Betrayal - The Matlock Pack: Book Two

Chapter 3 - Takeshi

Saturday 9 January

~*Takeshi*~

“Hey, Takeshi? Do you know where Auden is?”

I looked up from the paperwork on my desk to see Kennedy leaning against the doorframe, chewing his bottom lip. I put my pen down and leaned back in my chair to take his appearance in. His mop of dark brown hair looked even more unruly than normal, like he’d been running his hands through it all morning, and even though he had always been thin, he appeared to have lost even more weight over the past week.

“Yeah, she’s gone to visit a friend. She’ll be back later this afternoon.” Technically, she’d gone to help Nahi move some things back here, as well as to meet Tuka for the first time. When Nahi had mentioned Auden meeting Tuka the other day, I can’t say that it hadn’t filled me with a tiny bit of anxiety. I trusted her implicitly, like I did Nahi, but there was something about Tuka that just scared the crap out of me.

“Damn. I was hoping to get her to sign off on my medical,” he said. His shoulders slumped slightly as he sighed.

“You had an appointment with her?” I asked, frowning slightly. It wasn’t like Auden to forget her schedule.

“No,” Kennedy admitted, somewhat guiltily. “I was just hoping she could give me a quick sign off.”

I chuckled, immediately relaxing. As we’d expected, the council had bucked against Kennedy and Casey’s appointments as the new Beta and Gamma of the pack. One way we’d tried to appease them was to have both Kennedy and Casey go through a full medical with Auden, in both their human and wolf forms. We had dragged out the process for as long as possible to give Casey enough time to try to detox his system of the alcohol and drugs we all knew were present. Kennedy had gone first to give Casey even more time, but was still eager to get it all over and done with.

“I’m sure she’ll be happy to sign you off when she gets back.” I got up to grab a drink from the wet bar in my office. “You got a sec?”

“I do.” Kennedy stood straighter from the door frame and took a step in but hovered at the threshold.

I glanced up quickly from the drink I was pouring to see where he was and did a double take when I saw him looking a little unsure. “Nothing to worry about, Kennedy. Just wanted to check in.”

He let out a breath of relief and closed the door behind him before coming into the office properly. As he approached the visitors’ chairs, I held up the bottle of alcohol to him. “You want one?”

He shook his head. “Still a bit early for me, Takeshi.”

I shrugged. That just meant more for me. I poured just a dash more into my glass, then stoppered the bottle and returned to my seat.

“How’s life as a Beta been treating you so far, Kennedy?” I swished the golden liquid in my glass before taking a sip.

His shoulders tensed a little. “Not going to lie, Takeshi. It’s more than I expected it to be.”

I let my brows furrow slightly at his words. “It’s early days, you know. Things will get easier with time.”

“Yeah, I know,” he sighed. “Spence left quite a mess though, and it’s taking a fair bit more time than I thought it would to get through everything.”

“Anything I can help you with?” His words didn’t surprise me. I had a sneaking suspicion that we’d find a lot of things that would need unravelling and fixing now that Spence was gone.

“Not unless you can somehow grant me ten more hours in the day.” Kennedy grinned at me as he leaned back in his chair and scratched his chin. “The work is no harder than being Gamma; there’s just more of it to do.”

I let out a huff of amusement and lifted the glass to him before taking another sip. “Totally hear you on that. I sometimes feel like paperwork is all I do.” I put the glass down on the coaster. As I contemplated how to approach what I really needed to ask, I pushed a few pages around absently on my desk. “Have you had a response from James yet to your email?”

Kennedy shuffled a little in his seat. “Not yet, but it’s only been a couple of days. I’m sure he’s trying to figure out how legit it is.”

I tilted my head to the side in acknowledgement. “Let’s hope he falls for it.”

“I don’t like keeping this from Kelly,” Kennedy said, still squirming in his seat. “We don’t keep secrets from each other, and this is a hell of a big one to keep.”

I got up from my seat to lean on the desk next to Kennedy’s seat and crossed my arms. “The fewer people that know about this, the better. I know this is difficult, but I’m hoping that it will not only get you closer to James, but also flush out his sympathisers here in the council.” I patted him on the shoulder. “Kennedy, I trust you. I wouldn’t have appointed you to the Beta role if I didn’t.”

Kennedy took in a deep breath before letting it out slowly. “I know. I totally get it. Just wish we didn’t have to do it this way.” He pressed his thumb and fingers to his forehead to ease the headache he’d no doubt been suffering from since I’d talked to him last Tuesday about what Nat had told Cody, Auden, and I.

I gripped his shoulder in a supportive and sympathetic manner. “So do I, Kennedy. So do I.” I crossed my arms again and watched him carefully, still leaning against the desk. He really wasn’t comfortable doing what I was asking him to do, but such was the role of pack Beta. “Have you made any headway in finding out how someone would hide their diagnostic marking?”

When Nat had recovered her memories, one thing she had told us about was her former alpha being involved in and accommodating forced markings. Diagnostic markings were the duplicate marks left when a wolf tried to ‘cheat the system’ and force a match. They would appear on the upper back of the one doing the forced marking as a way to determine guilt. For James to have been doing this undetected for so long, he would need to have found a way to disguise or remove the diagnostic markings.

Kennedy leaned forward. “I had a thought about that. Would it be possible to hide the marks with a tattoo or scar?” He pulled his collar to the side to show me his mark from Kelly. “All marks have similar characteristics, right? They all have to adhere to a certain size, a certain shape; it’s just the internal design that’s different, isn’t it?”

I thought about it as I looked at his white mark, my fingers absently lifting to press against my own mark that had turned black from the passing of my wife. He had a point. His mark was very similar to mine, even though we had two very different mates. “You’re thinking a tattoo artist could be covering them?”

“Or using scarification to embellish.”

I frowned as I went back to my seat. “You might be onto something.” I opened one of my desk drawers and rifled through the business card holders to find what I was looking for. “I have a contact in the tattoo industry. You want to call him and see if he can make some quiet investigations?” I found the card I was looking for and handed it across to him. “He’s human, but one of ours. You can trust him, but keep the details to a minimum.”

On rare occasions, werewolf parents would have a child without a wolf spirit. In most packs around the world, these children were viewed as less than nothing, a blight on the pack and on the parents, and were either thrown out of their pack or used as slaves.

However, here in Matlock, as well as several other Australian packs, we waited until the child turned seventeen to confirm that they truly didn’t have a wolf, then we put them through highly specialised asset training. They were seen as perfect candidates to be spies or sleeper agents for their own pack and were highly prized.

Usually, we tried to keep their identities secret; sometimes even from their own families when they stubbornly adhered to the old ways. Typically, only the Alpha would know of them, occasionally the Beta. In Matlock, Auden also knew as she was the primary doctor for the pack.

Unlike the rest of the Matlock pack, I suspected Cody knew of the existence of the spies, but not their identities, because of her growing up in the pack house. That kid knew too much at times, but she had a good head on her shoulders and knew when to keep silent.

Amittai, the tattoo industry contact whose business card I was giving to Kennedy, was one such person. He and I had been in the same class growing up, and he had discovered his lack of wolf spirit when he turned seventeen. His parents had thrown him out of home in disgust when they found out, with the then-current Matlock Alpha’s blessing, but my parents had fought the decision and taken him in so he could finish his studies without having to change schools. At the end of high school, he had struck out on his own to become a tattoo artist, but we had kept in contact.

When I had become Alpha, one of the first things I did was change Matlock’s policy on how we dealt with humans born to werewolf parents, because I had seen how much it had hurt Amittai. I had approached him to become one of my assets and used him as one of the trainers for any new humans that were born to werewolf parents. Even though he was human, he’d grown up around werewolves and understood how they operated. After all the s**t his parents and former Alpha had put him through, he was still incredibly loyal to both the pack that raised him and me. I was proud to not only call him a friend, but a pack asset as well.

“There was one more thought I had that I thought I’d run by you,” Kennedy said, scratching his bearded chin again. “The border jumpers…” He trailed off, his brow furrowing. “Do you think they could be sold as well? We assumed they were being killed, but if James already has the network set up, it’d make sense to sell them too, right?”

I raised an eyebrow. “That’s not something I had thought about, I must admit, but it would certainly be better than killing them.” I paused as I thought about what I had just said. “Actually, maybe it wouldn’t be. Maybe they would be better off dead if all that was ahead of them was servitude.” I frowned and sighed. “What a mess…”

“Do you think Nat would have known about the border jumpers?” Kennedy asked, toying with the business card in his hand.

“Nat only told us about the few pack members she’d seen. It wouldn’t be impossible for James to be doing the same thing to the border jumpers, and it would be much easier to keep quiet about them over the pack members, especially if they were kept in the cells.” I rubbed circles into my temples as my headache grew. “If so, then this would be a lot bigger than even Nat knew.”