He didn’t need this shit now.
His eyes came back to Ryon’s. “The minute this shit is over with the rebellion, I want you, personally, with no one knowing about it, to investigate Sonia’s disease. I want to know what it is. I want to know the incidence. I want to know what it does to her body. And I want to know exactly what’s in that f**king injection, how it works and how long she’s been taking it. If you have to torture her f**king doctor, do it, but get me what I want.”
“You don’t think Sonny –” Ryon started and it took everything Callum had to beat back the urge to strike at Ryon even thinking what he was going to say, much less saying it.
“Not a chance,” Callum gritted out. “Every night, I tell her it’s time to take her injection and every night I watch her eyes go blank. Sonia’s eyes are never blank but to hide her distress at her nightly agony, they go… fucking… blank. And every night I give her that injection and every night it’s like she’s dying in my arms and not in a quiet, pass behind the veil kind of way but in a tortured, agonizing kind of way. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. It’s hideous. She wouldn’t do that to herself if she didn’t have to, no one would.”
“Then what are you thinking?” Ryon asked.
“She wouldn’t do it to herself,” Callum explained, “but a f**king vampire would do it to her.”
Ryon’s face went hard for he knew it was true.
Vampires could be ruthless.
“I don’t know what their game is or even if they’re playing it. But, if The Prophesies go down the way they’ve been foretold, then –” Callum stated.
Ryon cut him off. “I’ll investigate. Don’t jump to any conclusions before we know.”
Callum was a lucky wolf in many ways, not just having Sonia, but also a wise father, a loving mother, fiercely loyal brothers and Ryon, far more even-tempered and level-headed than Callum, as his advisor and friend.
Ryon got closer. “Lassiter wanted his daughter raised by them instead of us and you know why. Mac agreed and made the allegiance. And Cal, you know, Mac was no fool.”
Callum looked away, lifted his hand to his neck and gave it a squeeze.
His father was anything but a fool.
Then it hit him.
Callum dropped his arm and looked at his cousin. “Do you remember the conversation I had with Gregor that I told you about?”
“The info about Lucien?” Ryon asked.
Callum’s mouth went hard at the memory and bit out, “And the rest.”
Ryon nodded. “I remember.”
“Gregor doesn’t want to lose her, thinks of her as a daughter or at least he wanted me to believe that and he was pretty f**king convincing. Perhaps this injection isn’t for a deadly blood disease. Perhaps it isn’t for some nefarious reason, doing… whatever, to Sonia, my queen, a treachery against the alliance. Perhaps it’s vampiric. Perhaps they’ve concocted something that will lengthen her life.”
“Vampire saliva is pretty powerful but it doesn’t heighten senses,” Ryon commented.
“And humans don’t react to vampire saliva the way Sonia reacts to that injection. They aren’t injecting her with that, it’s something else. Wolves don’t need medicines and I can’t say I’ve a lot of experience with witnessing humans taking treatments but I can’t imagine their medicines regularly cause those kinds of reactions,” Callum’s gaze turned intense on his cousin. “When I say it’s bad, Ryon, I mean it’s bad.”
Ryon’s eyes flashed briefly before his thoughts turned and they gentled. “Poor Sonny.”
This was said with feeling, too much of it. More than would be offered to Ryon’s queen, even a member of his family. Callum again wondered at it at the same time he didn’t like it.
However, he’d have a word with his cousin later, after all of his problems were sorted.
“The minute we deal with this f**king situation in Mona’s territory, I’m taking Sonia to Scotland,” he announced.
“Of course.”
“I want any time she spends with Gregor or Yuri or any vampire monitored,” Callum ordered.
“It’s done.”
Then Callum said what he had to say so he could let it go and not leap out of his skin, into the wolf and tear Gregor and Yuri asunder the minute he walked back into Sonia’s house. This would cause an immortal incident which could tip the scales of The Prophesies far sooner than expected.