To heal a Rogue
Chapter 36: The fall guys

Chapter 36: The fall guys

JOHANN

My phone glowed on the small table beside me while I stood on the verandah, watching the slow procession of dark vehicles as they crawled through the front gates below. Every car seemed to spill out another Alpha or Luna, each dressed in mourning black, the fabric of their coats and dresses heavy with tradition and expectation. The elders moved among them like living shadows, sweeping in to greet the arrivals with a choreography so seamless, so practiced, that I could almost believe they had been born for this precise moment and would step into a hundred more just like it before they finally faded from memory.

I glanced down at the sharp intrusion of light. My mother’s name filled the screen, a name that always carried weight, especially now. I answered on the second ring, my voice carefully measured while I kept my eyes on the endless stream of black-clad guests below.

She wasted no time on greetings, as if affection were a luxury we could no longer afford. Her voice sounded thinner than it had even that morning, a stretched thread on the brink of snapping. "I sent the number. Tell them you’re calling from me," she instructed, her words clipped and brittle. "Order them accordingly. They won’t listen otherwise, not after what happened."

"Understood," I replied, though she had already hung up before the last syllable left my mouth. The silence that followed was absolute. For a moment, I lingered in it, letting the enormity of her request settle over my shoulders before I stepped back inside, away from the eyes of guests and the scrutiny of elders. I unlocked the bottom drawer of my desk, retrieving the second phone—the one that never left this room and existed solely for conversations that could not be traced to daylight.

I unlocked the second phone and opened the message my mother had sent only minutes earlier. The number sat there on the screen without explanation, as though the digits themselves were enough to tell me what kind of conversation awaited on the other end. I keyed it into the dial pad carefully, checking each number once before pressing call.

The line rang only once.

The voice that answered was thin, trembling on the verge of fear, the sound of a man who knew exactly what kind of call he was receiving and had been dreading it from the moment that number had been passed along.

"Hello?" he managed, his voice pitched high and brittle.

"Am I speaking to the rogue who attacked the Alpha King," I asked, my own tone flat and cold, "and succeeded in killing him?"

There was a pause, a brief flutter of panic, and then, "I don’t know what this is about."

I let the silence spool out, heavy and deliberate, the sort of pause that makes a man sweat. When I finally spoke, I gave him the only truth that mattered. "Edelina gave me this line," I said, letting her name fall like a stone into water.

His breathing changed at once, quickening, the fear sharpening into something closer to greed.

"When do we get the gift of the Lycan bite?" His voice shifted abruptly, eagerness overtaking caution, the promise of power transforming his fear into something sharper and more desperate. The hunger in his tone unsettled me, a feral edge that belonged to men who had learned to want with their whole bodies. Despite the rising tension, I kept my response measured, letting no hint of revulsion slip into my words.

"Not now," I replied. "Because your assassination, frankly, was one of the most poorly executed in recent memory. You can forget Luna Edelina’s promise for the foreseeable future. Not until you do something for me."

A beat of silence stretched between us, brittle and charged. The man bristled, his composure slipping. "Do not think you can play us," he snapped, his voice rising in pitch. "We risked everything for this."

"You were supposed to be the fall guys," I said, my tone turning clinical. "Why did you run?"

They did not answer. So I went on.

"The cause," I droned on, and the reverence with which I spoke the word made it sound like a prayer—or maybe a curse. "The rogue network was supposed to get the bite for every man, not just the few of us. Were you and your accomplice too afraid to die for something bigger than yourselves?"

"Of course not!" He slammed back.

I nearly laughed at how quickly his bravado replaced the fear I had sensed earlier, pride swelling to fill the cracks in his courage.

"We aren’t cowards," he insisted, the words tumbling over themselves in their haste. "A man interfered. But we still succeeded, and we made sure everybody got what they wanted. The dead man is more than enough of a scapegoat to be used. So what would be the need for us to die?"

This time, I did laugh—a sound sharp and cold that cut through the pretense. "Like I said. Sloppy." I let the word settle before continuing. "The boy is not dead."

A pause was longer this time, then a note of genuine confusion crept into his voice, bleeding through the bravado he’d been clinging to. "That is not possible. We put three bullets in that classless dog. Those were special rounds. They took down the Alpha King without effort. How could that retainer still be alive?"

"The man," I said, slow and precise, "is actually a woman. And you are either mistaken, or you are lying to me now—badly, I might add—because from where I stand, it appears you did nothing more than knock her unconscious and then left your weapon conveniently within her reach." I let the accusation linger, the silence on the other end growing dense with uncertainty. "Let us be honest. The girl is unhurt. Perfectly fine, in fact."

He bristled, denial flaring. "No. We shot her. Why would we lie about that? Three bullets. I wanted him... I mean... well.. if you say it’s her... I wanted her dead, and she should have been dead before we left that room."

For a moment, I simply sat with his words, letting them drift through the empty space between us while I turned over every detail, searching for the shape of the truth beneath his wounded ego and the tangled motives behind his story. Something was not adding up, and the puzzle of it intrigued me, a thorn in the back of my mind that refused to be ignored. Interesting.

"Regardless," I said, my voice low and measured, "she will most likely expose you both eventually, and with enough time, this entire arrangement unravels around us all. So let us dispense with the idea of self-preservation for now. One of you has to die tonight. The one with the scar at the mouth, preferably. Because she recognized him, saw his face in the light. Is that you?"