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I could also forget about leaving with any money despite the grueling hours I put in on the leap’s behalf. Since my last “unsanctioned absence” at eighteen, I couldn’t take so much as a nickel out of petty cash without a lengthy interrogation by my father. And I damn well better have a receipt for every penny I spent when I returned home from what was inevitably a highly chaperoned trip.
Seriously—every penny.
“Don’t lie to me, child!”
“I’m just distracted by a video I was watching,” I snapped as she woke the screen on my computer. “It was on the thumb drive Henric included with the quarterly files. I figured there was accounting data on it, like with the disks, but it was just one video. No other files.”
Crud! Why had I become so obsessed with the stupid clip? Because I thought it was fake? Or because I knew, deep down, that it was real?
My mother paused to scrutinize my expression, her bright emerald irises matching my own but offering a far sharper contrast against the deeper black of her skin.
“Don’t think he won’t kill you,” she hissed as I reached to snatch at the laptop. “Not if you embarrass him again. He’ll kill you and there will be no consequences for him beyond finding someone else to run his reports.”
I froze, an icy mud creeping through my veins. Henric was a truly violent man. There were never marks on my mother’s skin, but she healed with an alpha’s speed. And he could temper his anger when it threatened to damage his interests as the leap’s leader. I had miraculously escaped such overt violence from the bastard.
Instead of beating me—he had caged me. Literally in the initial stages, the box little bigger than a coffin, its form constructed of sheet metal punched with holes so I could breathe and wouldn’t have a puddle at the bottom.
The caging never lasted long—Justine would quickly discover what he had done. But the only way to get me out of his contraption without killing half a dozen guards was for her to submit to the punishment in my place. And Henric assigned a far worse punishment to my mother. He had only put me in the cage, in our basement, my clothes on and with water to drink. Justine went in naked. The only water she received was the water he had her dunked in, the cage suspended over a creek deep in the woods, the water always cold, but unbearably so during winter.
The punishment usually lasted for three days. Each day, he would walk me to the creek three times, asking me on each trip if I was sorry for whatever sin he claimed I had committed. Each time, I cried how sorry I was, but he would say I wasn't sorry enough and that my mommy had to stay in the cage a little longer because I had been so bad.
Eventually, my mother and I became one another’s cage as I tried to be the daughter Henric expected despite everyone in the leap of cat shifters knowing that was never going to happen. I hadn’t inherited his skinny gene or whatever gene it was, human or shifter, that made him a pure sadist. I couldn’t please him, ever. And I damn sure didn’t want to no matter how much I tried to conform.
“It’s just a video,” I repeated, lips trembling as tears threatened to erupt. Honestly, I was ready to pick a mate, someone who was kind, well tempered—someone who could get me out of my father’s house, preferably all the way out into another community of cat shifters.
But that wasn’t the kind of male my father would pick. Nor would entering my own unhappy marriage free Justine from hers.
“Fine,” my mother snorted. “Show me this video.”
CHAPTER2
MOSA
Waking the computer,I unplugged the headphones, brought the video up, and hit PLAY. On the screen, a woman close to my age sat across from a hulking, shadowy male, a mammoth metal desk separating their bodies. A single bright point of light to the side of the table provided the only illumination. The woman squinted as if her retinas were about to catch fire.
“You were there for the massacre of Champaign,” the man accused. The timbre of his voice exposed his shifter nature even though he played a human in the story.
Swiping at the tears that threatened to erupt, the woman denied her presence at the fictional slaughter. The man’s voice grew more menacing, each word a drop of acid violently flung in her direction.
"Who are you crying for?"
She denied she was crying. He pushed forward, his torso almost draped over the table. She shrank further back into her chair as he shouted straight into her face.
"Those tears aren't for the humans you filthy animals murdered!”
The woman swiped at her wet cheeks again, her expression contorting as if she was focused on something she had witnessed in the past. For a brief second, murder sparked in her black gaze.
"You killed twenty of ours for every one of yours!” she accused, the threat of tears making her dark eyes glitter.
The interrogator offered a carefree shrug, his approach swinging from outrage to a casual boredom. His hand lifted, swatting at the air as if he could so easily brush away any culpability.
"Maybe if your kind hadn't been warring with one another before we discovered your existence,” he offered, “you wouldn't be all but wiped clean from the face of the earth, what's left of you surviving only in lab cages."
The man paused, thick fingers strumming against the table's metal surface. "Is that why you weren't with your parents when our soldiers dragged them through the streets until they were nothing more than bones rattling on the pavement? Were you at war with your own blood?”
The prisoner remained silent, her expression stony, her breathing so shallow it was impossible to see the rise and fall of her chest.
"Interspecies reproduction,” the interrogator continued with a malevolent drawl. "That's why they threw you out. Disgusting enough to think of dogs fucking dogs, but you wanted stranger than strange. You wallowed in the mud with others who had done the same, who spawned offspring from these unions. You took a bear totem when your wolf was in estrus."
