“Until we understand exactly what happened,” Drake rasped instead of doing physical harm, “you’re a liability to everyone around you.”

  Before he could continue, Lynette gave up on struggling free of me and instead burst out with a reveal of secrets she and I both knew weren’t meant to be shared. “He can be a Stray!”

  The night seemed to grow darker and colder in the silence that followed. Weeks ago, Drake had explained to me that he didn’t always do his duty the way the higher-ups thought necessary. If a werewolf broke shifter law through no fault of his own, sometimes Drake was able to spirit the accidental offender away. Create a new life and a new identity for the one in danger while faking his untimely death.

  Lynette, I gathered, had been a Stray even though she wasn’t a werewolf. Her scorchy hands must have put her on the shifter radar in a negative way. Whatever the reason, she was more familiar than I was with the hidden werewolves Drake protected. She should have known better than to risk their lives by speaking of their existence in front of a near stranger.

  For the first time, I thought Drake might actually kill the boy in front of him. The scent of fur filled the air and Erik grunted as if the hands around his throat had tightened.

  “Stop it!” Lynette demanded, fighting anew against my grip.

  And Drake breathed out loudly through his nose then asked a question of Erik that calmed his ward back down. “You have a family who will miss you?”

  “I…I live with my aunt and uncle, sir. They wouldn’t be surprised if I took off.”

  Drake’s voice deepened. “Will you submit to being put into a cell? To not knowing if you’ll ever be allowed to leave where I take you tonight?”

  Before Erik could answer, Lynette was calling reassurance past me and Drake. “It’s not so bad there,” she promised. Then, her final words, clearly aimed at Drake: “Except for the cell part.”

  “Necessary,” he rasped.

  “If it’s necessary for him,” Lynette countered, “then it’s necessary for me too.”

  This from the girl who’d been kidnapped and caged for over a year, the trauma making it hard for her to sleep inside. Last month’s short-lived repeat hadn’t done her mental health any favors either. At Rosa’s, I woke up most mornings with Lynette in the bed beside me, fear having made her sneak in to join me overnight.

  Erik couldn’t have known that. Or maybe he did. Maybe Lynette had revealed all of her own secrets during the short time the two spent together.

  Whatever the reason, Erik answered Drake’s questions in the affirmative. “A cell sounds good, sir. It’ll protect Lynette from me if whatever happened happens again.”

  It was the best thing he could have said to defuse the tension in both Drake’s and Lynette’s muscles. Still, neither of them spoke to each other during the two-hour drive that came next. Two hours crammed shoulder to shoulder with their silence and one very wide awake kitten made my vehicle feel like a much smaller car.

  Our destination was high in the West Virginia mountains where the Strays unable to be reintegrated into society were housed. I’d imagined those outcasts weathering the winter in tents and lean-tos, but the cluster of A-frame cabins Lynette and I reached after that awkward drive and another, less awkward hour on foot looked more like an alpine ski village than a refugee encampment.

  The buildings were just barely visible by starlight as the two of us lingered at the edge of the trees, taking in the view with a leashed Neko perched on Lynette’s shoulder. Drake and Erik had gone on ahead in wolf form, likely making it to the end of the trail a good long while ago. Plenty of time to get Erik situated in a cell without traumatizing Lynette with the clang of a metal door and the click of a lock. Plenty of time to alert any sentries that we were coming up behind.

  So the man who stepped out from behind a tree trunk should have been expecting us. He shouldn’t have had a reason to press just a little too close into my personal space then to lash out and grab my dominant hand.

  Wolf. Danger.

  Trusting my nose, I fumbled for the slit in my skirt, but of course I wasn’t wearing a skirt. The dagger Kira had given me hung from my belt, snapped into place with a fastener that didn’t respond quickly enough when I tried to yank it loose with my left hand. By the time I’d armed myself, my captured appendage had been raised up to the stranger’s lips.

  Not an attack then. Or at least, not the kind my instincts had warned against.

  The barest brush of a kiss might have heated my cheeks under other circumstances. But this stranger’s touch felt wrong and his teeth flashed just a little sharper than they should have in a human mouth.

  He also didn’t release me as he murmured a greeting that referred to, but largely ignored, the teenager by my side. “I’ve prepared Lynette’s old cabin. Allow me to escort you there.”

  As he spoke, he winged one elbow, although how I was supposed to take his arm without him releasing my hand was beyond me. This wasn’t the sort of gentlemanly behavior I’d grown accustomed to in my partially forgotten past. Its facsimile pretended politeness while actually assuming obedience instead.

  “Unhand me, sir,” I demanded, knowing my wording had come out archaic but unable to find the modern equivalent after such a long day and night.

  Archaic or not, my order worked. The stranger released my hand while striking his own chest with a clenched fist. “I’m wounded to the core. Your beauty overcame me and…”

  Lynette’s snort interrupted what I suspected was about to turn into an extended monologue. “Leave her alone, Cedric.” Then she pointed at a building that I was pretty sure had a glass roof on one end—created for a claustrophobic teenager, maybe? “That one’s mine. I’m going to check on Erik, but you can…”

  “We’re both going to check on Erik,” I corrected. Then, nodding at the shifter I was very glad to be leaving behind, I called upon the sort of politeness that worked as a brushoff. “A pleasure to meet you, I’m sure. If you’ll excuse us…”

  Cedric laughed softly, letting us leave without additional pawing. But when I glanced back just before following Lynette into the building she’d led us to, Cedric was still staring after us with his wolf rampant behind human eyes.

  Which was an issue to be dealt with later. For now, the sight of Erik in a cell had turned Lynette from a self-contained woman-in-training into a lip-quivering child. She raced across the room and grabbed onto the bars as if she had a chance of tugging them loose. “Erik!”

  In response, his larger hands closed over hers. “It’s no big deal. Look, I have a bed, a toilet, a sink. I’m fine. You can go to your cabin and come see me in the morning.”

  “I’m staying.”

  “Figured you’d say that.” Erik motioned with his head rather than releasing his contact with Lynette, bringing our attention to a second small bed pushed up against the wall on our side of the bars. “So I had them bring in a cot for you.”

  He hadn’t merely demanded a cot for Lynette. Unlike his spartan sleeping area, hers involved a mattress with sheets and blankets, a pillow for her head, and two plump throw cushions for pure prettiness.

  “Your bed should be like this too,” Lynette complained. But she smiled as her fingers trailed across the satin blanket edging. And she accepted the hot chocolate I made from the packets beside the microwave, at least she did after demanding I prepare another round of this marvelous modern invention for Erik’s sake.

  Night was already half over, but Lynette’s jitters didn’t fade until Erik dragged his cot up against the inside of the bars, she dragged her cot up against the outside, and I shifted to fur form to become the living hot-water bottle that always soothed Lynette back to slumber after one of her nightmares.

  By the time the sun came up, we were all sound asleep, even the semi-nocturnal kitten. And it wasn’t the sun that woke me, but rather Drake’s voice.

  In human form, I wouldn’t have been able to make out words on the other side of the solid walls, but my vulpine ears picked up on his rasp despite the barrier. “What is it?”

  He sounded tired and cold. I’d wondered where Drake had disappeared to, and this was my answer. He’d spent the night outside, guarding Lynette without riling her up with his presence. Her fuming, I suspected, would have lasted much longer than half an hour if he’d peeked inside to check on us while she was still awake.

  The other voice wasn’t quite as familiar, but I identified it after a little brain racking. Seth, a friend of Lynette and Drake’s who I’d met briefly a month ago and who was also, apparently, one of the Strays. His voice was tighter than I remembered it being as he said, “You need to come see this.”

  I could imagine Drake’s firm head shake. “I need to be here. Tell me.”

  A pause, then Seth delivered the bad news. “It’s Cedric. He fell over a cliff last night. We found him at the bottom this morning. He’s dead.”

  Chapter 10

  Tru

  Cedric, the hand kisser? Despite his behavior, a pang shot through me. And with the pang came a nerve-wracking chill.

  Because although Cedric might conceivably have had a penchant for sleepwalking that could have caused him to stumble over the edge of the cliff under his own steam, the possibility seemed awfully coincidental. What were the chances that the only Stray Lynette and I met last night was also the one who was found belly up not many hours later?

  I peered across the pillow at my ward. She was childlike in slumber with one hand tucked up underneath her chin. Meanwhile, the other arm hugged herself as if, even sandwiched between me, Neko, and Erik she still felt alone.

  Alone and mixed up in this new puzzle due to familiarity with Cedric. That didn’t have to mean lost sleep however. For another half hour at least, she could just be a kid.

  So I wriggled out from under the covers with slow caution and landed fox-silent on the floor beside the cot. Then I shifted to humanity and scooped up the bundle of my possessions…only to freeze when the clink of zipper against floor tiles broke the silence.

  Lynette didn’t stir, but Erik’s eyes cracked open. He rose up on one elbow, mouth parting in what was bound to be a Lynette-waking question. Quickly, I shook my head, laying a finger across my own closed lips before pointing at the girl between us. If instinct was right and Erik honestly cared about my ward…

  Sure enough, he nodded and subsided back against the mattress without asking what I was up to. Only once I’d watched Lynette’s closed eyelids for another long moment did I leave them, slipping out the door and striding barefoot through the thin blanket of snow toward the alpha who’d stood watch so long his shoulders were dusted with white.

  “Cold?” Drake rasped, the warmth of his breath puffing white into the air between us. He wasn’t looking at my pebbled nipples, but I blushed anyway, feeling my body’s reaction to being naked in his presence as a tingling that counteracted the encircling chill.

  Still, I beckoned him further from the closed door before stopping to dress. And I kept my voice quiet as I murmured the information he wouldn’t have known already.

  Cedric had greeted me and Lynette last night. He’d been pushy but had let us walk away from him when I forced the issue. Our contact might possibly be related to why he’d died in the hours since then. The thread would need to be tugged.

  Drake’s phone chimed just as I was finishing my recital and after a quick glance down, his gray eyes flattened. Rather than reading me the text, he just tilted the screen to share more bad news.

  Kira was reporting in bright and early just as she’d promised with information about the license-plate number Erik had given us. It did indeed match up to a vehicle that was registered in the vicinity of the accident. But the car had been locked in a garage for months, Kira’s sleuthing turning up so much dust on its hood that it couldn’t have been driven yesterday.

  Plus, the man on the vehicle’s paperwork was no longer available to drive anything. Ambrose Reed, my ex-husband and Erik’s former alpha, was the owner on file.

  “Erik lied.” Drake’s rasp was colder than the snow melting between my toes. I hadn’t pulled on socks and boots yet, but dressing was now the furthest thing from my mind.

  “He couldn’t have killed Cedric,” I countered, not disagreeing so much as trying to piece together the puzzle. “He’s been in that cell since the moment I saw Cedric alive.”

  “An accomplice?”

  “Kami.” I spun in a tight circle, taking in the quiet village full of sleeping Strays…and, perhaps, one vengeful spirit. Then I winced as I realized what must have happened. “Lynette lent Erik her cell phone last night. He said he wanted to text his folks and tell them not to worry. I should have stopped them. Should have at least looked over his shoulder to make sure he contacted who he said he was going to contact…”

  My shiver now had nothing to do with cold.

  Rather than answering, Drake knelt at my feet. Lifting one foot, he wiped my toes free of snow, slid on a sock, then laced a boot around my frigid appendage. “You had no way of knowing.”

  “Maybe not. But if Erik told Kami where we were and she killed Cedric, then everyone here is in danger.”

  And perhaps Lynette was in danger also, alone in the room with the object of her affection, even with metal bars holding them apart?

  I must have tensed because Drake answered my unspoken concern. “I ordered Erik not to harm her.” He was still on the ground, his hands unbearably gentle as they lifted my other foot, drew on the other sock, cinched tight the other boot. “That came after he willingly swore to obey my commands.”

  My muscles relaxed just a little. Erik had, in essence, accepted Drake as his alpha. And, as such, any order Drake gave would be much longer lived than ordinary alpha commands.

  “I also don’t intend to move out of earshot,” Drake continued. “Still, getting the rest of the Strays to safety is a priority. There are sealed envelopes in my office to be handed out, telling each Stray where to disappear to. The safe is in the wall behind the desk. Here.”

  He was on his feet now, not bothering to brush the snow off his trousers as he handed me a key. I took it and my gaze followed his gesture toward the office where he clearly intended me to set an evacuation in motion. My feet, however, remained planted firmly in place.

  “You don’t intend to interrogate Erik in front of her, do you?”

  Drake shook his head. Then he winced as if remembering something that pained him. “The big boss is also due to arrive this morning. She likes to look everything over on the first of the month.”

  The big boss was what Drake called the woman who acted as his handler. I’d seen her during infrequent video chats and wasn’t a fan. She liked using Strays as collateral to push Drake into jobs that went against his moral compass.

  Still, I shrugged. “I’ll be polite,” I promised. “Does she get an envelope?”

  “She’s well able to take care of herself. The thing is…” He closed his eyes, voice trailing off.

  I’d never known Drake to be speechless. Careful with his words, yes. Pained when he spoke too long, sure. But unable to complete a thought? This wasn’t like him.

  “Drake,” I reached out to touch his hand. “What is it?”

  He growled deep in his throat then relinquished one more tidbit of information. “I call her the big boss, but she prefers a different name.”

  I could only imagine. Big boss sounded tongue-in-cheek, as if Drake was acknowledging the middle-aged woman’s role without quite granting her the honor that should come with that position.

  “What name?” I asked when Drake went silent.

  “She prefers,” he muttered at the ground, “that I call her Mother.”

  Chapter 11

  Tru

  There was so much to unpack about that statement, but now wasn’t the time. Instead, I left Drake cooling his heels—literally—outside the building in which Lynette slept cuddled up to a kitten and a possible accomplice to murder, then I entered the office Drake had pointed me toward.

  Back at Rosa’s, Drake rented a room that he treated like hotel accommodations. The few times I’d been inside, I’d seen no personal possessions. Suits were hung in the closet while clothes that wouldn’t wrinkle remained in a suitcase. He appeared to own no books or electronics beyond a tiny pair of earbuds and his phone.

  At first glance, this office was the polar opposite. A healthy twining philodendron had been trained all the way around the window. An ornate bookcase along the neighboring wall was full of well-loved texts ranging from children’s classics on the lowest shelf to philosophy and histories across the top. Two deep armchairs angled toward each other as if begging for conversation. And when I flipped the light switch, lamps glowed warm behind stained-glass shades.

  But none of it smelled like Drake. The room was redolent with fur, half a dozen scents strong enough to distinguish easily while several more twined underneath them. Nowhere, though, could I pick out Drake’s personal lemon, neither the sweet, desserty version nor the harsh cleaning-fluid reek he sometimes exuded while at work. This might be his office, but it was used by a wide variety of Strays who, I now guessed, had selected the books and the chairs and the plant and the lamps.

  The safe was different. It wasn’t hidden behind anything, but the handle smelled of polish rather than shifter. If I had to guess, that metal had been cleaned along with all the other surfaces many times since it had been opened last.

  Turning the key in the lock felt like invading Drake’s personal space, far more than when I’d offered to put clean towels on his bed at Rosa’s and he’d thanked me without flicking an eyelash. He hadn’t minded me accessing his bedroom then because there’d been nothing personal within.

  The inside of this safe was the exact opposite.

  There were letters, of course, a thick stack of them which I pulled out as requested. But two other items shoved into the back captured me before I could talk myself into turning away.