“Here.” He tossed the clean shirt at me and I stood to put it on. “You better hurry. Angela just turned into the driveway.”

Two

I jogged across the backyard toward the main house, Marc and Jace on my heels. We burst through the back door, and they passed me when I stopped in the guest bathroom to make sure my shirt was straight and there were no leaves in my hair. I had gotten all the blood off my neck, but I had to wash my hands to get Ryan’s scent off my right fist, which was when I discovered I’d split two of my knuckles on his face. Crap.

None of my fellow cats would give it a second thought; they’d assume I’d assaulted the hanging bag without my gloves again. But Angela… She probably wouldn’t know what to make of my split knuckles, not to mention the thin white line bisecting my left cheek. At least my sleeve covered the long, zigzag of new scar tissue on my left forearm—that was one less question to answer. Assuming she was bold enough to actually ask.

Her engine growled out front, and my pulse spiked almost painfully. Why was I so nervous? Well, truthfully, everyone was nervous. It isn’t every day you meet your dead brother’s pregnant girlfriend. A human girlfriend, at that. And she had no idea that we weren’t completely human, so a good deal of the ambient tension had to do with hiding our little secret, so she didn’t run screaming into the…broad daylight.

The rest of it had to do with the baby. Ethan’s baby, whose existence we’d only discovered the day we buried my brother. A tiny piece of him we’d had no reason to hope for. The grandchild my parents never expected.

That baby was a genetic miracle, and we desperately wanted Angela to like us. To want to include us in her child’s life.

Yet my own nerves went beyond that. They were a complex mix of jealousy, nostalgia, and relief over my near miss with a tragically mundane life.

Angela would be my first up-close look at anything resembling normalcy since I’d left grad school. The freedom I’d once fought for was now gone—choked out of existence by the iron grip of responsibility—and the life I’d once run from had reclaimed me. I’d made my own choices, and while I had undeniably moved past that escapist phase of my life, there was some tiny part of me that leaned toward panic at the knowledge that I couldn’t go back now even if I wanted to.

I stared into the mirror, trying to see myself as she would see me. Tangled hair, scarred cheek, skinned knuckles. My face was too thin, my arms and shoulders too well-defined. And there was a hardness behind my eyes now, difficult to describe, but impossible to miss.

I’d seen and done things that would have put most women my age in a padded room. I’d fought for my life, my freedom, and my family. I’d been kidnapped, beaten, broken, clawed, and stabbed. I’d caught rogues, and killed killers, and I’d watched my brother die. It was hard to believe that less than a year ago, I’d been a student like Angela.

Minus the whole faulty-condom-turned-miracle thing.

My mother appeared in the bathroom doorway, nervously twisting her wedding ring as I tried to finger-comb my hair. “She’s here.”

“So I heard.” I turned away from my identity crisis and smiled, almost amused to see her so flustered. My mom hadn’t blinked an eye when she’d faced down a jungle stray in her own basement, but now she looked ready to lose her breakfast. “It’ll be fine,” I insisted, while doubt rang in my head, soft but insistent. There was no way we’d come off like the average American household. The Addams Family had a better shot.

What if Angela knew something was scary-different about us, and she took off with Ethan’s baby? What if she decided not to have it?

“Maybe we shouldn’t do this.” My mother straightened her freshly pressed blouse, and the high arch of her brows managed to convey both eagerness and dread. “I mean, obviously we should help her financially, but maybe we should…keep our distance. It’s not really a good time, with you all leaving tomorrow….”

After months of waiting, lobbying, and fighting on the sidelines, our big day had finally come. Marc, Jace, and I would accompany my father to a meeting of the full Territorial Council, ostensibly for the vote that could reinstate him as council chair—or put Jace’s megalomaniac stepfather, Calvin Malone, in power. But our real reason for going was to present hard-won evidence against Malone as a traitor to our species and hopefully put him out of the running. And completely out of power.

I shoved aside my own doubts and linked my arm through hers to keep her from twisting her own fingers off. “The timing is out of our hands,” I said, and she could only nod. “Let’s just try not to overwhelm her.”

I stepped into the hall, half tugging my mother, and rolled my eyes when I saw Brian, Parker, and Vic peering through the sidelight windows. “Guys. Come on. We’re trying not to overwhelm her.”

Brian shrugged, looking younger than ever, and Vic just frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. “You really think there’s any chance of that?”

“If you guys lay off the stares and turn on the charm, yeah.” Though privately I had my doubts. “Remember, you’re normal, nonfurry ranch hands and good friends of the family.” That was close enough to the truth to be believable—if the Lazy S had been a functioning ranch. And if ranch hands were trained to protect their Alpha, patrol their territory, and take down bad guys with badass paw-to-paw combat.

“Brian, go tell my dad she’s here,” I said, and he took off dutifully toward the office, which was virtually soundproof with the door closed, thanks to solid concrete walls.