“You have a lovely voice,” I said, and I meant it. Her voice was clear and young, as was her complexion, in spite of having spent at least the past few weeks without access to soap and showering facilities. Her voice, skin and manners gave the only hint that her life had once been something else. Something pure and good, and completely unrelated to the wilderness nightmare that had become her reality at some point.
The tabby didn’t return my smile. She blinked, and that gleam in her eyes was gone. She wrapped the blanket around her torso, tucking it beneath her arms like a towel, likely a habit left over from her life before…whatever had brought her here.
From downstairs came the sound of water running. Someone was taking a morning shower. I had to get her talking posthaste.
Struggling to maintain a smile that now felt painted on my face, I set the bowl on the floor and faced the tabby. “Feel any better now?”
She shook her head. “Not much.”
“I’m sure you’re exhausted. But if you can answer a couple of questions for me, I’ll go away and let you sleep for a while.” Just as soon as the doc has examined you…
That time she didn’t deny her exhaustion—a definite step in the right direction. “What kind of questions?”
I smiled encouragingly. At least, I hoped it was encouraging. “Your name, for starters.”
“Kaci Dillon,” she said, and my heart tried to burst straight through my sternum.
Success! I’d now gotten the tabby to eat, Shift, talk and tell me her name, when she wouldn’t even tolerate the doctor’s presence. No matter what happened next, the Alphas couldn’t deny that I’d gotten the job done. That I had value as something other than an incubator.
But the tabby wasn’t done. “Kaci-with-a-K-and-an-I.” She said it as if the whole phrase was one word, and her speech had the distinctive cadence of long-term habit, as if she’d said that same thing nearly every day of her life. I could sympathize. No one ever spelled my name right the first time either.
“Nice to meet you, Kaci. I’m Faythe-with-a-Y-and-an-E.” My smile widened, and I was delighted to see a tiny echo of it on her face. She was happy to have made me happy. Or else she was laughing at me silently.
Hoping fervently that it was the former, I said, “You look pretty young.” Hopefully much younger than you actually are. I inhaled slowly, then asked the question before I could chicken out. I needed to know, whether I wanted to or not. “How old are you, Kaci?”
“I’m not that young.” She twisted her face into a look of displeasure; it was a bit like watching a pixie frown. A very thin, dirty pixie. “I’m just a late bloomer. At least, that’s what my mo—” She stopped in midword and looked away, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out how the sentence ended in her head. “Anyway, I’m not as young as I look.”
Thank goodness. But her reassurance wasn’t enough to unclench my hands in my lap. “So? How old are you?” Please, please, please say seventeen. Sixteen, even.
“Thirteen. And a half.”
Shit. Ohhhh, shit. Thirteen and a half was too young for…anything. There was no way any enforcer worth his own canines would let a tabby that young out of his sight. Especially with her parents dead.
“Thirteen and a half?” I heard the flat, shocked quality of my own voice and winced at it, even as Kaci frowned. How the hell had a thirteen-year-old survived on her own long enough to become so thin and malnourished? It just wasn’t possible, even if she had been stuck in cat form the whole time, which was how the story seemed to be shaping up.
“Where are you from, Kaci?” I tried to hide the horror in my voice, without much luck. But before she could answer, a loud, persistent knock came from the other side of the door.
Knowing none of the toms I’d left in the hall would interrupt us, I sniffed in that direction and felt the blood drain from my face, even as the voice bellowed from the hallway.
“Katherine Faythe Sanders, get your tail out here now!”
Damn!
“I’ll be right back,” I whispered to Kaci. Swallowing thickly, I started to stand, but then sank back onto the floor when I noticed that Kaci’s eyes had gone huge. “Don’t worry,” I mumbled, shoving sleep-tousled hair back from my face. “It’s just my dad.”
Seventeen
“What were you thinking, disobeying a direct order?” my father demanded, and I had to stand on my own foot to keep from scuffing my bare, freezing toes in the dirt. I hadn’t even had a chance to put shoes on before he marched down the stairs and out the back door, his very posture an unspoken command for me to follow. All the way to the woodpile stretched between two trees behind the main lodge.
“I was thinking about what Marc said earlier. Right now the council has no use for me—no reason to keep me alive. The best way I can help myself is to prove them wrong. To prove myself useful. Indispensable. So when Dr. Carver said she might calm down for another woman…”
My father’s scowl deepened.
Shit. I shouldn’t have mentioned Dr. Carver’s part in the whole thing. Now he would get his ass chewed, too.
“It’s not his fault, Daddy. He didn’t make me do it. No one did.” But that wouldn’t matter. If I went down, the doc would go down with me. And we probably wouldn’t be alone.
I stared into the skeletal branches overhead, trying to remember what I was originally getting at. Oh, yeah… “But my point is that I finally had something to offer. Something no one else could do.”
Early-morning sunlight highlighted the gray patches at his temples as he shook his head, mouth already open to interrupt. I rushed on before he could. “No one else could have gotten her to Shift, Daddy, much less talk. She was too afraid of the guys to relax enough to even listen. She split Dr. Carver’s arm wide open!”“Which is exactly why we said no one was to go in there alone! We’re all here trying to keep your head attached to your shoulders, yet for some reason, you feel the need to flaunt your disobedience in front of the very tribunal demanding your life! Not to mention how badly hurt you could have been. You had twenty stitches removed from your stomach not ten hours ago. We cannot afford to have you injured again.”
“I’m fine.” I spread my arms, showing him how perfectly intact I was.
“You could have been mauled.”
“Yes. I could also be struck by lightning on my way back to the cabin. Or I could be hit by a falling tree. Or run over on the crosswalk. Life isn’t safe, Daddy. Not for your little girl, and certainly not for one of your enforcers. I saw an opportunity to prove my own worth and help that poor child, and I took it. I stand by my decision.” Though I was so nervous about it my hands were starting to sweat in spite of the cold…
“And furthermore…” I rushed on, ignoring both my own nerves and whatever he’d been about to say. “I think you should be proud of me, instead of mad. I think I did exactly what you would have done in my place.”
My father’s face turned purple faster than I could backtrack. “What I would have done is irrelevant.” He stepped into my personal space and I backed up instinctively, groaning inwardly when my spine hit the tree trunk. “I am your sire and your Alpha. I do whatever has to be done, in large part because whelps like you can’t remember to follow orders!”
“Okay, yes. You’re right.” Like he needed me to tell him that. I exhaled slowly, gathering my wits as I grounded myself with the feel of the bark beneath my fingers. “But what you would have done is not irrelevant. It’s imperative. You’re training me to take over for you one day, right? To be as good a leader to the Pride as you are now.”
I probably shouldn’t have played the successor card, especially coupled with a heavy helping of sycophancy. But if the ends justified the means… “How can I do that better than by emulating you?”
His scowl deepened. “You’re not going to get out of this with flattery, so don’t even bother.”
Damn. “Fair enough.” I sighed and made myself meet his angry stare. “But can you honestly tell me you would have let that poor girl—that child—suffer alone out of fear for your own safety, when you could help her and everyone else by simply showing a little courage and compassion?”
For a moment, my father only looked at me, and I held my breath in anticipation of his reaction, mortified to realize I was scolding my-Father-the-Alpha. Oh, shit.
Then, to my absolute amazement, my father crossed his arms over his chest and nodded, by all appearances conceding my point. “Well said.” His face showed no hint of a smile, meaning that while he might—by some miracle—be proud of me, he was far from happy. “I hope you can say it again just like that, because no matter how good your intentions were, they don’t excuse you disobeying a direct order. The tribunal is going to want a word with you.”
“Yeah, I figured.” I closed my eyes for a moment, thinking. When I opened them again, I found my father watching me, still in that same closed-off posture. “I’ll do whatever I have to do. Apologize, take another suspension, or even a night in the cage.” Since we both knew there was no cage here. “All I ask is that you protect Kaci.”