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My larynx squeezed tight again. Another damn lie courtesy of my father. Not just a lie—an elaborate hoax recorded on 8mm film. A lie, but with a very real death, some patsy who probably thought he was playacting until the first bullet brought him to the ground and a pack of big cats fell upon him with fangs and teeth.
Instead of two-and-a-half decades of his bones fertilizing the forest, Mallory had been alive last fall. I prayed he still was and that he would recognize Mosa as his child, prayed he would not hold my disappearance against her. I hadn’t even realized I was pregnant.
“I expected you raging in your cage, like the old times,” Henric said, entering the room and prowling toward its center.
Reaching the metal coffin, he slid off his wedding band and began to tap against the oblong box. The beat was slow, methodical, like the maddening drip of rain on a tin roof.
“How much of my money did you give that little bitch?”
His money?
I wanted to laugh. Henric’s family had been rich once, but that was long ago, all the way back to when it was still legal for one man to own another, and later still when the “right” kind of man could still hold others down. But the Leopold fortunes had dwindled at the same time my father had risen up, mostly by doing dangerous work for big money and investing his earnings wisely. That money and power were what had attracted Henric to me. My husband and my father—neither were good men, at least not to me.
“How much!” he screeched, his voice reaching higher than any hysterical woman I had ever heard, shifter or human.
I drew a deep breath, released a long sigh.
“I lost count after fifty.”
His fist came down on my metal box, his gold watch striking it with each syllable screamed down at me.
“Fif-ty thou-sand dol-lars? You stu-pid cunt!”
“When I stopped counting,” I reminded, a perverse pleasure rippling across my skin that I had both rescued my daughter and deprived my husband of a large enough sum of money to further enrage him.
Henric roared and sent me and my cage flying. Hitting the floor, I was oddly grateful that there were only dime-size holes drilled in the sheet metal instead of bars.
“Mammad!” he roared.
His second-in-command, a sleek snow leopard whose family had immigrated from Azerbaijan in the nineteen twenties, slinked into the room.
Mammad’s gaze darted everywhere but at the space my cage occupied on the floor.
“Find someone to put this trash in the creek,” Henric ordered with a vague hand wave in my direction.
“The creek, sir?”
“Get Joseph to explain,” Henric said, walking from the room. “It hasn’t been so long that he’s forgotten.”
My heart shriveled inside my chest. I knew what Henric meant, had no confusion as to what waited for me in the next phase of torture.
Tow chains would be used to hold the cage suspended mostly in the creek, just a few inches open at the top so that I could breath through the holes. But there would be times when I would have to hold my breath—times when the creek swelled or the trees bowed with the strain of high winds pulling on the chains.
Before, I would always pray that I lived. I had a daughter to take care of, a beautiful, fierce child to raise up into a formidable young woman.
With Mosa free now, I had no words left for me or my salvation.
CHAPTER8
DOONE
Returningfrom a supply run the next morning, I pulled up to the Outlook then made a series of tight forward and reverse turns until I had the tailgate pointing toward the blank hole that was supposed to be the doorway.
I had spent the night sleeping inside the old place, deciding directly after Braeden gave me the money and truck keys that I would grab some of my gear from Mallory’s and head down the mountain and up the other side of the valley to assess the situation while I still had daylight.
The roof and decaying support beams, plus some lumber for a door were my first priority. After taking measurements, it was already too late to get to Buckley before the hardware store closed. I could have gone back to Mallory’s for the night, but I had lived alone for so long that I seemed to have developed trouble sleeping if there was another heartbeat in the room. Not to mention the other noises that came from the old wolf after a dinner of his infamous venison tamales.
Come morning, I could smell that he’d snuck by to check on me. I should have been ashamed that I hadn’t heard him, but he was a seasoned veteran of the pack wars. And I was damned tired. Still, this was a watch post and I’d have to do better. With the little shack fixed up, I could have the best of both worlds—the solitude I had grown to treasure, but a pack I belonged to.
