Griffon’s face darkened.
He quickly typed back. [That’s not a funny joke.]
The response was almost immediate. [It is not a joke. I don’t know who you are, but based on the messages I read on here, you don’t sound like a great guy. If you want to find her, you can go to hell, to do it.]
His heart stuttered. No, that wasn’t possible. He opened the door and looked at Andre, who was visibly flustered and upset, a rare occurrence for his a*sistant.
“What happened?” he demanded, the gruffness and worry his wolf was feeling infusing his typically rigid tone, though he managed to keep the rest of his reaction calm.
“Alpha… `Stella just called to tell me that Ms. Palmer pa*sed away at 2:19 p. m. yesterday…”
After Andre finished speaking, he looked up at Griffon.
He didn’t know if Alpha Knight didn’t hear him clearly or if he didn’t care. Why wasn’t he reacting?
After standing awkwardly at the door for a while, Andre said uneasily, “I won’t disturb your rest.”
Andre turned to leave, but a brusque voice came from behind
him.
“Who did you say pa*sed away?”
Andre frowned. He had made it obvious when he spoke.
He turned around to face his Alpha again, speaking slightly slower and carefully.
“Ms. Palmer, Alpha. Taya Palmer.”
Griffon furrowed his eyebrows as if confused. “She’s fine. How could she have pa*used away?”
Andre froze, not sure what to do. He couldn’t speak to his Alpha as if he were feeble-minded, but he wasn’t sure how he could make it even more clear that Taya had indeed died.
“Ms. Palmer was suffering from heart failure.”
The Alpha blinked once, then blinked again…and slammed the door in Andre’s face.
Griffon steadied his hands, grabbed his phone, and dialed a familiar number.
A number he constantly thought about calling but always kept himself from calling.
No. Absolutely not. Taya hadn’t pa*sed away. She was punishing him for what happened at the mall when he’d been forced to
slap her or else show weakness. She was intentionally lying to him, and she’d somehow managed to rope other people into her
ruse.
He just had to hear her voice. Once he heard her speak, he’d be able to calm the nerves going haywire inside his body, and he’d be able to ease his wolf’s deepest fears.
He called her several times, but she didn’t answer. Just as he was about to lose patience, someone finally picked up.
Oh, thank the goddess.
Taya had answered his call. She wasn’t dead. Andre and Stella were lying to him, playing their parts in her game to punish him.
And they would pay dearly for taking part in this whole scheme Taya had gone through so much effort to concoct.
Once his irrational fear was cased, he schooled his voice to remove any unnecessary emotion in it. He was a freaking Alpha, after all.
“Taya,” he said, somewhat gruffly despite his best efforts to sound composed.
Hearing the voice on the other end of the phone, Harper heaved a deep sigh in her heart.
She hadn’t wanted to answer it, but…
There was a folded piece of paper in the drawer where she had found Taya’s letter to her.
This one was to Griffon. It didn’t say much, but it told Harper everything she needed to know what Taya had been thinking and how she felt.
Now, she felt it was her duty to answer the phone and speak to Griffon herself.
After taking a deep breath, Harper managed to speak the awful words out loud. “Taya is gone.”
Griffon had been waiting for Taya’s reply but didn’t hear her voice. Instead, it was an unfamiliar female voice.
Ignoring the sentence, “Taya is gone,” he said in a deep voice, “Tell her to come to the phone and speak with me. Enough of this nonsense.”
“She’s dead. She can’t come to the phone.”
This was the third time today that he had been told Taya was dead. How hateful.
He tightened his grip on his phone. “Who the hell is this?”
“This is Taya’s sister, Harper Duke.”
He knew of Harper and who she was to Taya, but he still did not believe what she said. If anyone was going to help Taya punish him and play along with it, it would be her.
“Ms. Duke, you can tell Taya that I’ll just continue to call until she answers. I’m not going to give up until she stops with this rubbish.”
Harper was so angry that she laughed.
“You think she’s playing a trick on you? Are you out of your mind? Have you forgotten how you, your mate-to-be, and your cousin beat her? She was in the late stages of heart failure, and you inflicted a ma*sive head wound on her. Did you think she would survive that?”
Harper almost roared and shifted into her wolf, the rage, and grief and disbelief was flowing through her so much. In the end, all she could do was choke down her sobs.
When she thought of how Taya had been beaten up before she left the world, she couldn’t handle the despair she felt.
The angry and resentful cries on the other end of the line made Griffon’s chest tighten uncomfortably.
He wanted to control his emotions and his body’s reactions to them, but right now, it was not as easy as it usually was.
The more he tried to control his heart and body’s responses, the more flustered he became. He tried to ignore the panic that was spreading, but his wolf seemed unable to regulate anything right
now.
Clenching his phone, Griffon ground out, “What ma*sive head wound?”
“When Stella arrived at the hospital after you beat her, she had a head wound from hitting the corner of something when she fell. Her health drastically deteriorated after that, and it’s all your doing. How dare you play dumb here? If it weren’t for you, she would still be alive.”
After that, Harper hung up the phone and blocked him.
He looked at the black screen in silence for a few minutes.
Griffon stood before the floor-to-ceiling window, his body starting to shake as his wolf struggled to force his body to shift into his animal form. Griffon was unable to support himself, and he began to go limp as the change took over him.
Griffon held on to the gla*s with one hand to steady himself, trying to hold his wolf back so he wouldn’t give into his primal instincts at this moment, but all he could think of was the scene of Taya lying on the ground in the bathroom at the mall.
Thinking of her lying alone in the bathroom in despair, he couldn’t help but feel…too much.
The sense of guilt that swiftly invaded his heart wrapped tightly around him, making it hard for him to breathe.
It was impossible. Griffon had read Taya’s examination report. Except for a heart attack, there was nothing wrong with her. How could she suddenly have heart failure?