At the bottom of the steps, I glanced around the basement to find a much smaller space than Hargrove had at his own house. The workbench was smaller, the stash of tools and chemicals was meager, and there was no bulletin board at all, though that hadn’t stopped the hunters from hanging pictures on the wall with scotch tape.
A quick glance at the photos showed that they were reprints of the ones hung in that other basement—there was nothing I’d need to hide or destroy.
Dried blood caked Hargrove’s work surface, but the scents were all unfamiliar and mostly faint from the passage of time and from chemical degradation. A four-drawer metal filing cabinet stood against one wall, but I wouldn’t have time to go through that, and an empty three-by-five dog cage took up most of one corner. It smelled like bleach.
“Abby!” Jace shouted, and I jumped.
“Sorry!” I grabbed the duct tape from the workbench and clomped up the creaky stairs again. “I got distracted by all the creepy crap down there.”
“Here.” Jace took a step back from Hargrove without letting go of his neck. “Tape his hands up. Make it tight.”
I tore a long strip of tape from the roll, then knelt and reached between them to wrap the tape around Hargrove’s wrists, praying that the next strip would cover his mouth. When I’d stood and backed away, Jace let go of Hargrove and grabbed the rifle from the kitchen counter.
“Abby, call the guys back.” He flipped up a lever on the rifle then shoved it back, and the bullet popped out, then rolled around on the floor.
I pushed my sleeve up and reached into a pot full of greasy water to fish my poor phone out. “Can I use yours?”
Jace swore when he saw my cell dripping on the kitchen floor, then handed his to me.
“You move and I start breaking bones,” he told Hargrove while I scrolled through his contacts for my brother’s number. The hunter looked ready to wet his camouflage pants. “You refuse to answer a single question and I start breaking bones.”
Shit. I could not let him interrogate Hargrove.
“Jace?” Lucas said into my ear.
“No, it’s me. We got Hargrove. Jace wants you all to head back.”
“Be there in ten.” Lucas hung up, and I tossed Jace’s phone back to him.
“Where’s Darren?” My Alpha circled Hargrove slowly, sliding his phone into his jacket pocket.
“Hey, aren’t you supposed to let the whole council question him?” I leaned against the counter, watching them both in profile, trying to project a casual interest.
“I will, once I’m sure no more shifters are in imminent danger.”
Damn it.
“Where’s Darren?” Jace repeated.
“Is that your girlfriend?” Hargrove was no longer whispering, now that he’d been caught, but his natural voice was still scratchy and distinctive. “She talks back like a girlfriend.” He shrugged as his gaze slid down from my neck and kept going. “A little small for my taste, but I bet all those shifter bitches are hellcats in bed.”
My fist clenched around the countertop.
“Was Darren here with you?” Jace asked, and I could see from the tension in his arms as he slowly circled his prey that he was itching to punch a hole right through the taxidermist. “Is he a cop?”
“I’d love to get her on my table.” Hargrove licked his lips, staring right at me. “Stuffing that little showpiece would be a real pleasure.”
“She’d rip your balls off and feed them to you.” Jace stepped between me and Hargrove, blocking his view. “You take one more look at her, and I’m going to let her do it. Now, is Darren the cop in the photos?”
Hargrove shrugged. “Who’s Darren?”
Jace circled him in a blur of movement, and I heard a sudden soft snap. The hunter howled, and I’d never in my life heard such a noise come from a human. When Jace stepped back, Hargrove’s left pinkie finger was broken at a ninety-degree angle. Bone showed through a tear in his flesh and a steady dribble of blood dripped into a growing pool on the floor.
“If I have to ask again, I’ll break the next one,” Jace warned. “Good luck stuffing anything with two broken fingers.”
Hargrove said nothing, so Jace reached for his hand again.
“He’s a cop!” Hargrove shouted through his sobs. “Ten years on the force in a little town about an hour and a half from here.”
“And the other guys in your fucked-up hunting club? I want the names of the ones still breathing.”
When Hargrove hesitated, Jace lunged toward him, and I flinched when I heard another soft snap. Hargrove screamed again, and snot dripped from his left nostril.
“Names,” Jace demanded, and I tapped the edge of the countertop, growing increasingly desperate for a reasonable excuse to stop the interrogation.
“Carl Wilks and Reggie Lewis are the only others I know by name. But they quit. They got spooked when you guys started picking us off, one by one.”
When we’d… I exhaled slowly, relieved to realize that the hunters thought they were being killed off by Jace and his enforcers. However, Hargrove still possessed a fount of information I couldn’t let Jace have.
How the hell was I supposed to stop him from talking, when his silence was rewarded with broken bones?
“Quitting won’t keep them safe,” Jace said while I clutched the countertop at my back to keep from cutting my palms open with my own nails. “Carl and Reggie are dead men.”
Fear tensed every muscle in my body and sharpened my vision. I could see every bead of sweat that formed on Hargrove’s forehead and every clogged pore in the crease of his nose. I could smell his terror, but that only made me wonder if Jace could smell mine. If he could, surely he’d think I was still traumatized from behind held at gunpoint.
“Where is Darren now?” Jace demanded, and my chest suddenly felt tight, as if my heart no longer fit. If Hargrove answered many questions along those lines, I was screwed.
“Hunting. But he’s supposed to be back tonight.”
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Hunting is his job,” the human said. “I mostly just stuff them. And teach the other guys how to do it. Would you believe some of them used to think we could mount a human head with cat eyes? That’s what they wanted to do with you, until I told them you can’t keep any of the soft tissue. That’s why we use glass eyes. But we could keep your teeth, if they happened to be feline when you died.”
My stomach churned, disgust and fear warring inside me. I needed Hargrove to shut up, for multiple reasons.
When my right hand began to twitch, I tucked it behind me. If Jace thought I couldn’t handle the interrogation, he’d make me wait outside, and even though he shouldn’t hear whatever Hargrove had to say, I had to hear it in order to plan my next move.
“Who’s Darren hunting?” Jace’s voice was a snarl so low Hargrove probably hardly heard it.
“He went after the other tabby so we can—” Hargrove’s sentence ended so abruptly, I could only imagine how he’d planned to finish it.
My fingers began to itch and burn at my back as the bones moved, rearranging the structure of my hand with no conscious instruction from my brain. I felt threatened on multiple levels, and my body was instinctively preparing me to fight for my life.
“So you can what?” Jace demanded, and I shook my head slowly. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to think about it. The slaughter. And whatever came before.
Hargrove shrugged, an awkward movement with his hands bound at his back. “We’ve never had a girl cat. Steve and the others tried with her.” He glanced at me, and Jace snarled and stepped between us again. “But she turned out to be much more…spirited than advertised.”
A stubborn bolt of pride surged through me in spite of the circumstances. They’d been told by the toms they’d tortured that tabbies were largely overprotected and defenseless, and I’d been thrilled to defy the stereotype.
“So, we thought we’d go after one with less experience,” Hargrove f
inished. “Darren’s on his way to get her now.”
Jace seemed to swell like a puffer fish, only he was full of pure, homicidal rage. “Darren went after my sister?” he roared, and for a second, I thought he might kill Hargrove and solve my problem for me.
But then he stepped back and took several deep breaths. I could see his internal struggle as he forced his shoulders to relax and his jaw to unclench. He was reining his temper in, as any good Alpha would, and I knew from the movement of his lips that he was counting backward silently. Probably from one thousand.
Yet he’d be ready in an instant if Hargrove moved a single muscle.
For a moment, the only sounds were Jace’s steady, controlled inhalations, the pained hitch as Hargrove breathed through a bruised gut and broken fingers, and the steady drip of his blood into a growing puddle on the floor.
Then Hargrove frowned. “She’s your sister?”
Jace stiffened, and my fear spiked along with the almost painful jump in my pulse.
Nonononono!
My world was falling apart. Every word Hargrove spoke threatened to split the ground beneath my feet and send me tumbling into an abyss I could never crawl out of. Jace would be furious. My father would be devastated. The council would want my blood, and then everything I’d worked to hide—to protect—would be lost.
“Darren will never even get close to her,” Jace whispered. “My men will shred him before he even knows they’re there.”
Hargrove frowned, confusion warring with pain in his features. “But you’ve left her exposed! Darren probably already has her!”
Jace stepped toward him again, as claws burst from the ends of my fingers. I could see what he was thinking. He’d only brought four enforcers, including me, which left more than enough at the lodge to defend Melody. Especially considering that other than defending his Alpha, an enforcer had no greater or more honorable duty than to protect a pregnant tabby.
Hell, Isaac would singlehandedly skin Darren alive to protect his fiancée and unborn child.
But neither the Alpha nor the hunter knew they were taking part in two completely different conversations. And Jace could not come to that conclusion.
“We can’t figure out why, if girl cats are so rare, you’d all leave not just one”—Hargrove glanced at me—“but two of them totally undefended. We’ve been watching them, taking pictures, and we never saw a single one of your men. It’s almost like you want us to—”
Terror squeezed my chest with a brutal pressure. The bones in my hand crackled as they fell into place. The room blurred around me as I lunged at him.
“Abby, no!” Jace shouted, but logic cracked and fell away from me, and the exposed fury burned like fire in every vein in my body. It snapped like static across every synapse.
I have no memory of ripping Hargrove’s throat out.
One moment, I was leaning against the grimy kitchen counter, listening to the words that would bring an abrupt halt to life as I knew it, and the next, I was standing in front of Gene Hargrove as his blood arced over my face and my borrowed jacket with each dying beat of his heart. His mouth hung open as he gasped. His eyes were wide but already unfocused, and some primal part of me rejoiced at the thought that I was the last thing that bastard would ever see.
Then he crumpled to the floor in a pool of his own blood.
I stepped back, and the consequence of what I’d just done hit me like a blow to the gut.
That’s when the world slid out of focus.
THIRTEEN
Jace
I hardly saw her move, but as soon as I realized her hand had shifted, I knew what she was going to do.
“Abby, no!” I shouted, but I was too late.
One second, she was standing there with her jaw clenched, her heart racing so fast, I was afraid it would explode. The next, she was covered with Hargrove’s blood, and he lay dead at her feet, still bleeding all over the linoleum.
She looked down at him for the span of a single heartbeat. Then her eyes lost focus and her hands—one still a claw—fell limp at her sides.
“Abby!” I pulled her away from the body, and my fingers smeared the blood on her sleeve. Only it wasn’t even her sleeve. She’d ruined her roommate’s jacket with arterial spray from the man whose throat she’d just ripped out, and there would be no way to explain that to Robyn.
Or to the territorial council.
Fuck. I didn’t have clearance to execute any of the human hunters unless they were an imminent threat, and Abby had just killed the only member of the sick shifter taxidermy club we had in custody. The only source who could tell us how many of his fellow humans knew about us and just how big a problem we had. We needed that information, and someone would have to pay for the loss of it.
“Abby!” I yelled again, practically in her face, but she only stared at the floor as if she no longer saw the body lying there. As if she no longer saw anything. Footsteps thundered from the back porch, then Lucas pulled her from my grip and wrapped his massive arms around her.
“What the hell happened?” he demanded.
“She flipped out and ripped open his throat.” Then she’d totally checked out of reality—it probably wasn’t true catatonia, but she was definitely in shock. “Abby!” When I reached for her, Luke turned to put her out of my reach, and my temper flared in a white-hot instant. He’d forgotten in his concern and confusion that I was his fucking Alpha and that respect was my fucking due.
And, evidently, that I would never, ever hurt her. Even if she’d just thrown all of us into a vast world of hurt.
I snarled, and Lucas dropped his gaze but made no move to let go of his sister, who stood motionless in is grip. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that this wasn’t about defying his Alpha; it was about being there for his sister. I’d have done the same thing, even back when I was an enforcer. And I didn’t even like Melody that much. “Okay. See if you can wake her up. Quickly.” I grabbed his arm when he started to guide her away. “And don’t ever let that happen again.”
I turned to Mateo while Lucas bent to speak directly into his sister’s ear. “Call Isaac and put everyone on alert. Tell him Darren’s going after Melody, and we’ll be there as soon as we can.”
Teo stepped outside to make the call, and as a traumatized feline whine began to leak from Abby, I realized that her throat had shifted along with her right hand. What the hell had set her off?
“Why would she do that?” Warner watched Lucas smooth back his sister’s curls, still whispering into her ear.
“She must have felt threatened,” Luke said.
“Hargrove’s hands were bound behind him. He wasn’t a threat. She was in no danger.” Even when he’d held her at gunpoint, she’d been cool and collected…right up until the moment she ripped his neck open.
“Well, she must have thought she was,” Lucas insisted, over Abby’s head. “She was probably having some kind of flashback.”
Warner shrugged. “With everything she’s been through, I guess the real surprise is that she hasn’t flipped out before.”
In theory, that was a rational explanation, but in Abby’s case, it didn’t make sense. She’d definitely been threatened when the hunters had killed her friends in the woods, but she’d held it together in order to track the bad guys, eliminate them, then explain to me exactly what had happened, and how going against my orders was really the right thing to do.
Yet with Hargrove, even though he was restrained and unarmed, she’d freaked out, lashed out, then checked out. We were missing something.
“Abby,” I said as Warner started opening kitchen drawers in search of rags and towels. She still stared at the wall above the gun rack, but now a maelstrom of conflicting emotions flitted over her features. Terror, and desperation, and…caution.
What part of what she’d just done could be considered cautious?
“Abby!” I called again, and finally, she blinked. “Look at me.”
She complied, and I saw raw instin
ct battling shock behind her eyes. She was still mired in the trauma of what she’d done, yet something inside her demanded that she follow her Alpha’s orders. Hell, she might actually be easier to deal with as an enforcer without her human stubborn streak getting in the way.
Not that what she’d just done could possibly be easy to deal with. Her father and his allies had gone out on a limb to support my leadership of the Appalachian Pride, and so far, all I had to show for it was a serial killer stray and group of human psychos hanging dead shifters on walls. When the council found out I’d let a key informant die—at the hands of an unstable rookie enforcer I never should have hired—they’d have my head stuffed and mounted.
It wouldn’t matter how much I cared about Abby, or that I’d brought her on the mission in an effort to protect her. An Alpha is responsible for everything that happens in his territory, which meant that if she didn’t have a damn good reason for what she’d just done, we were both in serious trouble.
“Here.” Warner shoved a handful of kitchen towels at me. “Let’s get the blood off her. Maybe that’ll help.”
Lucas turned her by her shoulders so that she couldn’t see the body on the floor, then unzipped her ruined jacket and helped her shrug out of it. She was shaking all over.
“Abby.” I used one of the towels to wipe a spray of blood on her cheek, but that only smeared it. “Abby, wake up. I need you to tell me what happened.”
She blinked again, struggling to focus on my face. Then she threw her arms around me and I became the third shifter smeared with Hargrove’s blood. But I didn’t give a damn. I held her as tightly as I could without hurting her.
“I’m so sorry, Jace” she said through chattering teeth, her face buried in the shoulder of my coat.
“It’s okay.” One way or another, I would make it okay, so that I’d never have to let her go. “Just tell me what happened, and we’ll deal with it.”
Abby stood on her toes and kissed me, and something deep in my chest began to ache. That was a hungry kiss. That was the greedy kiss of a woman who knows she’ll soon be going without for a very long time. “I am so, so sorry for this,” she whispered against my ear, her arms wrapped around my neck to hold me close. “I wish there’d been another way.”