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The infant squirmed before drawing in a long, quivering breath that presaged a scream.
“Hush, little one,” he said, sliding the sling’s strap over his head before nestling the child inside. “We’re all done here. It’s time to take you home. With her last breath, that’s what your mother wanted.”
Someday he would have to tell the child about the woman he had shot.
The woman—and the wolf.
CHAPTER1
MOSA
The sharp gazeof my mother, Justine, sliced into me from the other side of the office suite we shared. Despite the distance, her irritation punched at my nose with the pungent pheromones she excreted as an alpha shifter. The bitter fragrance warned of an imminent and furious outburst unless I quickly diffused her anger.
At a minimum, I needed to actively pretend to work instead of looking at my laptop’s screen with the fixed stare of one recently condemned to death.
Removing my headphones, I wrestled my attention back to our community’s quarterly financial report. As with every other quarter for the last few years, the necessary data had been delivered to my desk in a box filled with papers, computer disks, and, unexpectedly this time, a thumb drive at the bottom.
The delivery was an unnecessary waste of effort. Every last byte of the financial data in the box existed on the community’s internal servers. Only I couldn’t access those servers—the prohibition a product of my nearly life-long history of trying to run away from my father and the leap of shapeshifters he controlled. Such prohibitions happen even when said person has reached the ripe old age of twenty-five and should—under the rules of western civilization—be able to walk away from her family and community, never to return.
Unfortunately for me, the world of cat shifters isn’t that liberal—especially for presumably fertile females. The men want us pushing out cubs like gum drops in a candy factory.
Strike that—they want us pushing out cubs like bullets in a munitions factory or blades in a knife factory.
Feeling Justine’s foul mood spike over the line into outrage, I minimized the media player running on the left side of my screen. The act of obeisance triggered a defiant burning sensation in my right index finger, scouring the flesh with an ill-advised desire to swipe across the touchpad of my laptop. Swipe and click, first calling up the video again before tapping the play icon.
After a morning of uncomfortable silence between us, Justine finally spoke.
“Do you not have enough work to do, Mosa?” she demanded, the glacial tone a contrast to the way her gaze stung my flesh like flakes of burning metal. “Or is sitting in a temperature controlled office on a cold, rainy day such a burden that you’d prefer to clean toilets in the community center when your father returns and discovers the report unfinished?”
Her threat triggered a rush of bile from my stomach up to my throat and all across the tastebuds at the back of my tongue. One of the primary functions of the community center was housing unmated male shifters. The place was one colossal pig sty of impudent, groping hands belonging to men who didn’t care if I was their esteemed leader’s only child.
Not that Henric would care—or that he was truly esteemed. He kept saying I was too old to remain without a mate and at least one cub of my own already.
Scratch that. He would care when it came to the males at the center. They were too low status. But he liked swinging the threat of letting them all have multiple turns with me over my head like the legendary sword of Damocles. Already considered an old maid, my window to pick a mate we both found acceptable was closing fast.
Soon, he would pick one for me.
Biting back a growl, I executed a print command for the report. Usually I could proof it on the screen, but not today, not with the enticing video lurking a swipe and click away.
Rising from her desk with all the sleek, stealthy grace of the panther that was her totem, my mother intercepted me before I reached the printer. Wrapping a hand around each of my elbows, she squeezed to the point of inflicting pain.
“What is wrong with you today, Mosa?”
A line of motherly concern tinted the edge of her question, but it was no more than a pale border to the highly controlled anger that always raged beneath the surface of her skin. I tried to ease my elbows from her grip. The attempt only caused her to squeeze my flesh more harshly, pulling me toward her at the same time.
“Always a problem child,” she growled.
I rolled my lips inward, teeth pressing down on them to contain the words that wanted to erupt. I didn’t even know what I would say, just that I had a lot to say and I wanted every last syllable to be hurtful.
Tit for tat, pussycat.
Shock bloomed across her face as she must have accurately read the expression I couldn’t contain. She released me like my flesh had turned to molten lava, then whipped her body toward my desk.
“You’ve decided to run away again!” she accused.
“No!”
My entire being denied the claim with a vehemence that belied an essential truth. After my first attempt at nine, I was always planning to run away. I just hadn’t figured out how I could avoid getting caught like all the previous times. And hatching a plan wasn’t easy when my driver’s license and birth certificate had been in a safe I couldn’t access for the last seven years.
