Pride (Shifters #3)(53)

“Can you hand me a towel?”
“Oh. Yeah.” I glanced around the bathroom for a clean towel, but had to dismiss the one hanging on the rack with one sniff. Not even kind of fresh. Fortunately, the cabinet over the toilet yielded several clean, folded towels. I shook out the one on top, then shoved it behind the shower curtain with my face averted.Kaci took the towel, and the cheap cotton whispered against her skin as she dried. Then her thin, pale fingers—now immaculate—curled around the edge of the curtain and pulled it aside to reveal a thin, wide-eyed, towel-wrapped tabby, more little girl than young woman. Her hair hung past her elbows in a thick blanket of loose brown waves, struggling to curl on the ends in spite of the weight of the water soaking them.
I handed her the pile of borrowed clothing as she stepped from the tub onto a worn green bath mat. “You’ll have to put these back on until we can get you some new clothes. Sorry.”
She shrugged, and a drop of water fell from the end of her nose. “Hey, it’s better than fur, right?”
“Sometimes. Though fur has its advantages, too.” I smiled, but her expression clouded with a brief flash of fear before fading into doubt and confusion. She didn’t look eager to return to cat form anytime soon, which was perfectly understandable, considering. However, if she waited too long to Shift, she’d pay the price, first with her health, then with her sanity.
And that’s where you come in, Faythe. I could demonstrate what life as a werecat was supposed to be like. I could show her that she had nothing to fear from her cat form, and plenty to gain from it. I could teach her what I’d failed to teach Andrew.
I could save her, where I’d lost him.
I turned away while Kaci dressed and wrapped the towel around her hair, then I walked her back to her room. And now that she knew what he was, instead of ignoring the guard in front of the door, she gazed at him curiously.
“Why is he here?” she asked, settling onto the bed in front of the window as I closed the door on the tom. “Why do I need someone to watch me?”
I smiled in sympathy. She’d have to get used to the Alphas monitoring her every move. That was a fact of life for a tabby, and with Kaci, the council would no doubt double its efforts, especially if she did turn out to be a stray. She’d be unique—even more of an oddity than a tabby who goes to college instead of getting married to raise a litter.
My hands twisted the bedsheet as I tried to decide how best to explain without frightening her. She deserved the truth, and I was probably the only one who would give it to her. Most of it, anyway. “The council is afraid you’ll get scared and run away. It’s not safe for a tabby alone in the woods.” But there was more to it than that, and after a moment’s hesitation, I decided to tell her the truth. “They don’t want you to go at all, but they especially don’t want you to go before you’ve answered all their questions,” I admitted, blushing a bit in shame for my fellow werecats’ selfish motives.
Kaci didn’t look surprised. “When I first woke up, I would have run if I could have opened the door.” She unwrapped the towel on her head and pulled the bulk of her hair over one shoulder, combing through it with her fingers because I hadn’t thought to bring her a brush. 
“That’s only natural. Cats hate being confined, and I’ve certainly done my fair share of running in the past. Hell, I’ve probably done your share too.” I grinned wryly, and could tell I’d piqued her interest when her brows arched high on her forehead.
“Why did you run? Did they lock you in a room, too?” Her eyes grew wide, rimmed with an oddly calm fear, as if such a prospect was distant and not of real concern so long as I was there to protect her.
I cringed inwardly. There were many, many things I couldn’t protect her from, and the council topped what was surely a very long list. But I had to try. A girl who grew up in the human world was not going to appreciate—or be willing to submit to—the werecat idea of what a woman should be. And no one could understand that better than I.
“Yeah, they locked me in several times,” I said when I realized she was still waiting for my answer.
“Why?”
I sighed and leaned back on the bed with my weight on both hands. She wasn’t ready to hear all the details. Hell, I wasn’t ready to think about all the details. “It’s complicated.” I stared out the window at another beautiful fall day I wouldn’t be allowed to truly experience. “I didn’t want to do what they wanted me to do, and I thought the only way to get out of it was to leave. So I ran, and they found me and locked me back up. To keep me safe, of course.” The last phrase sounded forced, even to my own ears.
“You don’t sound like you believe that.”
Her tone drew my head up until my eyes met the piercing, older-than-it-should-have-been gaze in hers. “You’re pretty perceptive for a thirteen-year-old.”
“My English teacher says that, too.” Her head dropped for a moment, and when she looked at me again her eyes were damp with tears she’d thus far refused to shed. “She used to, anyway. When I went to school. Can I stay with you and go to school in Texas? Where you live?”
My heart throbbed painfully, and my throat suddenly felt too thick to speak through. How was I supposed to answer that? I would do my best to make sure she was safe, wherever she wound up, but I couldn’t swear that would be with me. Or that I’d even be alive to see where they put her, because until my sentence was officially announced, I wasn’t in the clear on the whole execution thing.
But I could hardly tell her that.
Still, she deserved the truth… “I don’t know.”
Kaci accepted my nonanswer with the patience of someone long accustomed to going without vital information, as were most children. Silence settled into the room around us, showcasing the ambient sounds from the house at large. Snippets of conversation came from the kitchen, dining room, and living room, and from two different bedrooms came canned fight-noises. In one room, the guys were playing another bloody, pointless video game. From the other, I recognized Jack Nicholson’s distinctive nasal cadence, delivering one of his lines from Wolf.
But above all that was…footsteps.
A confident knock on the door preceded the aromas of pepperoni and tomato sauce by about a millisecond, and I knew from the way Kaci’s nose twitched that she’d caught them both. When I pulled the door open, Jace’s cobalt eyes shined at me in the dim hall light, and I couldn’t help noticing that he carried not one formerly frozen pizza, but two. “I thought you might be hungry, too,” he said, in response to the question plain on my face.
“Thanks.” I took the plates from him and set them on the dresser beside the door. In truth, Kaci could probably have eaten both pies on her own, but I appreciated the gesture. And the food. And the two chilled Cokes he pulled from the pockets of his baggy jeans.I set the cans on the dresser alongside the pizza.
Jace grinned, like he had a secret. “Your dad talked the tribunal into letting you go into town with me and Marc. Because we have no idea what to buy for a thirteen-year-old girl. Be ready in an hour.”
A field trip? That was too good to be true. My eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What’s the catch?”
His smile faded and Jace crossed his arms over his chest in a closed-off posture I recognized from every argument we’d ever had. “Calvin’s sending one of his men, too, to make sure you don’t make a break for it.”
“Wonderful.” I rolled my eyes in exasperation, stopping only when they landed on the eavesdropping enforcer in the hall. Malone’s man would no doubt report everything Marc and I said during the shopping trip.
Jace glanced over my shoulder. “How’s she doing?” He didn’t bother to whisper; she’d hear him anyway.
“Coming right along, actually.” I followed his gaze to where Kaci sat watching us both, making no attempt to hide her curiosity. “But the weird thing is that she knows nothing about us. As a species.”
Jace’s eyebrows rose, and he looked at the tabby again. Then those same brows furrowed in a deep frown. “How is that possible?”
I scowled at the guard still watching us, then met Jace’s eyes again. “I don’t know, but I’m about to find out.”
Twenty-Three

“Who was that?” Kaci asked as I tucked a can under each arm then bent awkwardly to pick up both plates of pizza.
“That was Jace Hammond.” Leaning over the bed, I set both plates down on the rumpled comforter and let the cans fall next to them. “He’s one of my father’s enforcers, and my brother Ethan’s best friend. He’s a really good guy.”
Kaci bit into her first wedge of pizza, then spoke around the bite with one small hand hiding her mouth. “Where’s your brother?”
“Ethan?” I asked, and she nodded, still chewing. “He’s at home. In Texas.”
“Do you miss him?”
I chewed and swallowed my own bite before answering. “Nah. We’ve only been here a few days, and we’ll go back soon.” Assuming I survived my trial. And could stand living on the ranch without Marc…
Kaci shoved the crust from her first piece into her mouth then leaned against the windowsill and popped open her Coke. “So, Jace works for your dad?”