He ran a hand over his grainy eyes. “How can I make these council members understand?”
Keegan cleared his throat. “I’d like to think they will, Harry—if they hear it from you. They didn’t love Marty and me at first either. I was meant to mate with someone else entirely.”
Harry held a hand up. “Hold up. This pack chooses your mate? The hell I’ll be told who to spend my life with,” he grumbled. “Do they even know what century we live in? Next you’ll tell me dowries and goat exchanges are involved.”
Keegan barked a harsh laugh. “You know, there was a time . . . Never mind. The point is they adjusted. They’re not unreasonable. They’re just from another era, one where humans and werewolves don’t mix under any circumstances. So yes, I’d like to think they’ll find a way to understand how this happened.”
“Think they will, Keegan?” Marty erupted in a yelp, disbelief riddling her question. “You have some pull, Keegan! Use it, damn it. I’m not going to sit back and let Mara go to prison because the council thinks she’s a crazy, werewolf-creating little Frankenstein. You know that’s not true! Surely her good reputation within the pack lets them see she’d never hurt a soul? What’s being a good girl for, if not for it to work in your favor? Jesus Christ!” Marty yelled up at him, her face contorted in fear and misery, her fists clenched at her side.
But Keegan didn’t shoot back like one would expect. Instead he pulled Marty to his chest and let her cry into it, releasing her ragged sobs of frustration.
Her raw, agonizing wail made his chest uncomfortably tight. Harry gripped the back of Mara’s couch.
The very couch he’d made the most incredible love with her on. And he was determined, despite their enormous differences, to have the chance to do that again.
Nina knocked his shoulder with hers and hitched her jaw toward the small hallway dividing Mara’s bedroom and the bathroom.
He followed without question. “Say something good, Nina. Say something that’ll keep me from blowing this whole thing for Mara by doing something unreasonable.”
Nina held up her phone, tapping it with a short nail. “Your favorite lame-ass witch doctor Guido just left me a voice mail. I think we got a lead on who snatched the damn kids and Carl. Listen.” She held her phone up to his ear.
Harry grabbed the phone, his eyes going wide as he heard what Guido had to say.
* * *
AS she entered the council courtroom, rich with miles of crown molding and an imposing judge’s bench that appeared a mile high, Mara lifted her chin, refusing to be ashamed of her prison garb. This might be, by far, one of the least flattering outfits she’d ever worn, but Marty’s words, as crazy a time as it was to actually remember them, still rang clear. “Even if it’s the worst fashion faux pas of your life, wear that bitch like you intended it, honey.”
Okay, so that had been in reference to the ugly oversized tie-dyed T-shirt she’d worn with a pair of red leggings and yellow ballet slippers, which Nina had promptly banned, but her jailhouse jumpsuit was sort of on the same level. She just wasn’t a free woman making the choice to wear something so ugly.
Clinking her way to her seat, along with what felt like an endless aisle of pack member after pack member in the crowd, she passed Marty and Keegan. Marty, threats of no contact to the prisoner be damned, reached out and grabbed her hand just before one of the council’s prison guards tried to prevent it, her eyes irate and sad at the same time.
Nina was up and out of her seat in a flash, almost making Mara smile. Except she was on her way to being tried for werewolf-making, and maybe a life sentence. That wasn’t cause for smiling.
Nina lifted her sunglasses and growled at the guard. “Touch a bitch, and I kill you, weasel. You got that?” She leered at him; despite his size, he had to clearly fight to keep his ground. “You’re draggin’ her around like you just caught Charlie Manson the Second. Take it down a notch, brother. You didn’t train at Quantico, and she ain’t some mass murderer. So step off. You do not want to see my vampire rage, poser.”
Mara, after a long sleepless night next to a snoring fellow werewolf inmate doing time for killing a neighboring farm’s cows, almost giggled. It had to be from lack of sleep and maybe a touch of delirium, but somehow Nina ignoring the long arm of the law was a million shades of awesome. “Nina,” she whispered, remembering where she was. “It’s okay. Sit down before they give me extra time for friends behaving badly.”
Nina turned to her, putting her hand up in the guard’s face before he could protest. “You okay, Short-Shot? Anybody bother you in the big house? You say it, I’ll kill it.”