Everyone except Robyn, who would not want to return. Even after a two-week reprieve.
“That won’t work,” Wade insisted.
“It’ll be a hard sell,” Faythe admitted.
“So do what I’m going to do. Make it work.” I ended the call and sank into my chair, my eyes closed.
How the hell did this happen?
Going into the council meeting, Faythe, Jace, and I had agreed that our petition had about a fifty percent chance of succeeding. Not great odds, but not bad for a first attempt. We were prepared to be turned down and ready to appeal the decision.
Worst case scenario, we were prepared to wait for Blackwell to die. His son-in-law was rumored to be much less old-fashioned. His grandson even less so.
But if the council didn’t get Robyn back—soon, unscathed, and willing to cooperate—they would blame me. At the very least, my abilities as an Alpha would be called into question, and if I was found lacking, I would not get a second chance.
Thanks to Robyn.
Yet even knowing all of that…I wanted her to stay. She was as smart and fierce as any of my enforcers, and she was a damn sight prettier than any of them. She was also a stray who personally understood what most of my men had been and were still going through.
Robyn felt like a Mississippi Valley Pride member.
I exhaled deeply, then slid my phone into my jacket pocket as I stood. All eyes turned my way when I stepped into the kitchen.
“Well?” Abby stood from her barstool, holding a half-eaten sandwich.
I turned from her to Robyn, who’d hardly touched her food, other than to shred the crust. “I bought you two weeks.”
Robyn swiveled on her stool until she faced me, brows drawn low over wide blue eyes. “Two weeks of what?”
“Hiatus. Vacation. Interlude.”
“Vacation.” She looked like she’d bitten into a clod of dirt. “And then what?”
“Then you go to Atlanta and finish your training.” I picked up my glass and took a sip. “After that, when the council is sure you’re no longer at the mercy of your instincts, you’ll get your life back.”
“In what form?”
“What do you mean?”
Robyn pushed her plate away and stood. “I’ll get my life back in what form? Can I finish school? Can I go see my parents, instead of checking in over the phone on approved calls, so they know I’m still alive?”
I shrugged. “Of course.”
“Maybe,” Abby said.
Jace exhaled slowly. “The school thing is complicated, Robyn. You only have one semester left, right?” he asked.
She nodded. “For my bachelor’s, anyway.”
“So you’d need permission from your Alpha—whoever that turns out to be depends upon what Pride you join—for a leave of absence, of sorts. And permission for temporary residency from the Alpha of the territory where the school’s located. That’s Abby’s brother Isaac.”
“My understanding is that that’s routine,” I added, when Robyn’s scowl began to deepen. “My toms will have the same privileges, once our Pride is recognized.”
“It is routine. That’s how I was able to go to school in Jace’s territory. And Isaac will totally give you permission,” Abby assured Robyn.
“Unless the council doesn’t want him to.” Jace drained his glass and reopened the bottle. “Isaac’s the junior-ranking council member, and I can tell you from experience that that position comes with pressure from all sides. You vote with a senior ranking Alpha on something he wants, and he’ll vote with you on something else. Or vice versa.”
“So, to finish school, I’d need permission from two different Alphas?” Robyn glanced from Abby to Jace, then back. “But I won’t get that without approval from the council? How is that freedom?”
“Well…” Abby picked up her glass and stared into it.
“Our society works differently from the human world.” I pulled Robyn’s stool out for her and sat in the one next to it.
“So I’ve noticed.” But she didn’t sit.
“Most of the rules are out of necessity,” Jace said. “The rest are to accommodate instincts that make cats territorial. You can’t walk into someone else’s territory without permission. That would trigger aggression, on both a personal and a societal level.”
“It’s like that for all of us,” I explained. “Even cats with no authority or seniority feel possessive of their own space, be it a neighborhood, a house, or even just a bedroom.”
“I don’t have a space of my own,” Robyn said. “My bedroom used to be Sara’s, and it’s like living in a shrine.”
Oh. Suddenly her impromptu defection made even more sense. “I suspect that’s part of why you’re unhappy with the Di Carlos. You’re living in someone else’s space.” And they’d taken away everything familiar to her. School. Her best friend. True contact with her human family. “When you return, I’m sure they’d be happy to let you make the space your own.”
“Yeah. They’re totally going to want to box up their dead daughter’s stuff so I can hang my own posters and sleep under my own comforter.”
“It’s been five years,” Abby said. “They need to move on.”
“I need to move on.” Robyn finally sank onto the stool next to me. “What if I don’t want any part of this territorial system? Can I opt out entirely? Like Abby did?”
“When you’ve completed your sentence, you can try to defect,” I told her. “But that will only get you stuck in one of the free zones, without access to friends, family, and schools in any of the other territories.”
“And that’s why you’re doing this?” Robyn turned to me. “That’s why you’re giving up autonomy in the free zone and subjecting yourself to the rulings of some arbitrarily manned committee?”
“It’s not arbitrary,” I told her. “And I won’t just be subject to it. I’ll be a member of it. Part of the decision making process. I’ll be in the position to make things better for my men. And women,” I added, when her brows rose.
“As long as those men and women are willing to live by your rules.”
“They’re not my rules. They’re the rules. And they’re there for a reason.”
“Fine.” Robyn stood again and took a deep breath. “Let’s get this ‘vacation’ started. Where can I shower?”
Abby stood. “I’ll show her.”
As the ladies headed out of the kitchen, I watched Robyn with a heavy feeling in my heart and Jace poured another inch of bourbon into my glass. “You know she has no intention of leaving in two weeks.”
“I know. I have two weeks to change her mind.” And to get myself on board with what I had no choice but to do.
“How are you going to do that?”
I drained the glass. “I have no fucking clue.”
FIVE
Robyn
“Abby and Jace are across the hall, and I’m a few doors down,” Titus said from the bedroom doorway, his arms crossed over a suit jacket that looked preposterously over-the-top for one in the morning. “In case you need anything. But this space is yours, for as long as you’re here. Please feel free to make it your own.”
I sat on the bed and pulled the bathrobe closed to cover my knees, while my wet hair dripped on his guestroom comforter. “Make it my own.” The words sounded as meaningless as they felt. “The problem with seizing the moment is that the moment is typically too brief to accommodate advanced planning.”
Titus laughed, and for a second he looked like a normal-yet-abnormally-gorgeous guy who didn’t have eight bathrooms, and hundreds of human employees, and a dozen shifter enforcers, and millions of dollars. And a smile that lit up his gray eyes like a lightbulb shining through a smoky room. “You didn’t bring any of your stuff?”
“There wasn’t time to pack a bag.” I hadn’t even thought to grab my shampoo or my makeup. “But I’ll do my best to take ownership of the designer colors and meaningless art your interior decorator chose.” I lifted one corner of th
e comforter beneath me. “Is this silk damask? Would you call the color ‘antique red’ or ‘blood of thine enemies’? Because I know which way I’m leaning.”
Titus’s left brow rose, and his amused gaze sent heat blazing toward the most private parts of my body. “You’re making fun of me?”
“I’m trying. What do I have left, if not my sense of humor?”
“Your life.” Abby shimmied through the doorway from behind him, her poof of red hair brushing the shoulder of his jacket. “Your friends. A two-week reprieve from Donna Di Carlo and her collection of ceramic angels.” She sank onto the bed next to me with a folded stack of spare clothes. “How many does she have now? Last time I was there, I counted more than a hundred.”
“There’s easily double that now. And they all look like Sara. Which is super-creepy.”
Abby’s smile wilted like a dead rose.
“I’m sorry.” I am such an asshole. “You knew her, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. I…um.” Abby cleared her throat and set the clothes on the bed between us. “I saw her die.”
“Oh. Shit. I’m sorry, Ab.”
“It’s okay. That was a long time ago.” She shook her head, and her smile returned. “I brought you something to sleep in, and some clothes for tomorrow. These are all I have that might fit you. We’ll go shopping in the morning and get everything else you need.”
“We can get a new comforter,” Titus added with a grin. “If you’d rather have ‘dark as the stain upon my soul’ with black velvet trim.”
“Ha. I think I can make do with the red, thanks.”
“Okay. I’ll see you ladies in the morning.” He backed into the hall and closed the door.
Abby turned to me with wide brown eyes. “I can’t believe you did that!”
“Criticized his decor?” I grabbed a pair of pajama shorts from the pile and stepped into them beneath the borrowed robe. “He’s an Alpha, not a god.”
“I can’t believe you snuck into his car! You put him in a really tough position.”
“You mean like the position you put Jace in?” I let the robe fall and pulled a soft pink T-shirt over my head.
Abby rolled her eyes. “That was different.”
“I was making a point, not an accusation. We do what we have to, right? You told me that.”
“I know, but…”
“Look, Ab, I had no idea they’d hold him responsible for what I did. I’m not trying to make enemies.”
“Good, because if you want to stay here, Titus is the friend you need to make.”
I crossed the room to hang the robe on a hook on the bathroom door. “Who says I want to stay here?”
Abby frowned. “I thought you didn’t want to go to the Southeast Pride.”
“I don’t. But it’s no better here. It sounds like this isn’t the free zone anymore, and it doesn’t do me any good to step out of one cage and into another. And that’s exactly what Titus is turning this place into.”
“Okay, but it’ll be different here,” she insisted.
“No, it won’t. Titus couldn’t get his Pride accepted if it weren’t just like all the others. Well, almost like the others.”
Shit. I sank into the desk chair as the truth hit me like a blow to the gut. What kind of revolutionary activist gives the disenfranchised and underrepresented a vacation? I asked for sanctuary. Autonomy. Instead, I got two weeks in a beautiful mansion with a gorgeous young Alpha.
But what’s in it for Titus?
“He’s in acquisition mode for the element he’s missing,” I mumbled. “Damn it, Robyn!”
“What are you talking about? What element?”
“He needs a wife, Abby. You can’t have a Pride without an Alpha and a dam. But he can’t have you, because you’re with Jace. Which is why he’s being so nice to me. And that means he’s no different than any of the others.”
“You think he wants to keep you here?”
“Considering he looks at me like he’s starving and I’m the last scrap of food in the fridge? Yeah. I think this is an audition. At the end of this two-week ‘vacation’, he thinks he’ll have a decision to make. Whether to send me back, or keep me for himself.”
“He may think you’re pretty—I mean, the man has eyes. But he wouldn’t use you to complete his Pride, Robyn.”
“Of course he would. He’s an Alpha. Running other people’s lives is what they do.”
My eyes flew open in the dark as footsteps pounded down the hall toward my door. I sat straight up in bed, panting as if I’d been running for my life, and if I’d woken up a second later—
I shook my head, dislodging the nightmare and my narrow escape from human hunters determined to hang my severed head on their wall. Was I screaming? Is that why someone was running toward my room?
I glanced to my left, expecting to see Sara Di Carlo’s green alarm clock numbers, but found a window instead, where moonlight gleamed through sheer curtains.
Oh yeah. I was in the not-so-free zone.
I looked to the other side and found red numbers floating in the darkness above the marble-topped nightstand. Three-oh-four. I’d only slept for an hour and a half.
“Titus!” a voice whisper-shouted from the hallway, and on the tail of his name, I heard three sharp thumps that could only be a fist hitting a door. But not my door. “We got another one!”
Heart racing, I threw off the covers and jogged across the large bedroom. When I opened the door, I found Abby and Jace standing in the doorway of their room across from mine, staring down the hall.
“Titus!” Drew Borden knocked on a double set of doors at the end of the hall, a cell phone clutched in his right fist, baggy jeans hanging low on his hips beneath a white tee. “Spencer’s on the line. He’s bringing in another one.”
The left-hand door opened, and Titus appeared, wearing nothing but a pair of sleep shorts, which showed off his nicely sculpted chest.
Stop it! You’re not attracted to him, Robyn. Your body thinks you should be, because you’re a tabby and he’s an Alpha. But it was my eyes, not my hormones, noticing how soft his lips looked, and how his biceps bulged, and how pretty his steely irises were. Titus Alexander was an attractive man by any standard. With or without shifter impulses pushing me toward him.
I had no intention of being used by him, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t look. Right?
“Sorry. My cell was on silent.” Titus took the phone from Drew. “Spence? How far away are you?” He listened for a moment, and though I could hear a deep voice over the line, I couldn’t make out the words. “Okay, take him downstairs as soon as you get here. We’ll get a space ready.”
Titus pressed a button on the phone, then handed it to Drew. He disappeared into his room for a minute, then came out wearing jeans and holding the button-up shirt he’d worn beneath his suit jacket the day before. “Jace?” Titus asked as he passed me, pushing his left arm through the sleeve of his shirt. “Up for this?”
“Always.” Jace kissed the top of Abby’s head, then gave me a polite nod and followed Titus and Drew toward the staircase at the other end of the hall.
“Where are they going?” I asked, as three sets of heavy footsteps clomped down the wood treads.
“Spencer’s bringing in a new stray,” Abby said, on the tail of a yawn.
“Spencer’s one of the enforcers?”
“No, just a Pride member. He works in the ER. Every now and then, they get a case of scratch fever mistaken for the flu. Spencer gives them IV fluids, and when they’re released, he brings them here. Titus and his men can help better than any ER doctor, and the fewer blood tests run on new strays, the better.”
“Because someone will eventually find something weird in the sample?”
“That’s the fear, yes.” She nods. “But it’s not likely as long as they’re only testing for specific illnesses, like strep and flu.”
“So, where are they taking this new guy?” A door squealed open downstairs, then everything went quiet as
it closed again on three sets of footsteps.
“They use the basement beneath the guest house as an infirmary.”
I thought about that for a second. Then I headed for the stairs. “Let’s go!”
Abby caught up with me in the kitchen, carrying a pair of slip-on shoes, but I headed into the backyard barefoot. The tiles were cold against my feet as I raced across the porch and down the steps. I passed the pool, which was covered for the winter, then crossed a small patch of grass in front of the guest house.
The door was ajar, so I went in without asking and followed the echo of voices to a stairwell off the small, high-end kitchen.
“Robyn!” Abby called as she followed me down the stairs. “Wait!”
At the bottom of the steps, I could only stop and stare. The basement was small but brightly lit, and divided into two distinct halves. On my left, steel bars were set into the floor and ceiling forming two old-fashioned jail cells. Both stood open and empty. Each cell held a stainless steel toilet and sink, as well as a twin-sized bed bolted to the floor. As I watched, Drew made the mattress in the farthest cell up with a clean fitted sheet.
“You keep new strays in prison cells?” I demanded.
All three of the toms looked up, obviously surprised to see Abby and me, in spite of my stomping down the stairs.
“It’s a precaution,” Titus said. “We don’t close the cells unless we have to, and there’s a private bathroom over there.” He pointed to an open door in the other half of the basement, past shelves of medical supplies, a kitchenette, and a small round breakfast table. “We modeled it after the one in Faythe’s basement.”
“With improvements,” Jace said.
“Hers doesn’t have a kitchenette,” Abby added. “And hers is for detention, whereas we mostly use this one for acclimating new strays.”
“Think of this more as a hospital than a prison,” Titus said. “We only lock the cells if the patient gets violent, and that’s as much for his good as for ours. But most of them are just sick.”
“Like you were,” Abby reminded me.
The guesthouse front door squealed open upstairs. “Hey! A little help?” a new voice called, and in answer, I heard the clomp of more footsteps, coming from the second floor of the guest house.