IVAN POV
“Okay, Owain, what do you have for me?” I asked grimly as I sat opposite the police chief. “What are we going to do next? Because fucking Brady Clover is still out there.”
I was supposed to be with Miranda right now, picking Cole up from the hospital, but a call from Owain brought me here instead, so I was hoping we finally had some news on this asshole. It fucking killed me that he was still out there somewhere, doing whatever the hell he wanted to whoever the hell he wanted. Not good since he was a psychopath.
The only good thing was that it seemed Owain was finally focused on the right lead. He had exhausted all others, so there was only one way to go.
“So, I followed your advice,” Owain replied, “and I looked into the military angle. You were right, Brady did have a short career there, so I dug deeper.”
“I thought as much.” Miranda hadn’t said it outright, but I got the impression from some of her stories that her ex-fiancé had once been in the military.
“He was honorably discharged under some strange circumstances, but I have found out what.” He paused for dramatic effect, with me staring at him like he had lost his damn mind. This was not the time for theatrics. “He showed too much prejudice against the shifter members of his team, to the point where he was harassing them and making their lives a living hell.”
I sucked in a sharp breath. I wasn’t expecting this at all. “Whoa, that’s… that crazy. Where the hell did that come from?”
“His family,” Owain replied grimly. “His very human family. Pure blood, they call themselves. Generations of racists against the shifters. They are part of that old fashioned thinking which believes ‘animals’ shouldn’t be allowed to mix with humans.”
My stomach churned. To think that anyone still thought like this was sickening. It happened, but I was sure I wasn’t the only shifter who didn’t want to acknowledge the existence of this blind, pointless hatred.
“So, Brady grew up with those beliefs then?” I asked, knowing that definitely didn’t excuse it, but it would help me to understand a little bit.
“He did. In a wealthy, powerful human family so he was always allowed to do whatever he wanted, especially when it came to these sick, twisted beliefs.”
“Oh no,” I groaned. “What the hell does that mean?”
“In the reports I have managed to find about this about this, it seems Brady has twisted his views in a specific way over time, and he has a lot of disdain for she-wolves. His anger all seems to be targeted towards them. Male shifters aren’t a problem to him, it’s the women. He sees them as less than. A misogynistic view that seems to have come from his overbearing asshole of a father. Rumors of this bad behavior has followed him throughout his whole life, but it’s escalated. It seems like his family has always paid his way out of things, until more recently. Perhaps why he has resorted to stealing to try and keep up his lifestyle without their constant support.”
I didn’t feel any sympathy for him. Plenty of people grew up in less than ideal circumstances and didn’t grow up to be absolute monsters. He made the decision not to better himself.
“Anyway, he was sent on his way from the military, and then the Dark Bounty Pack disowned him. The final nail in his coffin was put in by his mother.”
“Oh God, I bet that didn’t help his hatred of women,” I shot back dryly.
“Yeah, it definitely made him worse.” He looked like he had something he didn’t want to say, but he was going to have to. There was no point in hiding anything from me, even if I was emotionally entangled in this. I needed to know it all. “And then he met Miranda. From the research I have done into Brady Clover’s life, which isn’t the easiest thing because he doesn’t stay anywhere for too long, he didn’t know she was a she-wolf before they got together. She isn’t one for shifting much, so he just never found out.”
A thick lump of emotion lodged in my throat. I felt horrible for Miranda. How the hell was she supposed to know Brady was a sick fucker with a hatred for she-wolves? I honestly wasn’t sure how she had managed to survive for as long as she did with him.
“By the time he found out, she was already pregnant, which I guess stopped him from doing anything terrible to her.” That answer gave me a clue to the truth, but it wasn’t enough. “Coincidently, it seems to me that this is the time his family cut him off. Whether they discovered his she-wolf bride, or just got sick of his behavior, I’m not sure. But this all escalated things a lot. I can only assume that he didn’t want to kill Miranda because she was pregnant with his baby.
But he did go on to kill other she-wolves…something I don’t have full evidence of yet, but I definitely believe it. I compared the places Brady and Miranda moved to every time a she-wolf was found in a lake and the location of the murders, and I can see the pattern.”
I gasped as the realization hit me. “So, Brady was killing other she-wolves because he couldn’t kill the mother of his child? That’s so messed up.”
“You see some fucked up things when you are a police officer. It isn’t the easiest job.”
It was unthinkable, at least to me. I couldn’t imagine anyone doing such terrible things to another person, even after my stint in the military. I would never get used to people being so horrific and being such monsters deep down. It didn’t sit right with me and it never would.
“So, where do we go from here?” I threw my hands in the air in frustration. “How do we get the guy? I don’t want to wait until he acts again. We can’t have another she-wolf dead.”
The next one could be Miranda. He seemed utterly determined to ruin her life, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that meant she ended up at the bottom of a lake somewhere too. Not that any of us would let it happen, but for a guy who had been getting away with it for such a long time, anything was possible.
“Since we don’t know where Brady is at the moment, there isn’t much we can do. Unless you think you might be able to track him.”
I jumped up eagerly, grateful that I would finally have something to do. I hated all this sitting around and doing nothing. It was sickening. “Definitely. I will get right on that.”
“Actually, Ivan, you really shouldn’t get involved,” Owain warned, even though he probably knew that I wasn’t going to listen. “You’re far more emotionally invested than I would like, and I wouldn’t want that to get you hurt. I don’t want you to eagerly throw yourself in front of a bullet because your heart overrules your head. I have seen it happen before, and it gets ugly quick. I don’t want that to happen to you.”
I rolled my eyes. I got that he cared about me and my safety, but I was going to do what I thought was right, even if I did end up just another sad story he would go on to tell other people as a warning. “That isn’t going to happen. That will just make me fight harder. I would have thought you’d know that about me. I won’t let anything happen to Miranda.”