Chapter 103: RHETT’S FAMILY
DANE’S POV
The prison was quiet at seven.
I had finished the evening patrol handover and had two hours before the next rotation check and nothing useful to do with them so I went to the dungeon.
The guard let me in without a word.
Rhett was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and his broken hand resting on his knee and he looked up when he heard the door and then looked away again when he saw it was me.
"Don’t." He said.
"Don’t what?" I asked.
"Whatever you came to say." He said. "I’ve heard it."
I pulled the guard’s chair over and sat outside the cell and looked at him through the bars. "You collapsed." I said. "On purpose."
He said nothing.
"To get yourself into the clinic." I continued. "So she could get a message to you without it looking like a prison visit."
He kept his eyes on the wall.
"Was it worth it?" I asked. "Whatever she told you. Whatever she promised. Was it worth almost dying for?"
"I didn’t almost die." He grit out.
"The doctor said you didn’t take enough." I said. "Not that you didn’t take anything."
He shifted slightly. "I calculated it to be enough."
"You calculated it." I tilted my head. "Interesting."
"I’m not stupid." He said.
"You’re in a prison cell with a broken hand working for someone who used your seventeen year old sister as collateral." I said. "I’d argue the calculation was off somewhere."
Something moved through his face. He pressed his lips together and looked at the floor.
"She thinks you sold her out." I told him.
He looked up fast. "I didn’t—"
"I know you didn’t." I said. "But she doesn’t know that. What she knows is that Callum told her things that only you could have told him." I paused. "So whatever she said to you through that door yesterday, whatever promise she made about your family, I’d think carefully about how much it’s worth coming from someone who currently believes you betrayed her."
His jaw tightened.
"She’s not going to protect them." I said. "She has no reason to. Not anymore."
"She wouldn’t." He shook his head. "She knows I didn’t say anything. She knows her own people well enough to know who actually—"
"Rhett." I said. "She stood in that corridor and she saw my Alpha’s face when he told her what we knew and she panicked and she cursed your name out loud." I held his gaze. "I was there."
He stared at me.
I stood up. "Your testimony isn’t even useful to us anymore." I said. "We have what we need. You can sit here and protect someone who’s already decided you failed her or you can—" I stopped. "Actually. Doesn’t matter."
I pushed the chair back and walked toward the door.
"My sister." He spoke up behind me. "She goes to school on the east side. She walks home alone on Fridays."
I stopped walking.
"Blythe." He said. "She leaves at four. Takes the long way because there’s a bakery she likes on the corner." His voice had gone flat and careful, the voice of someone reciting information they had memorized. "If anything happened to her—"
My phone beeped and I looked at it.
The camera I had set up near his family’s house. Motion triggered, set to flag anything unusual — more than one person approaching the door, anyone with a visible weapon, any movement after nine at night.
It was flagging now.
I looked at the screen.
Three men at the door of the house with dark clothes. One of them had something at his hip that wasn’t a phone.
"Dane?" Rhett whispered because had seen my face. "What—"
I was already moving out of the dungeon, through the corridor, into the night air and to my car in under two minutes and I was pulling out of the estate before the gate had fully opened and driving fast with the camera feed open on my phone propped against the dashboard showing me three men and a door and a light on in the upstairs window that meant someone was home.
Blythe.
The older brother Corran was on a night shift at his pack. The parents were away visiting family two towns over. Rhett had told us that, two days ago, without knowing why we were asking.
Which meant she was alone.
I drove faster.
The house was twenty minutes out. I made it in twelve and pulled up with my headlights off and got out and moved toward the house.
The three men were still at the door, one of them working on the lock with something, and I came at them from the side before any of them heard me.
The first one went down before he could turn around.
The second one was faster — had time to face me, had time to take a swing — and I took it on my forearm and hit him back twice before he went into the wall of the house and stayed there. The third one ran and I let him go because the lock was already half open and I needed to get to the door.
I knocked. "Blythe." I said loud enough to be heard through the door. "My name is Dane Wolfe. I’m the Beta of Ashveil Pack. Your brother Rhett is in our custody and I’m here to help you. Open the door."
Silence.
"Blythe." I said again. "There were three men trying to get into your house. Two of them are on the ground outside right now. I’m not going to hurt you. Open the door."
A long pause.
Then the click of a lock.
The door opened and she was standing there with a kitchen knife in both hands and her hair down.
I held both hands up.
She looked at me, then looked at the two men on the ground behind me.
"Where’s my brother?" She asked.
"Safe." I said. "I promise you he’s safe." I pulled out my phone and called Callum. "I need guards at this address. Now." I gave him the street. "And bring a car."
He arrived with four guards twenty minutes later and looked at the two men still on the ground and then at the girl standing in the doorway still holding the kitchen knife and then at me.
"Is she alright?" He asked quietly.
"Shaken." I said. "Not hurt."
We took her back to the estate.
Callum put her in the guest wing with two guards on the door and then came to find me and we stood in the corridor outside and he looked at me and I looked at him.
"Vanessa." I said.
"Yes." He said.
"She made the call the same night she got the message through the clinic door." I said. "She decided Rhett had failed her and she moved on his family within twenty four hours."
"Let’s go show him." Callum said.
Rhett watched the camera footage on Callum’s phone in silence. He watched all of it — the three men at the door, the lock pick, Blythe with the knife — and by the end his hands were shaking and not from the broken one.
"She’s safe." Callum said. "She’s here. Tonight she’s safe."
Rhett pressed both hands over his face.
"I need you to talk to me." Callum said. "Whatever you know. Whatever they told you. All of it."
Rhett dropped his hands. Looked at Callum. Then started talking.
He talked for forty minutes. The whole of it — how he had been recruited, what he had been paid, what he had been told to do and not do and never ask about. Some elders.
And then he said— "But none of them are running it."
Callum looked at him. "What do you mean?"
"I mean they answer to someone." Rhett said. "Someone I never met. Never saw. I only know that every decision Vanessa made, she cleared with someone above her first." He looked at Callum. "Someone who knew about your pack before any of this started. Someone who’s been planning it for a long time."