Chapter 6- The letter

The next morning, the loud news report from the massive 65-inch television in the elegant room awakened Lily. She groaned from the light in the glass windows. The etching noise that lightly strolled across the bed was enough to send her back straight up like a bolt in pitch twilight as a raw sweat washed over her face and a hard knot constricted her throat, making her hard to breathe with the addition of her hammering headache. 

She despised hangovers and being so foolish, yet her palms grabbed her chest as it pounded quicker than anticipated when she realized something: she was partially naked! Then her thoughts were racing through her mind, recalling the most incredible sex encounter of her life, with the most beautiful stranger with...

Holy crap!

Naked! She was completely naked! She then panicked and glanced everywhere, examining her surroundings. She was nowhere near her apartment or Cassy's home.

Oh my God!

Last Night!

The man! Sgt. Leon Anderson!

No!

She had sex with Jason's lover. How disgusting was that?

And how amazing it had been?

But the ringtone on her phone gave her a headache even more. She took it and answered. "Hello?!"

"You filthy bitch! Where the hell are you?" Cassy's over-the-top screeching voice welcomes her already painful headache.

"I-I'm well… fine-"

"You better be, because you want to know what's trending online?" She paused, "oh... Girl, you did it!"

"Did what? Did you just call me to tell me that? Jesus! I have a headache I-"

"You better check your social media now. Your complaint letter to the police department had gone viral and now it was the talk of the town."

"What?!"

"Oh, yeah! Sgt. Anderson didn't see it coming. He will surely lose his job. Go check the official page of the-"

"Wait, hold on... Wait a minute, I am so confused. Let me check it... hold on." Lily scanned her phone and there it was: 15780 comments and 590 messages, links to the official website of the police precinct, pictures of policemen, and Sgt. Leon Anderson. Then she puffed in a wild breath. Shocked! She was surprised at what she saw. The man had a marine-style haircut, a crooked nose, brown eyes, and a scar on his right cheek.

"Lily, did you see it?" Cassy yelled from the other line. Her scream was a wail made from hell, albeit one dressed up as the horror movie version, Lily thought to herself as she covered her mouth then she yell back.

"Oh my goodness, Cassy, this is not Sgt. Anderson, this is not Gabriel's lover."

"What?!"

She had sex with some stranger? But who was that man? He surely looks like Gabriel's lover oh, God! Then something hit her hard, the beautiful man was telling her the truth last night. The man was telling her the whole fucking truth. He was not Gabriel's lover… He was Rhye Gosling. Oh! Crap! He was the famous, notorious billionaire and CEO of the fucking Gosling Hotel Inc.

"Oh my god, Cassieeeee! I'm so dead!" She grumbled, her nakedness forgotten as she began pacing around the room. Now, everything sinks in. 

"Lily, what the hell do you mean by that?"

"Cassy, this is not Gabriel's lover, I have- shit! I've ruined someone else's life! He was not the man who gave me the ticket either."

"Hell, Lily, what the hell did you do? Who was that guy? He was bullied online and he will surely lose his job."

"Listen, this man, this Sgt. Anderson was not the man who gave me a t-ticket, nor was he Gabriel's lover. He is a different m-man and Jesus, s-someone wore his uniform, and I- I'm so dead. The man must have a f-family and I ruined him! I'm so dead. I've harmed the wrong man."

"Oh, yeah, I heard you the first time and yes, you are so dead," Cassy grumbled back.

Wait?

She had the most amazing sex experience of her life last night, and the man was not even Gabriel's lover? But who looked exactly like the jerk?! This was so confusing.

Rhye Gosling was telling her the truth last night. He was not lying. "I want to die now!" She was more than horrified. She just wanted to melt there and be done with her life.

"Lily?! Lily?!" It was Cassy's voice she heard before she ran to the bathroom and hurled the sour-long rancid fluid from her stomach.

An hour later, she found a note on the bedside table.

Lily Walter,

You and I should talk in my office tomorrow at three in the afternoon. Sgt. Leon Anderson is my friend, and you owe him more than an apology. Don't be late. PS: I did not fuck your ex.

Sincerely,

Rhye Gosling

*****

The morning light shone down in the middle of Alpha Rhye's office, bringing the first shirt sleeves to the streets and the first vibrant pink roses to the garden outside the French windows of the Alpha's office in the Moonlight Pack. But though the windows were open and the fresh smells of grass and flowers drifted into the private sanctum of the most dominant and powerful Alpha on the continent, the attention of the two men present was focused upon the morning papers on his hand.

Alpha Rhye sat where the Alphas of the pack have always sat—his back to the south wall of the room, facing northward across a vast antique oak desk toward the elegant marble fireplace that overwhelms the north wall. His chair, unlike that of most of his ancestors, who had preferred personalized, made-to-measure seating, was a factory-made, high-backed swivel chair of the sort any ordinary person from a nearby pack might have had. For "Rhye'', as he asserted his close friend and Beta called him, had always, through his continuous and prosperous leadership, emphasized his conventional, down-home particular tastes in apparel, sustenance, and quirke conveniences.

The chair, therefore, which could be glimpsed by the records of envoys and pack members he liked to welcome personally into the Alpha office, was not impressive. The excellent antique oak desk, he was at pains to pinpoint, he had inherited from his grandfather, and it had become a fraction of the rare tradition of the Moonlight Pack. That went down well.

But there, Alpha Rhye drew the line. When he was in a meeting with his beta, his pack adviser, his twin brother, and also the pack doctor, Joseph, "Rhye" that his humblest pack member could call him to his face became the formal "Alpha Rhye." He also lowered the nice-guy tone of voice and the rumpled badass, fearsome grin that had initially gulled the Moonlight pack and woman into putting the boy-next-door into the office. He was not the boy-next-door, and his adviser and beta knew it; he was the man at the top. He was the most powerful Alpha, and right now, he was not in the mood for a beer conversation.

"Brother," Joseph grumbled as he trembled from the silence of his Alpha while reading the morning paper. "Let me explain."

Seated in upright armchairs across the desk from the Alpha were the two men who he had asked to see that morning. In personal terms, the closest thing to him was his Beta, and head of security, Leon Anderson, who has been working as a police officer on weekdays for the past six months to get some leeway from the human police precinct. He had been strategically put there to gain more information about what the humans knew about supernatural crimes that had been happening in the city. The sharp-faced Beta Leon was sometimes loathed but never underestimated.

They made a weird group, being so close: Leon was the opposite of Joseph, who was obviously trembling from his chair and had been mumbling nonsense. He worked as a resident doctor at the public hospital, which made him the head of genetic research and supernatural research. He was searching for the demon's blood, a legendary demon bloodline that could end the werewolf lineage, the blood that had been prophesied to end their kind. For werewolves, the council of elders had been anxious about such demonic blood existing in this century, thus assigning Joseph as the head researcher for the said study, and for humans, it was nothing but an ordinary blood disease research institute.

However, what Alpha Rhye lacked in understanding was why Joseph had been sexually involved with a human, specifically a man, and now, reading the morning paper and Lily's viral police complaint about why a police officer had been caught in a sexual act with a doctor. Rhye knew, from what he gathered last night, that Lily Walter had mistaken him for Joseph, while he was wearing a Leon police uniform. Now, Leon was in trouble, but above all, Joseph was in dire need of an excuse.

There were two other reasons why Leon didn't care about the viral post. In fact, Rhye saw him as relieved. After all, he hated his covert job, he hated being with humans and worming with humans, and being fired from his job was heaven-sent, yet it never appealed to the Alpha. Leon was ferociously devoted to the pack, and he had no political ambitions outside of the shadow of the Alpha. But there was one reservation: Rhye always had to balance his trust and suspicious dislike of their beta.

After all, Leon was responsible for that portion of electronic surveillance and espionage conducted outside the Moonlight pack against their enemies on his behalf that had to do with listening: wiretapping, radio monitoring, and, above all, being the ears and eyes of the pack. The Alpha shuffled with the pile of high-definition photographs on his desk and handed them back to Joseph, who rose to accept them and placed them back in his lap.

It was an image of him running naked from Lily's room while Gabriel tried to explain it to the dumbfounded Lily. "Brother, let me explain. I am not gay nor am a-"

"Stop right there, Joseph. I have seen enough."

"But, Rhye, brother, you have to believe me, Gabriel was a colleague of mine. He is a doctor and-"

"I know that, I have asked Leon here to do a background check on your lover." He said slowly, "He has shown me enough that Gabriel has a strange background. So, care to tell me if you knew about it?"

"What do you mean?"

"That the man was an orphan and his family was super rich and came from Russia, one of the elite, with the possibility of royal blood, and yet here he was working as an ordinary gynecologist in a public hospital?"

"I didn't know that!"

"Of course, you didn't know that, and by the way, his ex-girlfriend thought it was you who wore Leon's uniform the next day, and now look at the mess, Leon here got fired."

"Brother, it is not like Leon loves the job." Joseph looked at their beta and asked, "Right? You hated being with those mundane humans."

Rhye furrowed his brow, "Your lover is human, Joseph."

"Brother!"

"Stop!" Rhye sighed as he glanced across at Leon and nodded. The latter cleared his throat.

"Alpha, I’ve taken the liberty of setting up a screening of what is coming in right now from the police precinct website and the damage this Lily Walters has done. She managed to bypass a very secure website and its CCTVs. I was impressed. She was a good hacker. Would you care to see it?"

"What Satellite?" Joseph asked.

"Oh, she managed to catch a glimpse of the CCTV cameras from Gabriel's hospital clinic while you were fucking him on the patient's table."

"Damn it!" Joseph grumbled under his breath.

Alpha Rhye nodded and watched Leon cross to the bank of television sets placed on the curving west wall below the bookcases, which had been specially remodeled to accept the consoles of TV sets. When non-security-cleared deputations were in the room, the new row of TV screens was covered by sliding teak doors. Leon turned on the extreme left-hand set and returned to the Alpha's desk. He detached one of the two telephones from its cradle, dialed a number, and said simply, "Screen it."

"Brother, are you seriously watching this? That's outrageous."

"Joseph, what do you take me for? A stupid one who wanted to see you fuck a man?"

"Well-"

Leon nodded and smirked at Joseph. "You fucking with the doctor was not the only one. Miss Lily Walters had managed to hack, Dr. Gabriel's laptop as well. You might want to see this yourself."

Alpha Rhye sighed. He knew Lily was smart and a good IT person, but her being so useful was beyond him. If this incident hadn't happened, he wouldn't have realized it until now. The report from Leon says it all, but what bothered him more was how the woman had taken him into her palm without her knowing it. Not just because she was wanton in bed and so amazing that just thinking about it made him harder for a split second, but the woman was something else. was scentless. "Damn it!" He grumbled that Leon and Joseph were looking at him questionably. "Go on, continue, Leon," he added.

On the screen, Leon played a video from Lily's laptop hard drive. A man in pajamas was in the garden; it was Gabriel. The video was a month ago. He was alone and oblivious of his surroundings. The satellite video was flying higher than anything before, using cameras of intricacy that could reveal a close-up of a human fingernail from two hundred miles up, through a fog, rain, hail, snow, cloud, and night. Obviously, Lily had managed to bypass satellite imagery that was the latest and the best. She managed to hack a satellite and pull off Gabriel's whereabouts in Russia a month before the incident of her finding him with Joseph. Maybe she was a bit suspicious about it and wanted to see what he did in Russia, so she hacked the satellite.

It bothered Rhye. It never bothered Leon; he had fiddled with the images from Gabriel's Garden, "What you are seeing, Alpha, is coming to you from the satellite one month ago." Leon mumbled.

Rhye and Joseph raised their gazes to the screen.

Enormous areas of territory were opening slowly from top to bottom, a swath about twenty-five miles wide. The garden looked bare in the first few seconds of the image, as in autumn after the harvest. Leon muttered a few instructions into the telephone in his hand, from the tech guy. Seconds later, the view focused, nearing a group hardly ten miles wide. A small community of peasant or farmer shacks—wooden-plank sheds, no doubt, lost in the infinity of the steppe, wandered past on the left of the screen. The line of a road entered the picture, stayed in the center for a few uncertain minutes, then wandered offscreen. Leon muttered again, as the picture neared a track a hundred yards wide. The definition was better. A man leading a horse across the vast white snow-covered expanse of steppe came and went.

"Slow it down," advised Leon on the phone. The white snow on the ground beneath the cameras passed less promptly. High in space, the satellite was still on track at the same height and speed; inside the garden, the visions were being lessened and slowed. The image came closer, slower. A Russian peasant unbuttoned his fly slowly. The boy passed slowly out of view toward the bottom of the screen. The image that came up was of a garden of roses.

"And freeze," instructed Leon on the phone. The image slowly stopped moving and held.

"Close up," said Leon.

The picture came closer and closer until the entire yard-square screen was filled with red roses.

"What are we seeing here exactly?" asked Joseph.

"Just as you know, Miss Walter hadn't seen anything peculiar in the picture. After all, it was just roses and Gabriel enjoying his tea, in the snow-covered garden half-naked." Mumbled Leon and halted for a few seconds for an effect that made Rhye smirk. He knew him well. The man liked to take his time.

"But look closely at the young boy's neck and Gabriel's neck. They have dark, murky, circular veins in the shape of the symbol of the demon from the legend, the demon emblem. Maybe Lily didn't pay attention to it, but I saw it. Look closely." Leon turned and walked back, just as Rhye was preparing to swing his chair around to keep him in vision. He went to the screen and looked at it closely as if he couldn't believe it was really there. "Damn it! It was the symbol of the demon."

"Wait a fucking minute here. Gabriel doesn't have that emblem on his beck, I know for sure."

Rhye grumbled, "Oh, we will find out soon, but for now I want you to take a look around the hospital. Open your eyes, Joseph, and explore something suspicious, but keep this between us first. We can't risk the council of elders panicking. I will send Leon to Russia to investigate the farm boy." He looked at Leon and added, "Can I count on you Beta?"

Leon nodded, "Yes Alpha!"

"Good, let me handle the mess of Lily Walters and I'll fix your manly ego when you're gone. Deal?"

"Whatever you say, Alpha, I'll be happy as long as I am away from those humans."