“Try to buy you?” Chapel suggested, taking a long pull from her own drink. “Or stab someone?”
Sammy chewed his lip. “Both.”
“When a guy like that wants to own someone, it’s not usually a momentary lapse of judgement. It’s a pattern of behavior.”
“He was quick to resort to influence and manipulation when he didn’t get his way,” Dominic added. “Which tells me he was comfortable using his abilities against people.”
As further proof, when he had been flipping through Kiev’s memories, he’d seen himpersuadinganother host to follow a middle-aged businessman back to his hotel room. Sammy didn’t need to know that.
Kiev couldn’t control people’s minds or force them to do something they didn’t want to do. Instead, he used his innate magic to alter their emotional state—dampen their anxiety, boost their confidence, lower their inhibitions—to lull them into compliance.
While morally reprehensible, he hadn’t done anything illegal, neither by human nor paranormal laws. As such, the only recourse available was to strip his powers or bury him.
Dominic had considered the less extreme option…until the fucker had stabbed him.
Despite the whispers about them, the pack didn’t go around indiscriminately offing people. At the same time, they didn’t exactly discourage those rumors either.
Sammy shook his head and sighed. “I feel so stupid.”
“Because you care,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “Wanting to see the good in people isn’t a bad thing.” Just not a very realistic one, in his opinion. “He doesn’t deserve it, though. He never did.”
Sammy was quiet for a moment, seemingly lost in thought, but eventually, he bobbed his head. “You’re right.”
“There’s one thing I don’t get,” Chapel interjected. “Why did he call Sammy and warn him?”
“Spite.” He’d felt more than seen it in the siren’s memories. “Valerie wouldn’t give him what he wanted, and it was the only way he could get back at her.”
“That doesn’t help us find her, though,” Sammy muttered.
Dominic tightened his arm in comfort, pulling him closer. “We’ll find her. I promise.”
And he wasn’t in the habit of making promises he couldn’t keep.
“I know.” Sammy tilted his head back, looking up at him with a soft smile. “I trust you.”
The need to caution him, to remind him he shouldn’t hand out something as precious as trust so easily, played on the tip of his tongue, but he bit the words back. His mate didn’t need a lecture. He needed someone he could count on.
“Well, you two are revolting.” Chapel laughed and jerked a thumb to the side. “I’m going over there in case it’s contagious.”
“Coward!” Sammy called after her, laughing when she flipped him the bird over her shoulder.
“What did I tell you about encouraging her?”
That only made him laugh harder, and Dominic couldn’t help but chuckle as well.
“There are so many people,” Sammy commented a little while later. “How big is your pack?”
“Including partners and children, one hundred and seventeen.”
“Wow,” he breathed. “That sounds impressive, but then again, I don’t have anything to compare it to. I don’t know of any other werewolf packs.”
“Blackrock is one of the larger ones,” he confirmed. “But I’m not surprised you haven’t met others. It’s a fairly new concept.”
The idea of werewolf and shifter packs with rigid hierarchies was largely an invention of books and movies. Most groups were simply family units, with some of the larger ones consisting of two or even three generations.
Of course, exceptions existed, but it wasn’t until the last fifteen or twenty years that the formation of organized packs had really started to spread. Now, they cropped up in every major city across the world and had been slowly creeping into the suburbs and even some rural communities.
Blackrock was unique in many ways, but it had come about largely by accident. Loners, outcasts, freaks, and weirdos who had nowhere else to go and had come together to create their own family.