Ethan stepped out from behind my father and helped his best friend into the hall. Jace didn’t look at me on the way out, but Ethan shot me an angry look, as if it had all been my fault.
That’s right, everything’s always Faythe’s fault.
Daddy eyed me harshly, one fist still clenched around the doorknob. “Parker’s on his way to the airport again, and since Ethan’s tending Jace, that only leaves Marc to finish the shift as chaperone.”
Great, he blamed me too. And apparently he’d decided to torture me as punishment for my part in the disturbance.
“No,” I said, burying my nails in a bulbous section of the bedpost. “I’d rather spend the rest of the day in the cage.”
“That can be arranged,” Daddy said, his expression completely indecipherable. “In fact, it’s easier than sparing one of my men to watch you.” He wasn’t bluffing.
Wonderful. Marc it was.
Fifteen
As soon as the door closed behind my father, I snatched Marc’s shirt from the floor and threw it at him, wadded into a ball. He caught it, probably due to instinct rather than intent. While he watched me carefully, apparently expecting me to throw a fit, I grabbed a change of clothes and stomped into the bathroom, slamming the door in his face. Daddy had granted me bathroom clemency, and I was damn well going to use it. I ran a deep, hot bath and soaked until it got cold. Then I let the water out and drew more to wash in.
At first Marc tried to talk to me. He paced back and forth in my bedroom, stopping occasionally to listen, or maybe to think of some new approach to get me out of the bathroom, short of pounding his way in and dragging me, dripping, from the tub.
“I’m sorry, Faythe,” he said, much closer to the door than I’d expected.
I tried to ignore him, wishing desperately that I’d grabbed my headphones before locking myself in.
“I didn’t plan this. I just wanted to talk to you.”
You should have knocked, I thought, clenching my jaws shut to keep the words from leaking out. He’d take even the most hostile reply on my part as encouragement to keep trying.
“I couldn’t help myself. When I saw him on top of you like that, touching you, it was all I could do to keep from smashing his head in.”
Unfortunately, I knew he wasn’t exaggerating. His possessive instinct really ran that deep, but I was no longer willing to accept that as an excuse. Yeah, we were cats, and thus subject to the bizarre behavioral impulses that came with having fur and claws. But we were people too, and Marc seemed to have forgotten that. It was a good thing my father had never sent him to spy on me at school. One night of watching me and Andrew would have been more than Marc could take.
“I like Jace,” he insisted, still pacing. “You know I do. He just doesn’t know when to quit sometimes.”
Neither do you, I thought.
“I know, you probably think I don’t either, but I do.”
My fist slammed into the water, splashing raspberry-scented suds all over the floor. I hate it when he does that.
“I know when to quit, Faythe. I quit when my heart tells me there’s no chance of success. But it’s not telling me that. Not yet. Not about you.”
I let my face slip into the water, as much to escape Marc’s tenderhearted babble as to rinse my hair, and I only came up when I had to either surface for a breath or drown.“…can ignore me for as long as you want. For the rest of the day, or for the rest of the month. For five more years if that’s what you need. But when you finally realize I’m right, I’ll still be here waiting.”
He stopped talking, but he wasn’t gone. I heard him plop down in front of the bathroom door, waiting, just like he’d said he would. Damn, that man is stubborn, I thought, not quite sure whether I should be flattered or annoyed by his persistence.
Finally tired of hiding out in my own bathroom, I stepped out of the tub onto the lavender bath mat, curling my toes in the soft, shaggy fibers. I snatched my robe from the hook on the back of the door and snuggled into it. Egyptian cotton. Mmm. At least my mother had gotten one thing right.
In my bedroom, Marc cleared his throat, reminding me he was still there. As if I could possibly have forgotten. Though, admittedly, I’d tried.
Using my foot, I flipped down the little chrome lever to open the drain. The bathwater swirled out of sight, leaving only the artificial scent of raspberries and my fervent wish that Calgon really had taken me away. False advertising. Figures.
I could hear Marc breathing, and somehow that was worse than listening to him talk. I needed noise. Something loud enough to block his heartbeat from my ears, so that—for a little while at least—I could forget he was there.
Tying the sash of my robe around my waist, I searched the bathroom for something loud. The toilet? No. I’d feel pretty ridiculous after the third consecutive flush. The shower? No. If I spent any more time in water, I’d come out looking like a shar-pei. My eyes settled on the tail of a cord sticking out of a closed vanity drawer. My blow-dryer. Perfect.
I brushed my hair while I dried it, until no single strand remained damp. When I turned the dryer off nearly twenty minutes later, I expected to hear Marc talking again, or at least breathing. But I didn’t.
On bare feet, I crept to the door and pressed my ear against it. I heard nothing. Well, nothing from Marc. A woman was crying somewhere near the front of the house. My guess would be Donna Di Carlo or my aunt Melissa. Men spoke to each other in hushed, frantic tones all over the house, but I was almost positive Marc’s voice was not among them.
Where had he gone? Surely he wouldn’t have left me alone, against Daddy’s orders.
Curious, I hung up my robe and dressed in a hurry, then had to stop and turn my shirt around because I’d put it on backward. I opened the door and scanned my bedroom. Marc was gone. Something was wrong. What now?
Dread flooded my body, settling into my feet like lead and weighing them down. I could barely lift them, and I didn’t really want to. I didn’t want to know what was wrong, or who else had gone missing. There were only five tabbies left to choose from, unless the kidnapper had changed his pattern and gone after one of the dams, the Alphas’ wives.
We were all in trouble if he had.
There wasn’t an Alpha in the world who wouldn’t shred anything and anyone standing between him and his wife. Marc’s attachment to me paled in comparison with what most Alphas felt for their wives, which was probably why Daddy hadn’t punished him for what he’d done to Jace; Daddy understood. There was nothing my father wouldn’t do for my mother. Nothing at all.
I crossed my bedroom slowly, reluctantly, and was reaching for the doorknob when it began to turn on its own. The door swung open. I stepped back, expecting to see Marc. It was Michael, looking just as surprised to see me as I was to see him.
“Marc said you locked yourself in the bathroom.”
I stared up at him, trying with no luck to read his expression. “I’m out now.”
“I see that. Can I come in?”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Sit down,” he said, coming in without permission. I stepped back to make room for him, but remained standing. He closed the door, and my heart began to pound.
Crossing my arms over my chest, I took another step back, rubbing my elbows to have something to do with my hands. “Did Daddy send you?”
Sympathy leaked into his eyes. “You know he did.”
I nodded. Marc wouldn’t have left without my father’s permission and a really good reason. Something was wrong, and it had to do with the whispers coming from the living room and the woman crying in the kitchen. “What happened?”
“Are you going to sit?”
“No. Just tell me.” I was already tired of begging for answers. Why was everyone always beating around the proverbial bush, as if I were too delicate a flower to withstand whatever had gone wrong this time?
Michael leaned against the door and took off his glasses. He exhaled softly as he inspected the lenses of his useless spectacles. “Vic just called. They found Sara.”
They found her? That was good news, so why wouldn’t he put down the damn glasses and look at me?
A chill raced through me, leaving my hands cold. I crossed the room to my dresser and grabbed a bottle of lotion. My hands shook as I squeezed a dollop onto my palm. I used the back of my wrist to flip the lid closed and tried to set the bottle down gently, but it fell over on its side. “Where?” I concentrated on smearing the lotion all over my arms, working it in especially well on my elbows.
Michael settled his glasses onto his nose. “At home. The bastards propped her up against a tree in her own backyard, like a life-size doll.”
My eyes darted to his face as I tried to make sense out of what he’d said. Propped her up? I could think of several reasons Sara might need to be propped up, but there was only one reason to bring her home, and it wasn’t because she’d said “pretty please.”
Michael’s lips were still moving, but I couldn’t hear him. I glanced down at my arms, rubbing at the lotion in quick, spastic motions.
“Are you listening to me, Faythe?” he asked, concern narrowing his eyes. He took three steps away from the door, then hesitated.
“No, I’m not.” I reached across my dresser for more lotion and knocked over an unopened bottle of perfume my mother had given me for Christmas three years earlier. The glass didn’t break, which was fortunate, because I knew without ever having smelled it that the scent would give me a migraine. Nearly everything my mother picked out for me gave me a migraine. Or maybe they were tension headaches.