The Alpha King's Princess
The Alpha King’s Princess – Chapter 40

I woke up early, got dressed and packed. With about twenty minutes to spare before I needed to be heading out, I logged into my Moon Shadow laptop to check on the investigation of the murders.

Armageddon had added several files to my research folder including a few other attacks that had resulted in deaths with the same pattern as the others and the case file of Bella’s orchestrated attack. My heart lurched. Did Armageddon know it was me? I had only been offline for a week. That wasn’t unusual.

I opened the note attached.

Unidentified substance used to incapacitate the victim. Tracing origins. Sent to lab under ID# HCAKP-144538966.

I relaxed a bit. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought that it was probably connected. I was glad that Armageddon was seemingly getting involved in this. The lab hadn’t completed its analysis, but the preliminary notes suggested that it was related to the substance found in the b***d on other scenes.

I swallowed thickly. Had Bella known that it was probably lethal? Had it mattered? She had clearly planned for me to come to harm no matter if those men killed me or the spray killed me.

The laptop chimed with the completed results. I opened them. It confirmed that the substance that was used on me was the same as the other investigation. Seeing my b***d decaying so quickly made me shudder. It was a weaker version of the substance, so maybe it wasn’t going to kill me so much as incapacitate me for a long time.

I wonder how long it would have taken for me to recover if Candido hadn’t given me more of his b***d.

The substance was connected to several other cases. I suspected that these cases were the others my attackers mentioned, but among them, four of them stood out to the most.

The victims were still alive. They’d all been abducted and impregnated, but they had little recollection of what had happened to them or who the fathers of those children were. As I traced their records, I found that only one of them had decided to keep the child. She was a minor in a small pack on the edge of the werewolf territory. It was the only territory in that area that hadn’t been attacked.

I took note of it and added questions to the file for Armageddon to consider before moving on. My stomach turned with nausea. Had they planned to do the same to me or had those attackers been independent of the people who attacked those young women?

I sent a message to the lab to run the substance through more tests and urged them to try and figure out where it came from using, where it had been used, and its effects. We didn’t have any one that had infiltrated the vampire ranks, but there had to be some information on the street about the substance. I assigned a team of field operatives were assigned to the task. As soon as I hit send, my alarm went off.

I closed my laptop and hid it back in the headboard before grabbing my bag and heading down. To my surprise, Candido was waiting for me in the car with a gift bag. He offered it to me. The symbol on the bag was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t guess what it could be.

“For luck.”

I smiled and took the bag as I climbed in. “Thank you. Where are you off to?”

“I have a few things to take care of, and since you will be staying at the hotel with the rest of the team, I wanted to see you off.”

I thanked him, gave him a k**s to his cheek and scurried out of the car before he could tease me about the way my heart raced. As I walked into the hotel to check in, I opened the bag and smiled. Inside was a small stuffed, golden wolf with eyes like moonlight. When I was a kid, I’d seen one of these in a toy store window, but I had never been bought a toy. Every day I went to school when I was in the Wolf Fang Pack, I walked past it and asked it to give me luck.

I remembered seeing the store in Candido’s capital and making it a point to walk by it as much as I could. I hadn’t ever planned to buy myself anything from the store, but I always felt better and a bit luckier when I did.

I couldn’t believe Candido had remembered me telling him that. It only felt more special because Candido was a golden wolf. Had he bought me a golden wolf plushie because of his wolf form or because of my story?

“I think I’ll name you King,” I smiled. “What do you think?”

I placed the toy back in the bag as Claire waved me towards the desk. We checked in and headed up to our room. Then, we changed and headed down to meet the rest of the team. They were gathered around the tournament board and our captain let out a deep sigh.

“It’ll be just fine.”

“At least if we lose, we can start our pity party early,” one of the older members said.

I looked up at the board and winced. Our match was the first elimination match.

“I think that’s the campus that Linda was transferred to,” Claire said. “You think she’ll be around?”

I snorted. “Maybe. She’s probably already heard about Bella, so maybe not.”

The captain turned to us and waved us towards the rugby stadium. We went through our warm ups on the other side of the field while the other team did theirs. Several of the men on the team looked over at us and glared.

It only took a little while to realize that they were glaring at me.

“Is that her?” One of them asked. “She looks smaller than I thought she would be.”

Oh, no. It looked like they were fans of Linda’s. Of course, they were. I stretched, listening to figure out if they had any other issues.

“Don’t you think it’s bullshit?” Someone asked. “I mean what does being the alpha king even mean now?”

“It’s just a title. It doesn’t mean anything, but everyone’s scrambling around to obey him.”

“For luck.”

I smiled and took the bag as I climbed in. “Thank you. Where are you off to?”

“You know all those murders that happened in the east? Wonder what he’s doing about that.”

“Nothing. Too busy f*****g a sophomore.”

They laughed. I tried not to stiffen at the thought or turn around to defend Candido. One, it would give away my super hearing, and two, there was no reason to. We weren’t intimate like that, no matter how much I wish that wasn’t true. These guys were all idiots lured in by Linda’s pretty face, and it was better to hear what else they had to say.

Bella’s attack had got me thinking about what the smaller packs really thought of Candido, the Full Moon Pack, and the current system among the packs.

Did everyone think that being the alpha king was just a title? How many issues were humming beneath the surface between smaller packs? Between the mid-level packs? Were they worse than the issues between the big three?

These guys clearly didn’t understand the nature of inter-pack politics, but no one really did if their parents and their pack members were too far down to be involved with any negotiations that extended beyond their borders. As far as I remembered, it wasn’t something that was really taught at the lower level, and even the Academy seemed to skim over what the current system meant for us and how it had come to be.

The only reason I had even a small understanding of how important the Full Moon Pack was to the society was that I had read the Moon Goddess book. Maybe education about Candido’s position and the positions of the packs would go a long way to curbing a bit of the unrest.

Did any of them know that Candido held court and they could request an audience with him to discuss issues? I knew some people tended to do so, but was it widely known knowledge?

The more I listened to them and the conversations happening around me, the more I wondered how many people in our society had issues with the power structure. How many smaller packs got passed over for help because they didn’t rank high enough to their larger neighbors? Why didn’t any of them reach out to Candido?

Did they just assume that he didn’t care because the others didn’t?

I needed to do more research in and out of the field. None of them seemed terribly furious right now, but I knew that a little spark of fury would be all it took for all of this to turn into a much bigger issue. It would be easier to identify the issues of the smaller packs now and get them settled before someone else, like the vampires, offered them a way out that would jeopardize all of us.

My phone chimed with a message from Candido.

Don’t let them push you around on the field. I have a present for you when you win.

I smiled and wondered when Candido could be planning.