The guys left to follow orders, and I righted the table, studying the kitchen for any explanation that made sense.

“There was no one here,” Abby mumbled. “We went through the whole house.” And that had only taken minutes. “Did anyone look in the pantry?” she asked, and I turned to see what she’d already discovered.

The light was on.

“I did, and Warner rechecked,” I assured her. “There’s nothing suspicious in there except the thought of an existence sustained by that much peanut butter, pork rinds, and domestic beer.” One end of the pantry was lined in pine boards stacked on concrete blocks. Shelf after homemade shelf was stacked with canned soup, generic brand sandwich cookies, puffed pork skins, and Miller Genuine Draft.

“Backwoods haute cuisine.” Abby stepped into the small space and pulled the string to turn off the light bulb hanging from the ceiling. As she was pulling the pantry door closed, she froze, staring at the floor. “Jace,” she whispered, backing slowly away from the pantry.

I followed her focus to the thin line of light showing beneath the cheaply paneled wall directly opposite the door.

“That’s not a wall.” I felt around the edges of the paneled section, then finally pressed in the right place to trigger a crudely fashioned yet well-hidden door. The panel swung backward to reveal a narrow, dimly lit staircase running down and to the left, along what could only be the exterior wall of the house. A wall that had no windows.

“A secret basement?” Abby said, and I nodded. Our backwoods hunters were also amateur craftsmen. “Well, now we know where he was hiding, whoever he is. And it has to be either Hargrove or Darren, right?”

“That’s my guess.” I inhaled deeply. “Do you smell that?”

“Old blood.” Abby sniffed the air. “Strays. And chemicals. Hargrove has another taxidermy studio—or whatever they’re called—down there.”

I’d drawn the same conclusion. Either he’d been teaching Darren his craft, or Hargrove spent a lot of time at his friend’s lake cottage.

“Okay, let’s get this over with.” She stepped past me toward the stairs, but I grabbed her arm.

“You’re not going. Not after what we found in the last basement.” And there could still be someone down there. The scent of old blood was strong enough to conceal nearly anything.

“I’m a big girl.” Abby tried to push past me again, her jaw set in a stubborn line, as if she needed to see whatever was at the bottom of those stairs.

“Stay here,” I growled. “That’s an order.”

Her feline eyes narrowed as she glared up at me. “If I stay here, you stay with me,” she said through clenched teeth, and her irritation caught me off guard. Why would seeing the basement be so important to her? “That’s the deal, remember?”

“Abby, your safety trumps our agreement.” Protecting her was the whole point of the deal we’d made. “I have to make sure no one’s hiding down there.”

She wanted to argue—I could see the impulse flashing in the green striations of her feline eyes. “Okay,” she said at last, but I recognized anxiety in the frantic cadence of her heartbeat.

Abby wasn’t mad; she was terrified of letting me go into that basement by myself.

TWELVE

Abby

Jace studied my gaze in the glow from the naked pantry bulb, obviously trying to figure out what was wrong with me. It killed me to let him think I was being pointlessly rebellious and disrespectful.

I felt bad about lying to him, even by omission. Really bad. Like, stains-collecting-on-my-soul bad. With every secret I kept and every order I resisted, I was risking our brand-new relationship—the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. But no matter how precarious his seat on the council was, with humans being slaughtered in his territory, he wasn’t the one with the most to lose on this mission.

Neither was I.

Jace gave me a kiss, then headed downstairs, and each tread creaked beneath his weight. I held my breath, certain that any second, he’d start shouting my name and demand an explanation. I needed to be the first person in that basement, even if I couldn’t explain that to him.

My pulse whooshed in my ears, counting the seconds as they ticked past. I needed to make a phone call, but he’d hear anything I said, and any conversation I initiated via text message ran the risk of being seen if an alert popped up on my screen at the wrong time.

When Jace’s creaky footsteps became solid thumps, I realized he’d stepped off the stairs and onto the basement floor. My heart pounded harder, beyond my control by then. As I reached for the door of the old, yellow refrigerator, hoping for a bottle of water to wet my miserably dry throat, my gaze snagged on the gun rack against the wall.

Hadn’t it held three rifles before? Now there were only two.

Shit! The guys needed to know that whoever’d run into the woods was armed.

I pulled my phone from my pocket and opened my mouth to shout for Jace—then froze when something hard poked my back through Robyn’s down jacket..

“Set your phone on the counter and shut your mouth, shifter bitch, or I’ll blow a hole right through you,” a hoarse voice whispered as fear tightened both my chest and my throat. Then I realized he was speaking softly on purpose. If we couldn’t hear Jace’s footsteps anymore, chances were good that he couldn’t hear the whispered threat.

I lifted my left hand into the air slowly, to show him it was empty, then I set my phone on the kitchen counter.

“Push it into the sink.” He pressed the rifle harder into my back.

Damn it. I gave my phone a little shove, and it slid down the grimy Formica countertop into the sink, where it landed with a plop. I groaned. My phone was ruined, and unlike the other enforcers, I hadn’t yet been issued a work phone.

“Now turn around. Slowly.”

I turned to find Gene Hargrove pointing the missing hunting rifle at my chest.

The broom closet behind him stood open, and with a mental kick to my own backside, I realized he’d opened the back door and knocked over the table to make us think he’d run into the woods, when he’d actually just hidden in the closet, probably expecting all of us to take off after him.

“Your pictures don’t do you justice,” Hargrove whispered, studying me through grayish blue human eyes. “You would look stunning hanging on my wall.”