Dangerous Territory

Twenty One

They were walking down the empty hallway, the sounds of their feet against the scuffed flooring echoing loudly, when Blake spoke. The smile on the lady's face hadn't disappeared since Mala told her Jon's sappy message.

The message had almost been too sappy to repeat but she'd pressed through for the sake of love.

"So, Auden huh?"

Mala's eyes snapped to her, from the hall in front, and she involuntarily tightened her grip on her arm, "sorry?"

Blake shook her head, "you stink of him."

"I've been escorting him to Zoe's sessions too." She explained, wondering what was going through Blake's head when she made the statement.

"No, you stink like you've been rolling around in his bed." Blake pursed her lips, lapsing back into silence for a few seconds before exhaling like she couldn't hold the words in, "I know things about him."

Mala swallowed, pursing her lips as distrust hit her. "Like what?"

"Like his parents for one."

"You know about Wellington?"

"I know all about Wellington." Her eyes bore into the side of Mala's head. "How Auden's human mum used to be married to him until her mate found her and she left the old man. You know, he never came to terms with it. Even now, it fuels his hate of shifters."

Mala had had her suspicions but didn't known what to do with them.

The name link from Wellington to Auden had been too much for her brain to process at the time so she'd shoved it into a corner, unwilling to look too far into it before she knew how she was going to deal with the information.

As she had thought to herself before: what were the odds that Auden would end up in Wellington's penitentiary of all possible prisons?

"How do you know all that?" She slowed down the pace the two of them were walking at, stalling so that they had more time until they reached Zoe's office.

Blake stiffened, back straightening perceptibly. "Smell me."

"What? Why?"

"Just do it and you'll see."

With a reluctant sigh, she leaned forward and took a deliberate sniff, moving past the layers of scents above and searching through the winding coils of DNA to figure out what Blake wanted her to find.

There was the usual.

Detergent, medicine, a sickly twang.

Then shifter, blades of grass, tree bark.

She frowned.

Rainfall, wet dirt...

Now that she could smell that familiar note in the girl's scent, she couldn't stop smelling it.

"You're Auden's sister?"

"Even better." Blake smiled, "I'm his twin."

Scents were distinctive, even in twins. Identical twins obviously had a stronger link between their scents, fraternal twins not as much. Mala wouldn't have caught that particular link if she hadn't been searching for it, so boy, was she shocked.

The two looked nothing alike.

She would have never guessed that Auden had a twin. None of the articles she'd found had ever pointed to the fact that anyone else had survived.

They were fast approaching the room, the time for talking running out.

However, Blake wasn't done speaking, her voice lowering a notch. "As I told you before, I'm innocent. Auden is innocent too but he doesn't know it. Smelling like that, I know you're his mate so you'd probably want to know."