The Deputy and His Enforcer (Kincaid Pack #3) - Kiki Clark Page 0,108

be right in front of my face, but I can’t find it.”

Humming, she stood and meandered over to his desk where the letter was sitting on the front corner. “No clues in the message he wrote you?”

“None that I could see.”

She was quiet as she read it, then pointed at something on the page. “What does this mean? ‘My squire’?”

Marcus shrugged, not looking up. “He called me his squire when I worked for him. It became like a term of endearment and an inside joke because it…”

When he trailed off and raised his head, squinting at the wall across from him as his brain churned furiously, Tashmica hurried back over, sitting on the table in front of him. “What is it?”

“I’m an idiot,” he whispered. The clue was so subtle he’d completely missed it for the last week. Shaking his head, he climbed to his feet, stopping only to kiss the top of her head. “You’re a genius, Tash!”

“Um, okay?”

Not answering, he raced toward the door and threw it open, calling back at her, “Grab the letter and meet me up in the library!” Then he was gone. He repeated a prayer to the goddess that the book was there and not at his house somewhere, but he was almost positive he’d stored it in Rick’s library when he’d first arrived in Michigan, before he’d had a place of his own.

Then he’d forgotten about it.

Tearing into the library, he ignored the questions Bennett and Rick threw at him as he ran from one bookcase to the next, scanning them quickly. “It has to be here,” he muttered, stumbling to the one in the farthest corner, vaguely remembering thinking that no one would notice or be bothered if he stored a single book there.

He dropped to his knees when he spotted the worn spine, tears springing to his eyes for some reason. “I found it.”

Tashmica was hurrying into the room just as he carefully pulled the tattered volume of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn from the bottom shelf and cradled it in his hands.

“Is that it?” she asked, pausing by the table where Rick and Bennett had been working. They were both half standing like they weren’t sure if they should be worried about Marcus’s behavior or not.

“I think so.” He stood and carried the book over to the table, laying it down so they could see. “Mikel gave this to me right before I came here. Longfellow was one of his favorite poets, though he preferred to read his translation of The Divine Comedy more than most of his original work.” Marcus chuckled wetly, swiping at his eyes before carefully opening the book and thumbing to the page that had been earmarked years ago by Mikel. “‘The Poet’s Tale—The Birds of Killingworth’ made an inn in Massachusetts famous.”

Rick slowly stood and circled around to stand next to Marcus. “This book is the cipher?”

Marcus shook his head and tapped the page. “This poem is. The inn is in Mikel’s hometown. He used to be so proud of that and would brag about how he’d stay there when he went home to visit his old pack and family.” Clearing his throat, he looked up at Rick’s wide eyes. “Do you have a piece of paper I can use?”

There was a scramble to find a notebook, and then they all sat around the table as Tashmica carefully read out each set of numbers—line, word, letter—and Marcus painstakingly copied out the coded message Mikel had gone to so much effort to get to him. A part of him worried it would be a warning about Rick’s dad wanting to remove him as alpha or something else they’d already figured out. It wasn’t that he thought the letter needed to be worth him dying for—nothing was worth that in Marcus’s opinion—but if it wasn’t at least something new, it’d be a devastating blow.

It was definitely something new.

As the message became clear, Marcus’s adrenaline started to rise, his heart beating faster.

“Jesus, Marcus, what does it say?” Rick finally growled.

“Hang on. I want to get the whole thing before starting to read it.” They were almost done. The list of numbers was really long because they denoted letters instead of words, but the message itself wasn’t more than a few lines. There was a sting in his left arm like he’d been stung by a wasp, but when he felt his bicep, he couldn’t find anything wrong. Shaking off the weird sensation, he refocused