“He knew about the passageways in the halls,” Timur pointed out.
“What about Ambroise?” Fyodor asked. “Is he dangerous? Can he handle weapons?”
Drake shrugged when they all looked to him. The Tregres were from his lair and he was a man who kept close eyes on those under him. “Every Tregre can handle a weapon, including Evangeline. It’s necessary. They hunted their own food. If they didn’t go home with something, they didn’t eat. I’d bet he can handle himself, but he just doesn’t seem to be the kind of man who would plot to kill his sister and her husband.”
“Which leads us back to that damn perfume factory and Charisse and Armande,” Timur said. “We can’t seem to get away from it.”
Timur swept a hand through his hair, pushing the strands that had tumbled onto his forehead back. His hair was still wet from his shower. His gut was still in knots from having to interrogate and then kill a leopard. He made his way to the buffet and took another bottle of water from the ice bucket.
“Lazar sent the first hit team after Ashe. They had specific orders. Apparently, her grandfather made Lazar, very, very angry. Our good friend Ulisse has a nice little side business with Lazar. They trade young girls back and forth. Ulisse sends them out of the country to Lazar, and Lazar returns the favor, sending girls from our homeland to Ulisse.”
“Leopards?” Fyodor demanded sharply. “Ulisse isn’t leopard.”
“Not leopards. We have too few now for Lazar to use them that way. He gets young leopard girls from their fathers and sells them as he did Ashe’s mother, for temporary use only. They are very young, from ten to fifteen. He doesn’t like to let go of them any older than that because they might go into a heat cycle. He learned from the loss of Ashe’s mother that he couldn’t risk the girls being too old. No, the ones he sells or trades to Ulisse are wholly human.”
“Ulisse betrayed us,” Fyodor said. “He sat at my table and ate my food with my wife sitting opposite him, and all the time he plotted our betrayal.”
“According to young Gavyn, that’s exactly what happened,” Timur confirmed.
Fyodor stood up, with a surge of flowing power. He stalked across the room, turned, and looked at his brother, sheer ice in his gaze. “I want him here if possible, Timur. I would like to talk to him myself.”
Timur was silent. His gut tensed and then tied into a hundred tight knots. “Fyodor.” Just his brother’s name. He understood the need for vengeance. Ulisse was supposed to be an ally, not an enemy. They invited few people to their table, but Drake had decided to try to include him in their ring of power. It had been a mistake, one of many Timur knew would be made.
“When we agreed to take down organized crime,” Elijah said carefully, “we talked only of leopards. Going after humans increases our danger tenfold. More. We can’t take down everyone. Eli knows that.”
Eli had been a DEA agent for years. He was also leopard, but as an agent he hadn’t discriminated between leopard and human. Leopards couldn’t go to jail and had to be destroyed, and he couldn’t ever be caught doing that. He’d joined with Drake and Jake in their war against the shifters who used their abilities for criminal activity.
Fyodor shrugged. “If you want to give Ulisse a pass, that’s up to you. This man betrayed me and my wife and family to our greatest enemy. He is involved in human trafficking, which we all agreed we wouldn’t tolerate. Still, I will accept your decision.”
Like hell he would. Timur knew better. The softer Fyodor’s voice, the milder he sounded, the more pissed off he was, and he would definitely go after Ulisse.
“Don’t be an ass, Fyodor,” Elijah snapped. “No one is going to let that man go free. We’ll take him down. We just need to be a little cautious.”
“Why?” Timur asked.
There was silence and all of the heads of territories looked at him. Drake’s eyebrow shot up. “Why what, Timur?”
“Why do we need to be cautious? This man betrayed us. Every crime boss in the States has the right to go after another one who betrayed them. I say we take him out fast and hard and let the others know what we did and why we did it. We treat it as two separate issues. I know he’s in deep with the perfume factory and the opium, I got that information from interrogating the hit man and believe me, by that time he was telling me the truth without hesitating.”
Timur moved farther into the room, right into the middle of the men he considered to be powerful. “Ulisse is part of whatever this is against Fyodor and me. The Tregres want Evangeline’s bakery to widen their distribution of opium. Ulisse gave us up to Lazar in order to incur his favor. If Lazar wants something, what does he do?” He turned to his cousin. “What does he do, Mitya?”