APEX

Ch. 23: The Natural Order

Rhys

Everyone in my family seemed clueless that their Alpha and Crown's Luna had just participated in some forbidden shenanigans. Zara's murder worked as a sad distraction, the smell of death overwhelming any lingering intermingled scents the two of us might carry.

After calling Dev, I instructed everyone to eat dinner either downstairs or in private, and then accompanied my father to his room.

"Do you want to talk about this?" I asked him. He grabbed the plate of food I'd been holding for him and walked into his ensuite, closing the door in my face without saying a word. I knew what he was thinking, though. This would never have happened with a more competent Alpha heir. If I'd exerted more control over the pack, the murderer wouldn't have dared to kill one of our protected humans. I'd reprimanded myself for this as well. But what could I do now, other than wait until Dev and his team showed up and then work with them to find the guilty party.

Back in my own room, I scarfed down my dinner and then lay on my bed, arms and legs spread wide. This was bad. Just when Calla and I had promised the residents of Sury that this full moon cycle would bring no harm to humans, a human had been harmed. And this time, it was much worse than the previous month. As soon as the press found out about this, Apex would be in some deep shit. In fact, all the packs would be. We had murdered someone, seemingly indiscriminately. It was hard to say how we'd come back from that, but one thing was for sure: the culprit—or culprits—needed to be brought to justice, or most humans would condemn us forever.

As I lay there seething, Dev sent me a text, letting me know he was still over an hour away and to leave the investigating to him. Oh, how well he knew me. I climbed out of bed and headed back downstairs, avoiding looking to where Zara's body still lay.

An hour. That gave me time to take a walk, clear my head.

And possibly figure out who had done this...

One thing I knew to be true: I wouldn't protect the killer, no matter which shifter it turned out to be. That is, if the guilty party even was a shifter.

When Dev arrived, I'd make sure he interviewed each of the human employees. It seemed impossible that none of them had seen or heard anything. Zara hadn't been killed in her bedroom or another private space—it had been right out in the open. Plus, werewolves weren't exactly known for their subtle killing methods. They were loud and messy. Someone would have heard something...unless one of them was the actual murderer, and, like I'd thought previously, they were trying to frame a werewolf.

I'd have to insist to Dev that I sit in on the humans' interviews. Dev was a great detective, but if any of them tried to lie, I'd smell it before he did.

Outside, I contemplated heading down my favorite path—the one I'd taken yesterday. But I couldn't get the details of Zara's murder out of my mind. If the perpetrator wasn't a human, and one of my own truly was guilty, they would have had some way into the house. Crouching next to the front stairs, I used the light from my phone to illuminate the crawl space under the porch. Nothing but spiders and dirt. The foundation of the house, made from stone taken from the mountainside, seemed solid and untouched.

Stretching my legs as I straightened, I headed to the right of the porch, circling the house, looking for any sign of a forced entrance—a broken window, a hole dug under the foundation. Nothing seemed amiss.

That left the most obvious access points, the three doors at ground level—the front door, the back door, which lead to the lower kitchen, and a side door that opened into the hall where my father's study was. Had one of these doors been left unsecured last night? On purpose? By accident? There was no way to tell now.