He slid into his seat and closed the door, leaving us in the dark when the interior light went out. Yet even in human form, I could still make out every silvery striation in his gray eyes, thanks to a cat’s ability to see in low light. “I’m sure you misunder—”

“This is still the US, isn’t it? I still have rights?” I demanded, my fist clenched around the door grip.

“Yes, but you made a deal with the council, and—”

“I was coerced. I was threatened. If I hadn’t taken that deal, they would have ripped out my teeth or cut off the ends of my fingers to ‘declaw’ me. Have you seen what that looks like? Have you met Manx?” I saw her once, and a single glimpse of her mutilated hands had given me nightmares.

“No, but—”

“And there were veiled threats of execution. I had no choice but to accept their deal, not just for me, but for Abby. I did what I had to do to keep myself alive and to help her during her trial, but that doesn’t mean the deal was fair. That doesn’t give them the right to hand over my future to the Alpha with the most eligible son!”

“No, it doesn’t.” Anger flashed behind his eyes at the thought, and his reaction made something low and sensitive clench inside me. “But yours isn’t the only life at stake here…” He started scrolling through the contacts list on his phone, and I realized I was losing him, in spite of the fact that he clearly agreed with me.

“Titus!” I waved my hand in front of his screen. “If you send me to the Di Carlos, you have to admit that you’re a sexist hypocrite!”

He arched both brows at me. “How the hell do you figure that?”

“You’re offering protection and aid to all the strays in your territory, as long as they have a Y chromosome. That’s textbook sexism.”

He rolled his eyes. “You’re the only stray in the country without a Y chromosome.”

“Does that mean I don’t deserve the same consideration as the men?”

“Of course not. But that’s not the issue. When the council finds out I have you, they’ll think I lied. They’ll invade my territory to get you, and people will die. My Pride will never be recognized, and without the council’s cooperation and resources, Life will never get better for strays in the free zone. I have to think about the greater good, Robyn.”

I rolled my eyes. “And once again, the greater good of shifter society comes at the expense of one woman’s liberty. You toms are all alike. Posturing, blustering, hypocritical bigots.”

“Stop talking,” Titus growled, and I recoiled from the anger in his voice instinctively.

Then hated myself for that.

I’d never shied away from a fight in my life, yet every feline instinct I’d been infected with was suddenly telling me to lower my eyes and slowly back away from the angry Alpha.

Screw that. If I’d learned anything from mandatory training, it was that I didn’t have to give in to my shifter instincts. I was still as much human as feline. As was Titus.

He was also the only person in the world currently in the position to give me what I needed.

Freedom. A little space. A chance to talk to Abby.

“You only have a problem if the council finds out. So don’t tell the council.” I shrugged, hoping he couldn’t see—or somehow scent—my internal human-versus-feline battle of wills. “No one ever has to know how I broke out.”

“They’ll figure it out. You didn’t leave any scent on the ground, and the only vehicle that left the Di Carlo property other than Teddy’s was mine.” He tapped a name on his phone, and Faythe Sanders’s picture and phone number appeared. “If you really don’t want to cause me trouble, call Faythe and tell her what you did.” He tried to hand me his cell phone, but I pushed it away.

“Wait. Let’s talk about this.”

“We’re not negotiating,” he growled. “Call her, Robyn. That’s an order.”

I leaned against the passenger-side door, my arms crossed over my chest. Trying not to think about the wild, exciting nature of his scent—the warm, living version of the one I’d bathed in for four hours. “I don’t take orders from you.”

“If you want to belong to my Pride, you do.”

Belong to his Pride? I’d asked for sanctuary, not membership. Were the two inextricable?

I had no interest in trading one Alpha’s rules and machinations for another’s—no matter how good he smelled. But if pretending I wanted to belong would keep him from sending me back to the Di Carlos…

Wait a minute.

“The way I see this, I win either way.” I ticked the possibilities off on my fingers as I thought aloud, half convinced that I had overlooked some devastating detail. “If I join your Pride, I have to follow your orders, but you can’t send me to Atlanta, because I won’t belong there anymore. If I don’t join your Pride, I don’t have to follow your orders, which means you can tell me to go to Atlanta, but you’d be wasting your breath, because you’re not the boss of me. Or am I thinking about this all wrong?”

He frowned at me in the dark, and even his scowl was somehow sexy. “Are you asking me to help you manipulate me?”

“I’m assuming that if you have a counterargument, you’ll throw it at me. Soon, preferably.”

“A counterargument.” Titus slid his key into the ignition, and my pulse jumped when he started the car. “How’s this: I’m going to drive you to the border and tell Teddy Di Carlo to come get you. He’s less than an hour away.”

“That would be the biggest mistake of your life.”

Titus laughed, and the sound echoed through me, touching off little sparks everywhere it landed. “I’m pretty sure the biggest mistake of my life was following a shadow and a snort into a clump of brush during a corporate camping retreat three years ago.” He untucked the tail of his button-down shirt and pulled it up to reveal four prominent white claw mark scars stretched across the defined ripples of his abs.

I reached out to touch them before I realized what I was doing. Then I jerked my hand away.

Stop it, Robyn. I shook my head, trying to dislodge the enticing mental image of his bare stomach. Yes, Titus was hot in an obvious sort of way that made my pulse race and my skin flush, but those reactions weren’t real, and neither was any totally hypothetical attraction I felt toward him. Tabbies practically ovulating in the presence of an Alpha was hormonal witchcraft, and nothing more. Exactly the kind of shifter instinct I’d spent the past nine weeks learning that I didn’t have to give in to.