Letting Go [complete - expanding chapters during rewrite]

Chapter Twenty

   Mason and I spent hours with each other talking and cuddling.  There was an easiness that was new.  I'd gotten very used to touching him, because of our twice daily massages, but him casually touching me outside of our occasional intimacy was new.  Being new it made me catch my breath.  He smiled every time.
The next morning came and with it we learned that Jessa's dad Mark was the one who'd had her killed. It showed up the recording from that night. The pack had interview coordinators that questioned him after they brought him in at lunch. We watched on a monitor from a room next door.  Inside were Mark, Mark's lawyer a woman, and John the interviewer.
    "Why did you kill your daughter, Mark?" John said.
    "Why would I kill my daughter?" Mark demanded with tears in his eyes.
    "We have evidence that you not only planned for her death, but killed her yourself."
    "You can't have evidence, I wasn't there! What evidence?"
    "You don't need to know what evidence. You just need to know there's proof. Why'd you kill her?"
    It went back and forth like this for hours. They weren't getting anywhere. Finally the Alpha relented and told them to show Mark the tape. He was only using it as a last resort. He wanted to keep it as a slam dunk for the trial, and not give Mark's lawyers too much time to dispute it.
    The tape was in night vision. The camera had been hidden in the trees along the path, high enough up to not be too easily spotted. The view was downward towards the ground. It included audio.
    "Daddy, there you are. Help me carry this stuff." Jessa said.
    "Daughter you failed me. The plan was to get one of your pups to take over the pack as alpha someday, a pure wolf should lead. You buckled under pressure when they confronted you. I told you deny, deny, deny!"
    "Dad, they knew too much. It wasn't going to happen."
    "Your worthless. You've been worthless your whole life."
    In a move so fast I could barely make it out he rips out her throat, then he looks up at the moon savoring the violence, and in the process looks almost directly into the camera. There's no mistaking that it's him.
    I could see in the monitor showing the room a small sly upturn of his mouth. He enjoyed watching that.
    "As you can see, we know you killed your daughter. Why?" John asks.
    "That wasn't me. It looked like me, but I'm sure a lot of people look like me." Mark says back.
    "And are there a lot of people who call Jessa 'Daughter', or that Jessa calls 'Daddy'?"
    "Maybe, I'm not with her all the time. Maybe it's some kind of kink."
    The Alpha lifts a phone on the counter in front of him, and speaks into the earpiece John's wearing. "Come on out. We're not getting anywhere like this."