I carefully climbed off the trellis and started to pace back and forth. I headed for the street. If I was here too long he would pick up on my scent and he would know I followed him. What would make him fall for a small cub like that? I couldn’t tell her exact age, since the lion and the human age so differently, but she couldn’t be too old if she still had a form of a cub! I pulled my phone out and called Scarlet as I headed back for the house. She answered almost immediately.

“Where did he go?!”

“He is at some house, I don’t know.” I sighed. “I climbed up the trellis of a house to find him in a bedroom cleaning a cub. I don’t know her age, I couldn’t tell. But they were more than friends, if you know what I mean.”

“You climbed up the side of the house?!” she gasped, “And they didn’t see you? Matt, where would he have found her!? Our secret is kept by only the best!”

“I know baby, I know. I don’t know how this all worked out! But I know someone is going to be in trouble! Other than Junior.” I was trying to decide what I was going to do. “Do you want to come with me to work? I need to call a meeting of managers to we can start to narrow down who said what.”
“Is it safe for me to be there while I'm pregnant?”

“Absolutely. We won’t be in the actual warehouse long.” I reassured her “I’ll come in and get you and we will go, okay love?”

She agreed, and when I finally got back to the house, I went inside and escorted her out to my car. The drive to work was uneasy. What was I going to say? What was anyone going to say back? When we finally got to work, I linked my arm with Scarlet’s and walked with her toward the building. I flashed my badge and stopped at the front window.

“I thought you said you weren’t going to make it in today?” the guy behind the window asked.
“I had a change of plans. I need an emergency meeting paged for ten minutes from now. I’m running back to my office and we will all meet up in the room up here.” I said, leading Scarlet towards the double doors that went into the actual warehouse. We took the three minute walk to my department a little slower, so she could look around at everything there was around us. The building was three stories tall, but it was all open area and conveyor belts. She had been in here before, but unless you walked it every day, you don’t really get used to it. I said hi to a few of my employees who saw me, but tried to make the walk to my office quick. I got my clip board off my desk, and took the papers out of the folder hanging on my door from this morning. I also grabbed a legal pad from a desk drawer and stuck a pen behind my ear before taking Scarlet’s arm once again and making our way back up to the front of the building to the meeting room.

Once there, I greeted a couple of the managers who had shown up and were making coffee, and sat down at the table with Scarlet. It didn’t take long for everyone to show up, all of them asking what the meeting was about. Once everyone was seated and comfortable, I made sure the door was closed and no one was around to hear.

“Okay, we have a problem. I have a much larger problem than the rest of you, but we all share something in the situation. Someone has breached contract, and the secret seems to be trickling out faster than we can control it. I followed my son to a house this morning where I found him with a lion cub. I know that he is seeing her, but I don’t know who she belongs to. Which also leads me to believe that he didn’t just happen to meet her anywhere. The part that really scares me is that she must be old enough to be with him, but in lion form she is a cub. This means that she had to be turned. And you guys know we don’t just turn anyone. So I doubt that anyone of you did it, but do you guys know anything about this?”

Everyone looked around, and started to talk to each other in disbelief. They were in as much shock as I was. I sighed, getting their attention again. “Okay, so if no one here has heard anything going around, than we need to band together to find out who did this. Something like this is not okay, it is not accepted. We cannot let anyone know about us! Do you know what they will do to us?” I had to scare them into helping sometimes. I knew they were all worried about our secret, but sometimes they liked the drama of everything more. That was another one of the secrets, the kids didn’t even know. Everyone that I worked with? They were all lions. Some of them like me, the head of a pride. Some of them living with their families, some the runts of the litter. But we all still had that one trait in common, and keeping the secret safe was something we were normally good at. We had to continue to be good at it for the sake of my family…

Notes

Here you go! this is what happens when i get ratings, comments and such :) you guys seriously rock. i cannot thank you enough :)

<3