The Wolves and the Vipers

Chapter 68 - Two Can Keep a Secret

"I don't think it's going to be easy," Jace told me.

"What is?" I asked him distractedly. We were walking down to the prison, and I was trying to come up with the best way to tell him what I had discovered before we got there. With Zoe and Ashley at our backs, we had no privacy.

"Working with the rogues," he explained. "Ryan just tried to kill one of them. It's a feud much older than the one with Riverside, and there isn't a man or woman in this pack who hasn't lost something to the rogues. A score of them, Ryan included, have lost loved ones."

"A lot more people will lose loved ones if we don't beat the ferals," I sighed. "They'll just have to get over it for a few weeks."

"If we do beat the ferals," Jace murmured, "then a lot of people are going to lose loved ones anyway, because the ferals are not our enemies. They're our brothers and fathers and sons."

I winced then, because he was so clearly thinking about Luke, and I hadn't been very sensitive. We didn't know if he was part of the army amassing on the other side of the Silverstones, and we didn't know if he had taken part in the attacks on the other packs.

We were both quiet for a while. We had passed through the door to the prison, and I was running out of time. I'd become so caught up in the discussion that I hadn't spoken up yet. The stairs were a lot shorter than I remembered. Down in the gloom, I could already see faces staring out at me from behind the bars.

The old Beta wasn't on this floor. He was being kept separately, two levels down in the most isolated cells of the prison. He had contact with a very limited number of guards and a few books to keep him occupied. I thought perhaps Jace had been hoping to break him with the solitary confinement, to draw out a confession to make the prosecution easier. He hadn't visited since the first interview, and neither had Tyler.

Jace made a beeline for the interrogation room. I followed him inside, watching him set up the chairs in readiness, and I knew I wasn't going to get another chance like this.

"Jace," I said softly. "Before you talk to him, I need to... Um. I have something to say. You're not going to like it very much."

He stopped dead and turned to look at me, one eyebrow raised. If he was expecting me to elaborate, then he would have been disappointed. I was still struggling to find the words and then force my mouth to speak them aloud. When I wasn't forthcoming, Jace crossed to the door and pushed it softly closed, leaving my guards out in the corridor.

"What is it, Emma?" he asked me, much too quietly.

I liked to think we had a good level of trust between us, after everything that had happened. And I knew keeping these thoughts to myself would break that trust. On the other hand, I also knew that sharing them carried a risk of shattering that trust in a way that could never be fixed, depending entirely on how he reacted.

But he needed to know.

Right?

Yes, he needed to know. He would never be content to let the fire remain unsolved. He wouldn't leave it alone until he found the truth. And hell, I didn't know if I was right, did I? I had no proof whatsoever, just a collection of messy assumptions.

So I would tell him. Gently.

"You said that in the months before the fire, Jaden was working on the most dangerous patrol routes," I began hesitantly. "He was sixteen ... so who was giving those orders? Who was putting him in harm's way?"

Jace blinked at me, taken aback. He had been expecting a bombshell, and all he got was a confusing line of questioning. "The ranking pack members set the patrol schedule. And he may have been sixteen, but he had Alpha blood running in his veins. He thrived on those patrol routes."