murdered?" I demanded. "There must be more to it."

"Agreed," Jace sighed. "We'll talk to him, but there's a lot of missing pieces. As a low-ranking fighter, he wouldn't have had access to our rooms to sabotage the fire alarms. He would, however, have known our schedules that day."

"Hardly anyone would have had access to the rooms," Tyler pointed out, perching himself on the desk. "It's a nice short list. We could find more suspects on it, provided we believe that the fire alarms were sabotaged."

Jace frowned at him. "The list is longer than you might think. Cleaners, guards, ranking pack members, family friends, maintenance staff, Aria's babysitter... Whoever it was, they could have swapped out the batteries months before the fire. No, I think the money is the best lead we have."