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Lillian scoffed. “I am not stupid, and I am not crazy!” Her voice shook as she gritted out the words. Between hunger and cold and the aftermath of combat, Liliana’s hands were far from the only thing trembling, but she faced her enemy defiantly. “If I let you go, I know you will still try to kill me.” Her hands clenched in angry fists.
Does he think I’m stupid?
“I just want to talk to you.” His breath fogged in the column of light from the LED on his gun. His deep voice sounded soothing, like she was a wild animal he tried to calm.
Pride and anger straightened her spine to her full height, about even with the wolf’s shoulder. “Fine. Talk to me then, Celtic wolf. Talk to me without your weapons or your fangs.”
“Did you kill those soldiers?” he asked her.
“No. I did not.” She forced herself to meet his eyes again. If she could make him believe her, then they could both go home.
“Then why did you run? Why did you set a trap for me?”
Her shoulders sagged. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me. I know what you are. The colonel who owns your allegiance sent you to kill the murderer. You would not take my word over your employer’s. And he did not believe me either.”
He clenched his teeth. “No one sent me, and no one paid me. I’m no mercenary.” His mind filled with images reminding Liliana of her nightmares. Red wolf mercenary packs slaughtering Others without mercy. His memories came from snippets of old combat footage. His horror at those images came close to the intensity of her own, and she had lived it.
She feared the monsters.
Peter Teague feared becoming a monster.
That surprised her. She looked deeper into him, curious about a red wolf who refused to kill for money. She saw unshaded honesty. He genuinely believed what he said.
Yet he clearly worked for the powerful Sidhe colonel, even if the Fae insisted he wasn’t paying the Celtic wolf to hunt her. The wolf-kin thought he was there simply to stop more soldiers from dying, but Liliana’s eyes showed her clearly the handsome colonel telling him and Sergeant Zoe Giovanni about the problem. He didn’t promise Peter Teague money, but he did ask them to stop whoever was killing his men.
“You think I am a widow spider.” Liliana shrugged. Even if the red wolf only sought to protect innocents, he still wanted her dead. “You would have killed me if I hadn’t run.”
“What’s a widow spider?”
Liliana tilted her head. “Has no one taught you about the drinkers of life?” Vast knowledge of Others was passed down in the Celtic wolf packs. The wolves knew the secrets of the Others, their habits and weaknesses. That knowledge, carefully guarded by the red wolf packs, was part of what made them such valuable mercenaries.
He shook his head. “My mother and father were killed by unseelie Fae when I was little, and they were the last of our pack. I was adopted and raised by a human woman who didn’t know anything about Others.”
“Oh.” Liliana felt oddly sad for the orphaned wolf, raised with no knowledge of his heritage. “I, too, was raised by a second mother who was not of my species after my other two parents were killed.”
“I’m sorry.” His face and voice sounded sincere. But he was certain she’d murdered soldiers and would murder more if he didn’t stop her. He was still determined to get free and either kill her or take her to Detective Jackson to put in a cage.
Liliana could not let herself like this wolf. He was her enemy. It wouldn’t hurt to educate him though. “When a widow spider is pregnant, she must inject into male Others acidic venom that slowly dissolves bones and organs while maintaining life as long as possible. Then, she drinks the men’s dissolved insides while they’re still alive. If the pregnant widow spider does not do this, she and many of her unborn babies will die.”
“And you’re not pregnant?”
Liliana ducked her head, embarrassed. She was not old enough yet to be pregnant, not for four more years when she reached her one hundred fiftieth birthday. But she did not have to tell her enemy that. “I am not a widow spider. Just as you are a Celtic wolf, not an ordinary wolf-kin. I am a different kind of spider-kin, a spider seer.” Liliana opened all her eyes at once and showed him.
“Whoa.” The wolf looked at her face with wonder even in the midst of his fear. “I just saw glimpses of your eyes this morning, behind the veil. I didn’t get a chance to really look at them.”
As the wolf admired her eyes, she looked deeper into him with all her eyes at once. She sought not just to know if he spoke truth or lies, but who he truly was inside.
First, his high intelligence was obvious. His mind churned through possibilities and probabilities based on the evidence he’d seen. Images of the gruesome murders flashed past. A woman about her height and build had been caught on a poor resolution security camera at the night club and described by witnesses at the basketball game. Street and drone cameras had not been able to track where she took the men. They were found later, dead in hotel rooms.
His suspicious, calculating mind was exactly what she would expect from someone who worked as a scientific consultant with the military police.
His heart, however, surprised her. It shone with courage and a compelling desire to protect those who were weaker. That part fit what she knew of the origin of red wolves as protectors of the ancient Celtic villages before their corruption by greed, so it wasn’t entirely unexpected. The surprising thing was love. He glowed with it. Liliana saw flashes of a golden-haired human man with a gentle smile and a quick wit.
Liliana had not expected a deadly predator to have such a generous heart. The heart she saw did not fit the legends of ruthless mercenaries who killed without conscience. Nor did they match the ugly memories she had of the ones who murdered her parents and many of her family and childhood friends.
“Did you come here to kill me?” she asked him.
He looked away from her face. “Not unless I had to.”
