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Guilt rushed across their features.
I didn’t need to yell, to say I’d caught them—it was written all over their faces I’d heard them exactly right. There was no misunderstanding, nothing for them to explain away.
I shook my head and wrapped my arms around myself. I’d been sostupidto actually trust any of them.
Four men had fallen into my life out of the blue at the exact moments I needed them, and I didn’t realize how insanely suspicious that was? I forgot for a moment that I didn’tgetthings like this?
“Wait,” Kase said when I stepped backward.
I held my hand up to stop him. “Do you really think there isanythingfor you to say right now?”
He stilled, then pressed his lips together as if he had to keep himself silent.
Troy’s heavy footsteps made me turn, and the tense expression on his face reminded me we had bigger problems…
Like a killer werewolf in the basement.
“He’s ready,” Troy said.
I nodded and turned my back on Grant and Kase, not needing them to see exactly how wounded I was.
* * * *
The man downstairs wasn’t really a man anymore. I tried to look calm when I saw him for the first time, as though it didn’t entirely freak me out, but he made Troy look normal those times when he’d started to shift.
I recalled Gran once telling me that werewolves didn’t look like men or wolves when they turned, and she’d said it with a rare hesitation in her tone that said she wasn’t a fan of the sight.
I finally understood.
Paul’s face was hardly recognizable, with sharp, high cheekbones and lips pulled up to reveal a mouth full of sharp teeth. His eyes were bright and amber, and his face angled as though a snout had started to form.
He was huge, larger than any man, and with thick black fur covering him. His arms were longer than they should have been and his large hands were tipped with vicious looking claws.
He was every inch the monster people pictured werewolves being.
Heavy chains of silver wrapped around him, and manacles kept his hands behind his back. He was on his knees on the ground, a muzzle over his face made of leather and steel, fastened behind his head.
The chains hooked to two anchors drilled into the cement, and despite the way he twisted, he couldn’t move.
I tried not to think about Troy like that. Would he look the same if I ever saw him fully shifted? Would he have that same anger in his eyes, that violence?
A hand touched my arm and I jumped, so focused on Paul that I’d failed to realize Hunter had walked up to my left. He didn’t pull away, instead giving me a moment to recognize him and relax.
“He shouldn’t have much range,” Troy explained as he walked past me. His words were sharp and careful. Maybe he was thinking the same thing, comparing himself to the beast bound there. “I had him muzzled, and his hands are bound in the thickest silver we could find. That should keep him from being able to do too much damage.”
“Has he said anything?”
Troy shook his head, standing beside Paul, a glow in his eyes that said he didn’t care for this. “According to the wolves who transported him, he hasn’t said anything. He just snarls and lunges, mostly. He hasn’t seemed to sleep, hasn’t shifted back to human, doesn’t respond to even pack dynamics.” At my confusion, he continued, “Dominant wolves and alphas can usually force some amount of submission. No one can reach him.”
I let my hands fall to my sides and shook them out, like trying to release the tension. It felt like the first time I’d tried to follow a spirit trail, when Gran had explained how to do it, had told me to slow my breathing and focus.
I suddenly wished Gran were there. She always managed to make me feel not quite so strange, not so out of my element.
Instead, I was all on my own.
Paul struggled as I approached, and Troy put a gloved hand on the chains that wrapped up and around his shoulders to hold him still.
I shook my hand once more, hard, then held it out. Paul’s skin was burning hot when I touched it, as though he had a raging fever.
