Chapter 83

Accepting My Twin Mates Chapter 83 Chapter 80 – Payments?

Badru “Weird, how?” Astennu asked in sceptical intrigue.

“Ok, so, I went over your pack financials for the last decade, twice, with a fine tooth comb, and it doesn’t add up. Ru, I know you thought you had made a mistake, but you didn’t,” Elan asserted. “You have some pretty huge discrepancies.”

“Are you saying someone is stealing huge sums of money from our pack?” Alarm bells were ringing in my ears.

“No, the opposite.”

My brother and I gave each other a curious glance as the phone hung, face up, between us.

“You don’t have money missing,” Elan continued. “You have more coming in than you should, meaning undisclosed income. It dates back roughly a decade. There’s no sign of any unknown sums further back than that.”

“How big are the sums?” I started, my twin finishing my sentence.

“Is it something that could have been overlooked?”

We had only recently become involved in our pack’s finances in the last several months as part of the introduction and training into our duties. One of the first points we wanted to address was improvements to our pack’s infrastructure, like the farms that Astennu had taken Evie to. It was exactly why we had asked Elan to be our Delta, delegated to the task of developing a new budget with us.

“These sums run into tens of thousands, some are a few hundred thousand. That’s a hell of an overlook. All your pack money comes from businesses within your territory and some ventures from outside with your allies. All fine,” our Delta explained, the sound of paper rustling in the background as he spoke. “Then there’s these undisclosed payments that I’ve found come with a falsified invoice. Each comes with a different vendor name, but when I looked into them, they’re fake. Which means, someone didn’t want the true origins known. These false invoices weren’t included in that first batch of files you sent, but a couple have been included or slipped through on the ones I’ve been looking at for the last few months.”

“What does that mean? What’s the point of a false invoice?” I gave another rapid glance around the stables to make sure we were still alone.

“In the human world, it’s a cover for money laundering. But you wolves operate on your own laws, not theirs. So I don’t know why the payment origin would need to be secret. As I said, this dated back roughly a decade. Do you have any idea if something happened in your pack back then?”

The two of us shook our heads, racking our brains for a possible answer. We would have been around 15 years old at the time and nothing rang any bells. There were no events of note around that time, we had nothing going on in our pack worthy of any note.

“Aside from Ru and me being squeaky-sounding teens as our voices broke and awkwardly tall with no muscles, that’s all I remember from 10 years ago. These payments, do they come on any specific dates?”

“This is what’s super weird, because there’s no pattern. It’s completely random and they’re few and far between, only a couple a year, if that. They’re never for the same amount, either, and it’s never on a recurring or specific date. There’s a gap I’m looking at,” the sound of paper flicked, no doubt from Elan straightening his files. “Where a payment wasn’t made for nearly two years and then the following year, there’s three. I’m not a member of your pack so I haven’t got a clue what happened on or around these dates that might help explain it. The payments tend to coincide with other larger and legitimate payments. Whether it’s to do with them or used to deflect, I don’t know. As it stands, you haven’t had a hidden payment for over a year.”

“Can you make a list of dates these payments were made and email it to us?” I pinched the bridge of my nose, feeling a sickening headache forming.

“Sure,” the clicking of Elan’s keyboard tapped away, followed by a ping from my phone. “I sent it to yours as we’re on Aste’s phone.”

I snatched my phone from my back pocket, opening the email to the list of amounts, dates and the supposed companies.

“Maybe look into who exactly has access or permission to your accounts and business dealings. But I can’t see any of this being due to some oversight or ignorance,” Elan suggested. “Either, someone didn’t care to look into these payments’ origins or they didn’t want anyone to know where they came from…” he left the sentence hanging.

He hung up, leaving a loaded silence behind with my brother and me.

“I knew you hadn’t made a mistake, Ru,” Astennu’s tight voice cut through our silence.

“Aste, we don’t have time to look into this and track down our mate!”

Any other time, I would have dived in to investigate without a second thought, wanting to know what our pack was involved in. But with our pregnant mate no closer to being found, growing more pregnant, my already scattered train of thought had its priorities elsewhere and it wasn’t about to be on some sketchy payments.

“What if they’re linked?”

“What does this…” I waved my phone in the air in front of my brother’s face, my overwrought state made worse by the nauseating pounding in my temples. “…Have to do with Evie and Konstantin?”

“Maybe they were taken as collateral,” he ignored my outburst, keeping his cool facade that betrayed the inner storm bubbling under his cracking surface. “By whoever is behind the payments.”

“Holy s**t, you could be on to something,” my arms dropped to my side, along with my stomach, as a grisly realisation took hold. “But that means…”

…Someone close to us had betrayed us in the vilest way possible.

While our father had overall control, there were several others, as leaders of our pack, that conducted business on its behalf. Those other people were Tamlyn, Kate and, up to when he left, Finley.

Like us, Finley would have only recently begun to be included as part of his training, well after the payments had started. And he had f****d all his access away with his exile. But Kate? Had she been conducting shady business behind my father’s back and now her son’s banishment from the pack had messed it up?

Was this why Tamlyn really came along to question Janet? To make sure her pawn remained silent and only spoke to deflect attention from her?

Was it our father? Was that why he wanted Elan away from our books, and the ‘outsider’ thing was bullshit? He had his issues with rogues, but could he physically do this to us, his own sons?

There was our father’s former Gamma, Wesley, Tamlyn’s predecessor, who left to be with his rogue mate and was forced to give up his title, home and pack to be with her four years ago. But why would he continue to make our pack money, even questionably sourced, and how would he even have access? He hadn’t parted from our pack on good terms in the slightest and he hadn’t taken any of our calls, slamming the phone down as soon as he heard our names. Would he do this as revenge?

‘This is a lot of questions and I’m starting to feel sick,’ Baniti groaned, overwhelmed and wanting to block out the new reality settling in.

‘I don’t want to think any of them are true either, but we have to accept one of them just might be.’

As my twin’s was, my aura darkened and thickened around me, almost a vibration to the air that unnerved Heru in his stable behind us. His distressed whinnying and pacing jolted the two of us out of our stewing.

“Where do we even start?” I thought aloud as Astennu calmed his horse, patting his neck.

“Our dad’s computer would be the best start, providing we can get into it,” he grimaced, staring at an unfocused point in the air. “We’re on our own from now on. We have to suspect everyone.”

The evening sun had all but set, leaving behind a faint deep blue glow above the horizon of the forest and the subtle soft lights of the pack house to illuminate our home. As we pulled into our private garage, we quite literally caught our mother like a deer in our headlights. Seeing that it was us, she promptly shoved the three bags into the hands of the guard that had accompanied her on her not-so-

secret shopping trip and shooed the bewildered man away and towards the pack house in an attempt to hide that she had bought more baby clothes. Our mother had never been a particularly subtle woman. Graceful and poised? Always. Delicate and low-key? Never.

“Ahibbaa! (Darings!) What a coincidence. How’s Heru? He’s looked so glum recently,” she tried to deflect, using the smell of the stables on us in her favour.

“Fine,” Astennu replied tersely.

I could see the cogs turning in his mind, scrutinising whether she could have had a hand in what Elan had told us. If she had, our mother was a hell of an actress. What I saw that day in her hospital room, the fear and what it had done to her since, didn’t feel like an act. Our mother was never one to walk about needing a guard for a sense of safety in our pack. Ever since that day, one accompanied her most places.

“Good, good…” she threaded her arms through ours and walked us towards the Alpha wing. “Come and have tea tonight (British slang for dinner) with your father and me? It’s been so long since you ate with us and I need to see you eating. You’re both looking so skinny.”

‘Skinny?!’ Baniti exclaimed, affronted. ‘If anything, we’re broader with the amount we bench now.’

“Actually, mom-”

“Sure we will,” my brother interjected.

“Wonderful! Your father is cooking tonight; fattah with lamb.”

‘Go along with it. I think I have a plan for getting into our dad’s computer,’ he shot me a beseeching glance over our mother’s head.

‘Well? You gonna share?’

‘You know how dad’s the worst with passwords?’ Astennu held open the pack house door for our mother. ‘He might just have it noted down on his phone. Remember that last Alpha meeting we went to with him at Opal Sun?’

‘Ok, I see where you’re going with this.’

I had borrowed his phone during the meet because mine had gone dead and our father was next to me.

‘That was almost a year ago. What if the PIN has changed?’

‘It’s dad,’ my brother stated flatly. ‘It won’t have changed. He is literally the worst for passwords.’

‘Leave it to me and I’ll let you know when to cause the distraction.’