Robyn blinked at him for a moment, obviously struggling to make sense of what she was hearing. Then she turned to me, and the fear leaking from her pores developed a sharp tang of panic. “Abby?” She wanted me to tell her that this was all a joke. Or that Jace was wrong and she really did have a choice in the matter. “I didn’t sign up for this.”

“I know. Me neither. I didn’t choose to be born into this any more than you chose to be infected. And for the record, I am so sorry. I thought I was protecting you by hiding all this from you, but Jace is right. You need an Alpha. And really, this is sort of a best-case scenario. There are only a few Alphas I’d be happy to see you serve, and Jace is one of them.” The others were Faythe, my dad, and Umberto Di Carlo.

“Serve?” Robyn’s eyes widened as her panic swelled.

“Well, only in the sense that he’s your boss. But that’s really more like a supervisory position.”

“I’m an adult. I don’t need to be supervised,” she insisted.

“The string of murders bearing your signature would argue otherwise,” Jace said, as gently as I’d ever heard him say anything.

Robyn recoiled, shocked. “You know about that?” If she’d been in a police station, that probably would have been considered an admission of guilt. Obviously, she hadn’t realized they knew anything more than that Darren had tried to kill her.

“It’s my job to know,” Jace said. “You’ve put our entire species at risk of exposure, and we’ve been trying to clean up after you. Though Abby was a little less helpful in that regard than she could have been, once she realized you were the stray we were hunting.” He shot a censuring glance at me, and I could only bow my head in apology. That was the very least of what I’d get from the other Alphas.

“I didn’t mean to.” Tears formed in Robyn’s eyes. “I can’t even remember much of it.”

Jace leaned over the counter with both elbows on the tile. “Well, on some level, you must have meant to. You found out where they lived and you hunted them like prey.”

“That’s not how it happened.” A tear rolled down her right cheek, and I wanted to hug her, but I was afraid she’d push me away. “I only tracked them down to make sure they hadn’t kidnapped someone else. But at every one of their houses, I saw other dead cats, and I smelled blood, and I…lost it. I don’t remember shifting. I just woke up naked, covered in blood, every time. But they were monsters!”

She dismissed Jace—something no one born a shifter would ever have done—and implored me with wide blue eyes to understand. “They were just like the men who killed Dani, and Mitch, and Olsen! They’re part of some sick club that kidnapped me, and played with me, and beat me. They’re the reason I turn into this animal I can’t control and crave things I never even knew existed. They deserved to die! All of them!”

“Yes, they did,” Jace agreed. “But killing them was my job, not yours.”

“I didn’t mean to do it,” she repeated, and when I gestured to the stool again, she finally limped in my direction. “And I didn’t even know the rest of you existed.”

“That’s my fault.” My heart ached, seeing how much I’d put her through by denying her the support of an Alpha and a team of enforcers. “I broke the rules by not telling him about you, and vice versa.”

“Why?” Robyn lifted herself gingerly onto the stool, favoring her injured leg. “What were you trying to protect me from? Him?” She nodded in Jace’s direction, and I shook my head.

“No. He’s one of the good guys. Actually, there aren’t really any bad guys left on the council, but some of them are very old-fashioned, and they care more about the future of our entire species than about any individual member of it.”

“I don’t understand what that means,” Robyn said, as Patricia set a glass of ice water in front of her.

“That means that—” Jace began, but I interrupted, ignoring his irritated growl. The next part would be better coming from a fellow tabby.

“Okay, you met Melody and Patricia this morning, right? And you’ve known me for years,” I said, and Robyn nodded as she lifted her glass. “Well, we’re the only female shifters in this entire territory. Just the three of us. Only two of us are young enough to…propagate. And Melody’s clearly jumped into that role with both feet. But my point is that there are dozens of tomcats in the Appalachian territory. Right?” I glanced at Jace for confirmation, and he nodded. “But only a couple of tabbies.”

Because Patricia was actually a dam—a mother beyond childbearing years.

“Wait.” I frowned and reconsidered. “Technically, I belong to my birth Pride again—my father’s territory—which means you and Melody are the only tabbies here, and that’s actually a very high ratio of tabbies to toms, compared with the average.”

“That’s a high ratio?” Robyn said, and I could see that she might soon draw for herself the conclusion I was leading up to.

“Yes. Right now in my birth Pride, I’m the only woman of childbearing age, and the Southeast Territory has none, because Sara Di Carlo died almost five years ago.” She’d been killed right in front of me, in the cage across from mine.

“So, what, they want you to have a bunch of babies for them?” Robyn forced a laugh, obviously expecting me to say she’d drawn a hilariously inaccurate conclusion. But my silence spoke volumes. “Wait, that can’t be what they want from me! I’m not having a whole litter of some random tomcat’s shifter babies, and they can’t make me!”

She stood again, and this time when she backed away from me, the betrayal in her eyes burned all the way to my soul. She thought I’d sold her out.

“No, they can’t make you, and they won’t even try,” Jace assured her.

I sat straighter when I heard the distant rumble of an engine heading toward us. My parents were minutes away, and I wanted Robyn to understand everything before she met my dad, the council chairman.

“But that is the expectation for tabbies born into our society,” Jace continued. “Which—until you—has been all tabbies.”

“That’s barbaric.”

“Actually, it’s just very old-fashioned,” Patricia insisted, and when she started a fresh pot of coffee, I knew she’d heard the engine too. “It’s also somewhat unavoidable, at least until men start growing uteruses. They can’t have babies, so we must, or the species will fail. I’ve had six myself.”