I lay still in near darkness, unwilling to move until my eyes had a chance to adjust. As a cat, I would have had no problem seeing, but my human eyes make much less efficient use of the available light.
Wait a minute…
I closed my eyes in concentration, willing them to Shift, as they’d done in my bedroom the afternoon before. For more than a minute I waited, lying on my stomach, trying to force the change in my face. Nothing happened. When I opened my eyes, I saw only vaguely defined shadows against a background of murky gray.
It was that damn tranquilizer. It had to be. I added an inability to Shift to my growing list of reasons not to ever let anyone sedate me again.
My hands and feet were unbound, and my watch was gone. When my eyes had adjusted to the gloom, I sat up. My fingers tingled, and my wrists and ankles felt raw when I rubbed them, my flesh still indented from the nylon cord. I hadn’t been free for very long.
Suddenly panicked by the memory of Miguel’s lecherous leer, I ran my hands over Marc’s Aerosmith T-shirt and my denim shorts, looking for rips. There were none. A quick check for cuts and bruises revealed only a fresh bruise on my knee and the two needle marks I remembered receiving—one on each thigh. I sucked in hot, humid air and sighed, relieved to find no unaccounted-for marks or aches.
Satisfied with my physical condition, all things considered, I turned my attention to the bare twin mattress beneath me. It was thin and cheap but felt new and smelled clean. How thoughtful. A new mattress, just for me.
“Faythe?”
I spun in the direction of my cousin’s voice, but the tranquilizer had left me dizzy, and I almost fell flat on the mattress. “Abby?” I squinted in the dark. “Where are you?”
“Over here. In the cage across from you.”
Cage? She was in a cage?
My eyes were starting to focus, and I made out a double row of metal bars, one several feet beyond the other. I was in a cage, too, in a basement, if I had my guess. We had to be underground or in some kind of concrete-reinforced room for outside sound to be muffled so effectively. I could hear nothing but my heartbeat and Abby’s. The near silence was eerie. Just like the basement at home.
Great. I’ve traded one prison for another.
Standing for a better view, I gripped the bars for balance as vertigo threatened to topple me again. Yes, it was a basement, lit only by muted daylight filtered through two grimy, horizontal windows near the low ceiling. The floor was concrete, cooler than the warm, humid air, and rough against my bare feet.
“Are you okay?” I asked, squinting again as I looked her over for obvious injuries. Her clothes appeared undamaged, a T-shirt bearing her high-school mascot and a pair of tight jogging shorts. A deep bruise marred one side of her face, a purple stripe stretching from below her eye to the edge of her chin. Her huge brown eyes were ringed with dark circles, which made them look haunted. Fortunately, other than the bruise and the bags beneath her eyes, she looked unharmed.
Abby’s hair had grown since I’d seen her last; it now fell halfway down her back in a bright red curtain of perfect corkscrew ringlets. But nothing else about her had changed. She was still tiny—just over five feet tall—and thin, with almost no curves to speak of. At seventeen years old, she could pass for twelve.
Though my brain knew she was almost grown, my eyes saw a child locked behind bars in a dark basement, bruised and scared. But she wasn’t alone anymore.
“I’ve been better, how ’bout you?” Abby asked from her own cell, maybe five feet away.
“Fine, as far as I can tell. How long have I been out?” I turned in a slow circle, glancing around at what little I could see of my new surroundings. There wasn’t much to look at.
“I don’t know. They brought you down about an hour ago. Maybe a little less. I didn’t believe they’d actually caught you until I saw your face. I was so sure they were lying.”
I didn’t know whether to thank her for what I assumed was a compliment, or explain how—idiot that I was—I’d swum right into their net. So, I changed the subject. “What do they want?” I sank onto the floor to sit with my legs crossed.
She shrugged. “I was hoping you could tell me. Didn’t they send a ransom note, or a list of demands, or something?”
“Nope.” I shook my head. “No contact at all. Not so much as a phone call to take credit.”
Her disappointment tugged at my heart, but I didn’t know how to make it any better. So I changed the subject—again. “Any idea where we are?”
Abby shook her head. “I don’t know anything. I’m not even sure how long I’ve been here. What’s today?”
“Wednesday.”
Her eyes widened. “Only Wednesday? Really?”
I nodded, intimately familiar with the way time sometimes seemed to stand still. “Assuming I wasn’t unconscious for more than a day.”
“You couldn’t have been,” she said, staring past me, obviously deep in thought. “They got me Monday night, but it was morning when I woke up here. And they didn’t leave to go after you until…” Her eyes met mine in question. “This is Wednesday?”
“Yeah.”
“Last night, sometime shortly after dark.”
A timeline began to take shape in my head. They’d gotten Abby roughly thirty-six hours earlier. “Wait a minute.” I glanced at her, daring a tiny smile. “You’ve only been here a day and a half.”
“So what?”
“So, they got me around five this morning, and if they were here with you at dusk the night before, we can’t be more than six or eight hours away from the ranch.”
She rolled her eyes, unimpressed with my Nancy Drew routine. “Yeah, but that could be anywhere.”
“Not really.” I stood to pace the length of my cell, thinking aloud. “They’d be stupid to keep us in any of the territories. We’re in one of the free zones. We have to be.” Pausing in mid-pace, I closed my eyes to study the U.S. map I’d committed to memory back in junior high, overlaying it with the territorial boundaries I knew by heart.
Impressed with myself, I opened my eyes and smiled at Abby. “Mississippi is the only one they could have gotten to in less than eight hours.”
Huh. I guess my teacher was right after all; geography had come in handy in the real world. But I had yet to use an augmented matrix outside of class.
“How far is Mississippi from the Lazy S?” Abby asked, her eyes tracking my movement as I resumed pacing.
“You can drive to Jackson in about six and a half hours. How long did it take you to get here?”
She shrugged. “I have no idea. I was in and out of consciousness. But it felt like a long time.”
I frowned as if that told me something important. It didn’t, but I saw no reason to shoot holes in my own credibility. “I bet we’re in Mississippi.”
Abby was quiet for a moment, processing the new information. “Okay, so how does that help?”
Good question. It took me nearly a full minute to come up with an answer. “Knowing we’re in Mississippi means it won’t take the cavalry long to get here. The council’s meeting at the ranch now.” Not great, but it was the best I could do. And figuring something out, however small, made me feel useful.
“The whole council?” Abby asked, excited now. “My dad?”
“Yeah, and your mom too.” I used Marc’s shirt to wipe sweat from my face. My heart throbbed painfully as his scent triggered a jarring flashback of the night before.
“Faythe?” Abby stared at me, concern weighing down the corners of her mouth. “You were talking about the council…” she prompted.
I blinked, clearing my head as well as my vision. “Yeah. Daddy called a meeting yesterday.”
She stood, following me from behind her own bars as I resumed pacing across the front of my cage. “Do they have a plan?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t in on the meeting.” I just couldn’t tell her that I was getting drunk and laid while the Alphas were trying to figure out how to get her back.
We paced in silence, and I used my stride to measure the size of my cage. Fourteen steps across the front, placing my feet heel-to-toe. By my guess, the cell was about ten feet long.
In her cage across from mine, Abby lowered herself to sit yoga-style on the floor, watching me with huge, sad eyes.
“Abby?”
“Yeah?”
I wanted to ask her about Sara but was at a complete loss for a tactful way to broach the subject. I’d been waiting for her to bring it up, and could only think of two possible reasons to explain why she hadn’t. The first, and most preferable, was that she didn’t know. Sara could have died before they took Abby. In fact, Sara’s death might even have been why they took Abby. A new toy to replace the broken one.
The second possibility was much more disturbing. What if Abby hadn’t mentioned Sara because she knew exactly what had happened and wasn’t ready to talk about it yet? What if she’d seen what they did to Sara?
“Faythe?” Abby said, pushing a sweat-damp curl from her forehead.
“Sorry. I zoned out again.” I decided not to ask her about Sara. She’d tell me what she knew when the time was right. For her, not for me.
Abby drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “Yeah, well, zoning out may come in handy later.” Her eyes drifted down to a spot on the floor between our cages, making it impossible for me to interpret her expression.
Oh, no, I thought, sitting across from her as she sniffled and refused to look at me. Because she was alive and apparently unharmed, I’d assumed they hadn’t touched her. At least not yet. But I was wrong.
Before I could work up the courage to ask her what had happened, wood creaked overhead, and her focus swung up to the ceiling. Mine followed automatically. It was the first sound I’d heard from outside the basement since regaining consciousness. I knew what it meant, but Abby said it for me.
“Someone’s coming,” she whispered, hugging herself in a gesture so automatic I was sure it was unconscious. She scooted away from me on her backside, putting as much room as possible between herself and the door to her cage. “Pretend you’re still out, and he’ll leave you alone for now,” she said, her eyes wide and shiny with unshed tears.
“What do you mean?” I rose to grip the bars, dread twisting my stomach into knots.
“Shh,” she hissed. “Lie down. And don’t move, no matter what. I’ll be okay.”
Something squealed overhead: an old doorknob turning.
There was no time to consider the wisdom of taking orders from a seventeen-year-old. There was no time to do anything but comply.
Slick with nervous sweat, my hands slid down the bars. I dropped onto the mattress just as light flooded the basement from an open door at the top of a wooden staircase.
For one precious moment, the whole room was illuminated, but from my position, I saw only cinderblock walls and a third, unoccupied cell. As I watched with one eye slit open, a pair of boots appeared on the top step. They were unfamiliar, as was the voice accompanying them.
“Good evening, Abby-cat.” He closed the door, and the light winked out, blinding me again until my eyes had another chance to adjust.
Abby didn’t answer. I couldn’t see her without moving, but I heard her shoes slide across the concrete as she continued toward the back of her cage, now on her feet.
The boots clomped down the stairs, marching into view beneath a pair of faded jeans and a plain white T-shirt. The man wearing them had wavy blond hair and a build sturdy enough to strain the material of his shirt. He was a tomcat, and definitely not a stray, based on his smell. But try as I might, I couldn’t identify his birth Pride.
He sneered, twisting his mouth into a frightening approximation of a smile as he stepped down onto the concrete. “Aren’t you going to say hi, Abby-cat?”
“Fuck off, Eric.”
I almost laughed out loud. I’d never heard my baby cousin cuss before, but she did it well. I was proud.
“Now, that wasn’t very nice.” Eric pulled his shirt off, dropping it on the floor just outside her cage, and my heart ached as I stared at it. “We’ll have to work on your manners.”
He dug into his front right pocket and came up with a key, which he used to open the padlock holding her cage door closed. I couldn’t see him anymore, but the squeal of metal on metal assaulted my ears as he opened the door.
Abby’s heart rate increased, and I knew that as a cat, I would have smelled her panic.
Eric’s heart sped up too, but in anticipation, rather than fear. “Are you going to behave yourself?” he asked.
She huffed at him. “Are you?”
He laughed, and a chill traveled up my back, making my imaginary fur stand on end. “Never, Abby-cat.”
“Quit calling me that.”
Metal clanged as he swung the cage door shut, but I didn’t hear him lock it. “What would you prefer?”
“I’d prefer that you take a few deep breaths underwater.” Abby sounded scared, which I’d expected, but she also sounded weary, as if her big talk was merely to cover up how tired and hopeless she really felt. Lying there listening, I knew her rebellion wouldn’t go beyond words. She might have fought in the beginning, but now she was too worn down.
Eric’s boots clomped twice. Rubber slapped the concrete as Abby dodged him, presumably running for the cage door. She’d only taken three steps when I heard a scream, followed by a dull thunk and her moan of pain. Then there was nothing but twin racing heartbeats and his deep breathing.
I turned my head for a better look, but Eric was too preoccupied to notice my movement. He was using a handful of Abby’s bright red curls to press her face against the bars.
That’s how she got the bruise, I thought, fury scorching a path from my heart down to my toenails.
Eric’s free hand slipped beneath her shirt. Abby whimpered once, then her jaws tensed as she gritted her teeth. “That’s better,” he said in a falsely soothing voice. “See, it’s not so bad.” He ran his hand down her stomach and beneath the elastic waist of her jogging shorts. Abby stiffened and closed her eyes. A tear ran down her cheek.
Son of a bitch! I couldn’t just lie there and watch, no matter what she’d said. I sat up, fists clenched in my lap. “Get your hands off her,” I whispered, fighting to sound calm and in control, neither of which I actually felt.
Eric’s head swung in my direction, but he recovered from his surprise quickly. “Hello, tabby,” he said, visibly tightening his grip on my cousin’s hair.
“No, Faythe,” Abby moaned, but I ignored her. As long as my heart was beating, I couldn’t sit there and watch someone hurt her without trying to help.
I used the bars to pull myself up, shooting Eric my best pick-on-someone-your-own-size look. “Let her go. Now.”
“And if I don’t?” He grinned, jerking her head back.
Abby gasped, and another tear rolled down her bruised cheek.
I growled, showing Eric my human teeth. “I’ll rip your throat out.”
“That’ll be kind of hard from all the way over there.”
“So come closer and give me a fair shot.”
Faced with a personal challenge, Eric couldn’t turn me down without looking like a coward. I’d already concluded—based on his looks—that his ego might get in the way of his common sense. I was right. Yes, I was judging a book by its cover, but Eric was a picture book at best, with no large words to distract from the pretty illustrations. Besides, some stereotypes have their basis in truth, and my bet was that I was looking at one very dumb jock.
Elastic snapped as he pulled his hand from Abby’s shorts. Still sneering at me, he tossed her across the cell by her hair. She hit the far wall of bars, but this time her raised arms absorbed the impact. By the time she sank onto her mattress, rubbing her new bruises, he had already swung her cage door shut.
Abby looked from him to me through wide eyes, shaking her head at me in silent warning. We both ignored her.
Eric clicked the lock closed, already leering at me with a slimy smile. “I was hoping you’d wake up soon,” he said, pocketing the key.
“You’re in luck.” I tried to control my galloping pulse, knowing he could hear it. At least, he could if he bothered to listen for it. “Why don’t you come see how far you can get with a real woman? Or do you only have eyes for little girls?” In spite of my bravado, my chest tightened as he ran his eyes over me, lingering in all the usual places. His appraisal showed a pathetic lack of imagination.
“Aren’t you the eager one?” he said, still a good three feet from my cage. “Don’t worry, your turn’s coming. Not with me, though. Miguel wants you all to himself.”
I pressed myself against the bars, trying to tempt him closer. I only needed one good shot… “You scared?”
“Not of you, tabby.” He licked his lips in appreciation of the view, and I swallowed to keep from gagging. “But I have a healthy respect for Miguel. Those jungle cats don’t like anyone else’s shit in their litter box.”
Litter box? I thought. No wonder the guy has to play snatch-and-grab to get some attention.
Flattered as I was by the description of me as someone’s toilet, I managed to keep my reply on topic. “Sounds to me like you’re a scaredy-cat.”
Eric’s eyes hardened as he came a step closer. “Talk to me tomorrow, and we’ll see who’s scared.” He scowled down at me, clearly trying to intimidate me with his height and bulk. Apparently he’d had some success with that tactic in the past, because he seemed unable to understand why it didn’t work on me.
I met his eyes without blinking, letting him see how undaunted I was. I saw no reason to fear a man who preyed on children. Men like Eric chose victims who didn’t fight back; he’d want nothing to do with me when there weren’t bars between us. Unfortunately, that meant he probably wouldn’t come close enough for me to snatch his key, either.
“Stay away from my cousin,” I demanded, hoping to piss him off by ordering him around, like an Alpha to his subordinate Pride member.
Still well out of reach, he gave me a taunting smile, and I was reminded of people who go to the zoo to tease the lions from behind a thick pane of safety glass. “Sorry, but that little tabby’s mine,” Eric said. “Bought and paid for.”
Bought and paid for? A chill shivered through me at his phrasing, and I glanced at Abby for clarification. “What’s he talking about?” I asked, but she shook her head. She didn’t know.
“You’ll figure it out,” Eric said. “I heard you’re a smart one. College girl, right? You’re a long way from campus now. Long way from home, too.” He started to turn away, and I saw my chance for escape slipping through my fingers.
Desperate now, I clucked my tongue, shaking my head in mock sympathy. “Just not Alpha material, are you, Eric?” I said, daring him to prove me wrong.
He pivoted slowly and wrapped his hands around the bars of my cage, on either side of my own. Staring down at me, he growled deep in his throat.
Unimpressed, I let contempt shine in my eyes. I’d heard better. Hell, I’d done better. “Come on in and prove you’re a real man. Or can’t you get it up for an adult?”
Eric snarled, his face aflame with rage. Before I could react, he thrust one hand into the cage and grabbed the back of my head, slamming the left side of my face into the bars. Pain exploded in my cheekbone, radiating in all directions. Soon I’d have a bruise to match Abby’s.
Wincing, I pushed against the bars with both hands, trying to pull my face away from the cool steel. It did no good; Eric was as strong as he looked.
Great job, Faythe, I thought. You’ve got him right where you want him, now.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, my words muffled from having my jaw pressed into the bars. “Did I strike a nerve?”
His fist clenched, pulling several of my hairs out by the root. “You just remember who roughed you up first when Miguel has you nailed to the floor.”
“Remember this.” My right hand shot out, and I raked my nails down the length of his face, echoing the shape of Abby’s bruise. Though short, my nails were sharp and hard, even in human form, and I gouged four long ruts into his cheek. He howled and let go of my head.
Pleased, I stepped back out of his reach as he clapped a hand to his ruined cheek. It came away bloody.
“You stupid bitch!” he yelled, turning to snatch his shirt from the ground. He pressed the wad of white cotton to his face to absorb the blood. And there was plenty of it, for such shallow wounds.
Maybe they’ll scar, I thought, barely resisting the urge to clap my hands and jump up and down with glee. Instead, I made a show of slowly licking his blood from my fingertips, one at a time. “Mmm. Tastes like fear to me.”
Eyes wide, Eric spun and ran for the steps, tripping and fumbling his way to the top. Voices and light flooded the basement as he shoved the door open, but they stopped abruptly as he stepped across the threshold. An instant later, the new silence was replaced by derisive ribbing. I couldn’t help but gloat.
“The kid too much for you?” Miguel asked between fits of barbed laughter.
“Your bitch-kitty did this,” Eric said, fury rolling from his voice like smoke from a fire.
“Faythe’s awake?” a new voice asked, and my smile died on my face. I scrambled to the far corner of my cage, desperately pressing my still-throbbing cheek into the bars. But no matter how I turned, I couldn’t see into the room at the top of the stairs.
“I told you not to touch her,” Miguel said, his accent thick with anger. “You got what you deserved. Close the door.” Someone pushed the basement door shut, cutting off the light and the voices. But I’d heard enough.
I sank to my knees, numb with shock and betrayal. I’d recognized the new voice. I hadn’t heard it in ten years, but I’d know my brother’s voice anywhere. It was Ryan.