when he was angered.
Slowly, she went down to one knee. Slowly, she gave him her vulnerability. Her very caution seemed to please him.
“You failed,” Gausto said. “I’m surprised. Perhaps I didn’t explain the stakes carefully enough? Another demonstration—” He stopped as Jet stiffened, and smirked slightly in the satisfaction of it.
She wanted to tear his throat out.
And she could have done it, could have shifted and been on him before he so much as moved from the chair. His blood would have splashed across these walls, his mysterious ward of protection of no use against her teeth and speed.
But she didn’t. Not with the scent wrapped around this house, ever reminding her…her pack, trapped beneath, some already dead at Gausto’s hand, the rest awaiting salvation only Jet could provide.
It should have been enough. It would have been enough. But Gausto had also promised her something else again.
Freedom.
For Jet, freedom had turned complicated and elusive—much more complicated than the simple return of a pack to the distant mountains from which it had come. For among them, Jet was no longer fully wolf…nor completely human. She was Gausto’s prize tool, his thing. That he would even contemplate releasing her…
He must want Nick Carter very much.
But Jet, in spite of her own best efforts, was not as biddable as she was meant to be.
Now she tipped her head just a little more, looking up for permission to speak. He made her wait for it—of course he made her wait—and then gestured assent, pleased with his own benevolence. She said, “I found him.” She used the words carefully; he had made it clear he found her natural way of speaking displeasing.
Nick Carter, she thought, had not minded at all.
“But you did not bring him back.” Gausto flicked invisible lint from his knee. “Finding him is no great accomplishment, little Jet. Did I not provide you with the details of where he would be, and train you in the exact route, the correct clandestine approach? Finding him was nothing. But I also gave you amulets to use on him. My dear wolf-child, all you had to do was take him aside and trigger the amulet as you’ve been trained.” He regarded her with disdain at the corners of his mouth. “You will try again tomorrow. And the next day, if necessary. But Jet—mark this well. For each day you fail, one of your pack members will pay the price.”
After an instant’s spike of alarm, she schooled herself. As long as he still wanted Carter, her packmates would not die. Because if she truly failed—if she died in the attempt or she died at Gausto’s impatient hands—he would need them to start again. And her pack was not such a very large pack that he could afford to discard any one of them.
Not until he’d given up on Carter.
And still, she couldn’t stop herself from saying, too quickly, “I have him.”
Gausto snorted, most genteelly. He must be in a mood. He was far from genteel when it suited him. “My dear, don’t insult me. The cameras would have shown him to me when you arrived.” His eyes narrowed. “But you’re smarter than that. Explain yourself.”
She straightened, watching to make sure it didn’t displease him—but he’d forgotten about such subtleties. He often did. It only proved to Jet that he was far less civilized than he pretended to be—but the same could be said about any of the humans she’d met here. “I found him. I used the amulet.”
Gausto’s expression swapped out triumph with a frown. “Then why have you not brought him to me?”
“I had questions,” Jet told him, and thought it reasonable.
“Questions?” Gausto repeated, his tone instantly telling her he thought no such thing. “It is not your place to have questions, Jet. It is not your place to think. You do as you’re told, when you’re told, how you’re told.”
“But if I understand, I do it better.” She tipped her head, looked at him in cublike question…she’d learned early that he interpreted this as an eagerness to please. “Yes?”
It did indeed settle him, if only infinitesimally. She took the moment. “I don’t understand your world,” she told him. “He is alpha, your Nick Carter. Is this how it is done, the challenge? From behind?”
Gausto sucked in a sudden breath; Jet knew she’d misspoken badly, but had no idea how—sometimes it seemed to her that the truth was not his truth. His lips thinned. He reached for her, and she forced herself to be still, not to react—not to cringe or lift her lip or retreat, all hard-learned lessons—as he grasped the short, romp-fluffed hair at the back of her head, digging his fingers in to pull hard. “Nick Carter,” he said, “has committed crimes against my people. He is alpha to nothing of mine, do you understand that?”
Jet understood that Nick Carter knew alpha where Gausto knew bullying. She understood on a level so deep it needed no words. She understood that where Gausto held sway over her through dint of his cruelty and advantages in this human world, through his ability and willingness to manipulate her and change the very essence of what she was, Nick Carter had connected to her with heart, with the things he had chosen not to do as well as those things he had done. He had run with her; they had forged an afternoon together with the instinctive, spirit-deep communication of creatures who could not lie about their souls.
He had not bullied her. He had not snarled her into submission. He had not gone beyond fairness to coercion.
Maybe that’s why, somehow, she had left a piece of herself behind with him, felled by that amulet right along with him.
If Gausto noticed her distraction, he didn’t indicate it. “Nick Carter is a criminal and he must be stopped. And unless you don’t care anything about protecting your own people, that’s all you need to know.”
But Jet already knew much, much more.
He’d almost made it. Had almost bolted up out of reach, out of range.
He’d thought she might be so many different things…from undeclared field agent to outright rogue—until there at the end, when her shift had gone so differently, he began to realize she might be something else altogether.
But he’d never thought she could be Core.
And he hadn’t realized it would shred something deep within him to have it so. He didn’t know her; he hadn’t done anything more than let his guard down for an uncharacteristic lupine romp. Or so he’d thought.
He knew better now.
Too late for that.
Barely conscious enough for the thought, gasping under the weight of the triggered amulet and the poison of it in his system, he nonetheless found it hard to reconcile the betrayal with her subsequent flight, leaving him tucked away here in the wild strip of growth protecting the outlying fairground fields from the desert.
Hard to think at all.
The amulet, triggered, hung around his neck with a stench he couldn’t avoid—corruption and coppery astringency and sharp acrid
