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“I don’t know.” He squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed his temple. “And trying to remember makes my head scream.”
“Okay,” I said, filing that away. “Then tell me what you do remember.”
“Brisket.”
Not what I’d expected him to say. “Brisket?”
“The Pack supplied the meat for the party, including brisket we’d smoked at Little Red in the new kitchen—there’s a mesquite pit, but I guess that doesn’t matter. I got to the party same time as the van, helped unload the trays.” He held out his arms in a rough rectangle. “You know those big aluminum pans?”
“Sure. The catering pans. I saw you carrying them.”
He nodded. “I brought them in, got them situated.”
“And then what?”
“I went out to the party. Had a whiskey—Cadogan has the good stuff—and walked around, talked to people. I ate and drank and listened to the music, talked to my Pack mates about the Sox, this problem Cole is having with one of his cams.”
“Cams?”
“On his ride. Engine cam.”
“Ah. Got it. Keep going.”
“We thought about asking if we could take a dip in the pool, after the party died down. I figured Sullivan would be game. I wanted to check the water, so I kneeled down, put my fingers in. It was warm, but not too warm. And then”—he winced, rubbed his temple again. “And then I saw something. Or heard something? I don’t... I don’t remember.”
“Something caught your attention?”
“Yeah. But I don’t know what. And then I smelled blood, and I looked around—” He stopped, brow furrowed, and pressed a clenched fist against his forehead. And, like he’d been holding in pain, exhaled loudly.
I moved closer to the glass. “Do you need me to get someone, Riley? For the pain?”
“No. I can handle it.” But he walked to the bed, sat down, and cradled his head in his hands.
His size made it even harder to see him hurting. He was strong, so pain that brought him down would have probably been unbearable to me.
“The next thing I knew,” he said without looking up, “you were standing in front of me, and the woman behind you was screaming. Then the cops showed up.” He looked up again, misery and anger warring in his eyes. “And here we fucking are.”
“Have you ever had gaps in your memory like that?”
“No. When my brain was working again, I recognized the man on the bricks. The delegate from Spain. The one who raged about shifters and vampires working together, then nearly ran into me and tried to blame me for it.”
“Did you know him before the event? Had you talked to him before?”
He lifted his head and his eyes seemed clearer, as if the pain had vanished because we’d switched topics. Could magic have done this? Affected his memory, and made it painful to access?
“Neither. His name, photo were probably in the security dossier.” He tried for a grin. “But I don’t pay much attention to vampires who live a continent away.”
Since I hadn’t given much thought to shifters while I’d been in Paris, I couldn’t fault him for that.
“Would anyone want to hurt you?” I asked.
“I’m a shifter,” he said, as if that explained it completely. “I’ve got enemies like everyone else.” His eyes darkened. “But my enemies would come after me. They wouldn’t kill someone else.”
“Who are those enemies?” I asked.
He rose, walked back to the glass. “You know I did time—before the Pack.”
“Yeah.” Lulu had explained it. Riley was born in a small town in Oklahoma, but left when he was sixteen, looking for excitement. He ended up in Memphis in an independent band of shifters—the Rogues of the shifter world—who didn’t recognize the authority of any Apex outside their own family. Unfortunately, it had been less a family than a gang, and he’d done time for assault and larceny before he tried to pull a con on the wrong shifter. Gabriel hadn’t fallen for it, and he’d apparently seen past the grift. He pulled Riley into the Pack, and Riley had been on the straight and narrow—or as straight and narrow as shifters’ paths got—since then.
