Once the invitation had been issued, Isabelle blew in like the March wind, as she usually did, simultaneously shutting the door and holding out a hand to Charles. "Charles, it is so good to see you."
He took her hand and bowed over it, kissing it lightly. It smelled of cinnamon and cloves. He'd forgotten that about her, that she used perfume with an eye toward the sharpness of werewolf senses. Just strong enough to mask herself and so give her some protection from the sharp noses of her fellow wolves. Unless she was extremely agitated, no one could tell how she felt from her scent.
"You look beautiful," he said, as he knew she expected. It was true enough.
"I should be looking a nervous wreck," she said, running the hand Charles had kissed through her airy, feathery cut hair that, combined with her fine features, made her look like a fairy princess. She was shorter than Anna and finer-boned, but Charles had never made the mistake of thinking of her as fragile. "Justin came boiling in with some nonsense about a meeting tonight. He was all but incoherent – why did you enrage the boy like that? – and I told Leo I'd drop by to see what you were doing."
This was why he didn't make friends.
"Leo received my message?" Charles asked.
She nodded. "And looked quite frightened, which is not a good look for him, as I told him." She leaned forward and put a too-familiar hand on his arm. "What has brought you to our territory, Charles?"
He stepped back. He didn't much like to touch or be touched – though he seemed to have largely forgotten that while he was around Anna.
His Anna.
Forcefully he brought his attention back to business. "I have come to meet with Leo tonight."
Isabelle's usually cheerful face hardened, and he waited for her to blow up at him. Isabelle was as famous for her temper as she was for her charisma. She was one of the few people to blow up in the Marrok's face and get away with it – Charles's father liked Isabelle, too.
But she didn't say anything more to him. Instead she turned her head to glance at Anna, whom, he suddenly realized, she'd been pointedly ignoring up to that point. When she returned her gaze to Charles, she began speaking, but not to him.
"What tales have you been carrying, Anna, my dear? Complaining about your place in the pack? Choose a mate, if you don't like it. I've told you that before. Justin would take you, I'm sure." There was no venom in her voice. Maybe if Charles hadn't already met Justin, he'd have missed the way Anna's face paled. Maybe he wouldn't have heard the threat.
Anna didn't say anything.
Isabelle continued to stare at Charles, though she was careful to keep from meeting his eyes. He thought she was studying his reactions, but he knew that his face gave nothing away – he'd been prepared for the way his brother wolf surged up in anger to defend Anna this time.
"Are you sleeping with him?" Isabelle asked. "He's a good lover, isn't he?"
Though Isabelle was mated, she had a wandering eye and Leo let her indulge herself as she pleased, a situation almost unique among werewolves. That didn't mean she wasn't jealous; Leo couldn't so much as look at another woman. Charles always felt it was an odd relationship, but it had worked for them for a long time. When she'd made a play for him a few years ago, he'd allowed himself to be caught, knowing that there was nothing serious about her offer. He hadn't been surprised when she'd tried to get him to talk his father into letting Leo expand his territory. She had taken his refusal in good humor, though.
The sex had meant nothing to either of them – but it meant something to Anna. He'd have had to be human to miss the hurt and mistrust in her eyes at Isabelle's thrust.
"Play nicely, Isabelle," he told her, abruptly impatient. He put a little force in his voice as he said, "Go home and tell Leo I'll talk to him tonight."
Her eyes lit with rage and she drew herself up.
"I am not my father," he said softly. "You don't want to try the shrew act with me."
Fear cooled her temper – and his, too, for that matter. Her perfume might have hid her scent, but it didn't hide her eyes or her clenched hands. He didn't enjoy frightening people – not usually.
"Go home, Isabelle. You'll have to swallow your curiosity until then."
He shut the door gently behind her and stared at it for a moment, reluctant to face Anna – though he had no idea why he should feel so guilty for doing something long before he'd ever met her.
"Are you going to kill her?"
He looked at Anna then, unable to tell what she thought about it. "I don't know."
Anna bit her lip. "She has been kind to me."
Kind? As far as he could tell kindness had been pretty far from anything that had happened to Anna since her Change. But the worry in her face had him swallowing his sharp reply.
"There is something odd going on in Leo's pack," was all he said. "I'll find out exactly what it is tonight."
"How?"
"I'll ask them," he told her. "They know better than to think they can lie to me – and refusal to answer my questions, or refusal to meet with me is admitting guilt."
She looked puzzled. "Why couldn't they lie to you?"
He tapped a finger on her nose. "Smelling a lie is pretty easy, unless you are dealing with someone who cannot tell truth from lie, but there are other ways to detect them."
Her stomach growled.
"Enough of this," he said, deciding it was time to feed her up a little. A bagel was not enough. "Get your coat."
He didn't want to take the car into the Loop, where it would be difficult to find parking, because his temper was too uncertain around her. He couldn't talk her into a taxi, which was a new experience for him – not many people refused to listen when he told them what to do. But then, she was an Omega, and not constrained by an instinctive need to obey a more dominant wolf. With an inward sigh, he followed her down a few blocks to the nearest L station.
He'd never been on Chicago's elevated train before, and, if it weren't for a certain stubborn woman, he wouldn't have ridden one this time. Though he admitted, if only to himself, that he rather enjoyed it when a rowdy group of thugs disguised as teenagers decided to give him a bad time.
"Hey, Injun Joe," said a baggy-clothed boy. "You a stranger in town? That's a foxy lady you have there. If she likes her meat brown, there's plenty here to go 'round." He tapped himself on his chest.
There were real gangs in Chicago, raised in the eat-or-be-eaten world of the inner city. But these boys were imitators, probably out of school for the holidays and bored. So they decided to entertain themselves by scaring the adults who couldn't differentiate between amateurs and the real deal. Not that a pack of boys couldn't be dangerous under the wrong circumstances...
An old woman sitting next to them shrank back, and the smell of her fear washed away his tolerance.
Charles got to his feet, smiled, and watched their smugness evaporate at his confidence. "She's foxy, all right," he said. "But she belongs to me."
"Hey, man," said the boy just behind the one who had spoken. "No hard feelings, man."
He let his smile widen and watched them shuffle backward. "It's a nice day. I think that you should go sit in those empty seats up there where you see your way more clearly."
They scuttled to the front of the car and, after they had all taken a seat, Charles sat back down next to Anna.
There was such satisfaction in his face when he sat down that Anna had to suppress a grin for fear that one of the boys would look back and think she was laughing at one of them.
"That was a prime example of testosterone poisoning," she observed dryly. "Are you going to go after Girl Scouts next?"