ONE

Robyn

Years ago, I saw a documentary about US detention centers. Most of them, it turns out, are made of some combination of steel bars, concrete, and shatter-proof acrylic walls. But there’s another category of prison that neither the US Justice Department nor the producers of that documentary know about.

That category includes a certain large house on the outskirts of Atlanta, decorated by a woman with an excessive fondness for a soft shade of purple and an extravagant collection of ceramic angels.

I’d been a captive in that house for two months and eight days when I walked into the kitchen and saw Dr. Danny Carver cradling a steaming mug of coffee, his medical supply bag hanging from one shoulder. I swallowed a groan and crossed my arms over my chest. “Are you here for the conference, or did you come to break me out?”

His smile was small, but genuine. “No one considers you a prisoner, Robyn.”

“Yet I’m not allowed to leave.”

He set his mug on the counter and opened his bag of medical supplies. “You signed up for this.”

“My options were pretty limited at the time, if you recall.” A few months before, as a newly infected stray suffering from bloodlust and post-traumatic stress, I’d killed four human men. They totally deserved it, but murder is a capital crime in shifter society as it is in human society. However, because female werecats are rare and I am the first female stray confirmed to exist in the US, the territorial council offered me a deal. If I agreed to stay in the Southeast Territory and let them train me to control my inner-shifter, they wouldn’t rip out my incisors. Or chop off the tips of my fingers, along with my claws.

Or execute me.

But the whole house arrest thing was supposed to be temporary. Only until I learned to control my new feline instincts and impulses. Which I never asked for, by the way. I was infected against my will, and that fact chafed my temper as surely as literal bindings would have abraded my wrists.

I considered myself fully rehabilitated, but every time I even hinted at the fact that I felt ready to leave the Southeast Territory, Umberto Di Carlo, my acting Alpha, doubled the guard. So I’d learned to keep my mouth shut.

Or at least to grumble quietly.

“Have a seat and roll your sleeves up please.” Dr. Carver took a sterile syringe and several empty blood collection tubes from his bag and set them on the counter. Despite the disagreeable nature of his visit, he was a difficult man to stay mad at, considering that he legitimately believed that the violation of my veins was for the greater good.

The shifter world was desperate to understand why I’d survived infection when so many other women had died. That was the real reason I was still being held. One of them, anyway.

“You’ve come to poke me three times in one month?” I leaned against the kitchen doorframe, letting my obvious reluctance stand as my official protest. “People are starting to talk.”

The doctor’s chuckle produced a cluster of fine lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes, the only indicators that he was at least twenty years my senior. A handsome doctor with a gentle touch and a good sense of humor. In the human world, he would have been snapped up long before his mid-forties, but like the vast majority of the male shifters I’d met over the past couple of months, Carver was single, and as far as I could tell, completely without romantic prospects.

Not that I had any interest in changing that, even if he’d been closer to my age. I’d sworn off shifter men within minutes of meeting my first tomcat.

Still, it was a damn shame about Carver.

“What’s it going to take to get you to cooperate?” The doctor pulled out a chair at the table for me, but I hardly glanced at it.

“That depends. What contraband were you able to smuggle in?”

His brows rose. “What do you want?”

“You are aware, are you not, that the Di Carlos don’t get movie channels and don’t have Wi-Fi? I’ve seen more History Channel documentaries in the past two months than any girl—even a history major—should ever have to suffer through. Take me to a movie, doc.”

His smile faded a bit. “What would you say to a pint of ice cream and piping hot Starbucks? Venti.”

“Do I get to pick them both up myself?” I asked, and his frown spoke volumes. “Not authorized to take me off the property, are you? Fine.” I lowered my voice. “Give me ten minutes alone with your cell phone, and I’ll bleed into every vial you brought.” My phone was confiscated as part of my official sentence.

“Robyn…” He looked conflicted, but I knew from experience that his sympathy didn’t mean he’d smuggle me off the grounds.

“Forget it.” As frustrated as I was with my predicament, if it weren’t for Dr. Carver’s testimony on my behalf to the territorial council, I’d probably be much worse off. The good doctor was as close to an ally as I had. In the Southeast Territory, anyway.

Instead of sitting at the table, I hopped onto the kitchen counter with a fluid sort of feline grace. When I was a kid, my duplicate set of left feet were my biggest obstacle in life, and I bore the scars to attest to two broken arms, four broken toes, and a particularly traumatic tumble into a recently extinguished campfire.

Yet I hadn’t lost my balance once in the four months since I’d been infected. But the upside was nowhere near enough to balance out my new lack of autonomy, impulse control, and the right to live as anonymously as I pleased. No tabby—the term for a female cat shifter—can live in peace in a society suffering an admittedly devastating gender imbalance.

On average, only one female werecat was born for every seven or eight males. Which meant that while most male shifters dated, few would ever get the chance to marry and have a family, because shifters were forbidden from disclosing their existence to humans.

That left the entire burden of bearing the next generation up to those one-in-seven-or-eight female shifters.

The imbalance was even more severe with strays, obviously.

I sympathized with the difficult situation. But the shifter world’s lack of eligible bachelorettes was neither my fault nor my responsibility. Even if it had become my problem.

“So you’re not going to the meeting?” I said, as Carver tore open the packaging around the sterile syringe.

“It’s a council meeting. I’m not on the territorial council.”