“Okay,” she said. “I know that. But you’d spent most of your life trying to get away from us, from werewolves and our business. Why did you marry Adam—no. Before that. Why did you agree to be his mate in the first place? The cost to you, to your way of life, was so high—and you knew that it would be.”
That. He hadn’t asked. But he hadn’t needed to, really. I’d been lost and struggling and Adam had thrown me a lifeline that had saved me. But it had also hurt, and completed the process of burning to ashes the quiet, safe life I’d built for myself. I didn’t know if I owed Mary Jo that answer. I didn’t talk about that time, even to Adam.
“It wasn’t his good looks,” my mouth said dryly before I’d made up my mind to speak.
My mate was movie-star beautiful. The kind of looks that, if he chose to emphasize them, would have stopped people in the street. I thought they were part of what made him so dangerous—a distraction for his enemies.
There was a brief silence.
“Do you know,” she said, sounding almost surprised, “I believe you.”
She shook her head and murmured, “This is the wrong way to go about this.” She slurred the last “this” and looked surprised. Frowning, she took a gulp of the cider, then squared her shoulders. “Renny asked me to marry him.”
Renny was a deputy with the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office. He was so in love with Mary Jo it made me feel like songs should start spontaneously playing anytime they were together.
“Okay,” I said carefully. Because she hadn’t sounded happy about it.
Her hands tensed and her eyes lightened with her wolf again.
“He is human,” she said. “If this were a few years ago, that would be okay. But we’re under siege now. We have to keep our territory safe for everyone. That means our whole pack—and anyone we love—is a target. The bad guys already went after Renny once, and there are more and bigger bad guys all the time.”
As if in answer, my phone rang. I flinched. But I picked it up and looked at the caller ID.
“Ben,” said Mary Jo, who must have seen my phone’s face as I moved it. “You should answer.”
“I’ll call him back,” I said, hitting the red button so my phone shut up.
My phone chimed with an incoming message from Ben. I glanced at it.
Fuck you, woman. We know who called you. Who do you think you’re trying to fool? Don’t be a silly twat.
I sighed, then turned my attention to the problem at hand.
“Mary Jo,” I said. “Tell me about Renny.”
“He’s going to die if he keeps hanging around with me—and now he thinks we should get married,” she said, a growl in her voice. She must have heard it, too, because she took a calming breath, and when she continued, she sounded steadier. “I never minded not having children—I didn’t want them in the first place. But Renny should have, I don’t know, twenty kids. He volunteers for Big Brothers and for the Special Olympics. He teaches tae kwon do for kids at the Martin Luther King Center.”
I was not surprised.
“You told him no,” I said.
She nodded, looked away from me, then after a moment wiped her eyes. When she looked back at me, those wet eyes were also yellow.
“I love him,” she said. “Who wouldn’t? Of course I told him no. It was the right thing to do. It was. And now I can’t sleep or eat.”
That was bad. Werewolves need to eat. I gave a quick thought to her behavior since I’d come into the room and rapidly replaced “ticked off at a dunk in the outhouse and a little drunk” with “sleepless sad werewolf who had too much to drink without eating properly,” and I shoved her bowl of stew at her.
“Eat that right now,” I said in the voice of authority that I no longer always had to borrow from Adam.
She gave me a startled, uncomprehending look—as if I’d responded in Cornish or Mandarin or something. I gave the bowl another push.
“Eat.”
I waited until she’d taken a couple of bites, then asked her, “How long since you turned down Renny?”
“A couple of days,” she said, and from the way she said it, I thought she could probably have given me the hours and minutes.
She settled down to eat in earnest. I ate mine, too. It was good stew, and after I’ve been terrorized, I’m usually hungry.
Two days. She knew better than to let her wolf starve for two days, especially when the full moon was so recent. She was lucky she hadn’t gone after one of her own team or the boy who’d fallen into the outhouse.
She needed more calories than she’d find in a single bowl of stew, no matter how filling. “Stay there,” I told her. “I’m going out for more food.”
I got up and opened the door to find Uncle Mike standing there like the Addams Family butler, with another, larger bowl of stew and a sliced loaf of bread with butter on the side.
I did not squeak in surprise.
Uncle Mike smiled, amused. “Any good tavern keeper knows when his guests are hungry.” Which was his version of “You rang?”
I took the tray from him and wondered how much else he could tell about his guests. I swallowed my discomfort. “I appreciate the food,” I said, which was not quite a thank-you.
He glanced at the table and said, “Drink the rest of that glass, Mercy.”
“Yessir,” I said dryly.
Unbothered by my sarcasm, he nodded. I backed into the room, shutting the door between us and the green man. I put the food on the table, took Mary Jo’s empty bowl, and set it on the tray and the tray on the floor because there was no room for it on the table.
“Renny asked you to marry him, and you broke up with him instead,” I said.
I picked up the glass and drank some more of Uncle Mike’s magic-spiked cider. More of my headache slid away, allowing some of the tension in my shoulders to release, too.
“I told him we were done.” Mary Jo looked miserable even as she dug into the larger bowl.
There were other humans in our pack, mates of werewolves. But they predated our ascent—or descent, depending upon your view—into our current job of being the protectors of the Tri-Cities. Mary Jo had been absolutely right that anyone associated with our pack had a target painted on their back. We’d been able to safeguard our vulnerable members, but none of the humans currently in our pack were adrenaline junkies like Renny. His job required the willingness to run toward danger when everyone with a lick of common sense would run away. He wasn’t going to stand back and let the werewolves keep him safe.
My phone rang and, distracted by Mary Jo, I picked it up.
“This is Mercy,” I said.
A soft dark laugh rang in my ear.
Mary Jo jerked up her head and stared at my phone.
“Hello,” I said in what I hoped was a disinterested tone. He didn’t usually call twice in one day. I found that I was terrorized out. Oddly, sitting across from Mary Jo steadied me, too. “Is there something I can do for you?”
A shivery tension filled the air. When silence answered me, I ended the call.
“He really defeated Adam?” Mary Jo asked in a smaller-than-usual voice.
My mate had cut his teeth in Vietnam and was one of the toughest werewolf fighters I had ever seen—and I’d grown up in the Marrok’s pack with the bunch of crazy werewolves he’d deemed too dangerous to inflict on any other Alpha. Adam was a born warrior.
“Yes,” I said. I tried not to picture my mate’s broken body on the ground, curled around an artifact that was trying to turn him into its slave. It had been so close.
Mary Jo looked at my phone.