“Be there in ten.” Lucas hung up, and I tossed Jace’s phone back to him.

“Where’s Darren?” My Alpha circled Hargrove slowly, sliding his phone into his jacket pocket.

“Hey, aren’t you supposed to let the whole council question him?” I leaned against the counter, watching them both in profile, trying to project a casual interest.

“I will, once I’m sure no more shifters are in imminent danger.”

Damn it.

“Where’s Darren?” Jace repeated.

“Is that your girlfriend?” Hargrove was no longer whispering, now that he’d been caught, but his natural voice was still scratchy and distinctive. “She talks back like a girlfriend.” He shrugged as his gaze slid down from my neck and kept going. “A little small for my taste, but I bet all those shifter bitches are hellcats in bed.”

My fist clenched around the countertop.

“Was Darren here with you?” Jace asked, and I could see from the tension in his arms as he slowly circled his prey that he was itching to punch a hole right through the taxidermist. “Is he a cop?”

“I’d love to get her on my table.” Hargrove licked his lips, staring right at me. “Stuffing that little showpiece would be a real pleasure.”

“She’d rip your balls off and feed them to you.” Jace stepped between me and Hargrove, blocking his view. “You take one more look at her, and I’m going to let her do it. Now, is Darren the cop in the photos?”

Hargrove shrugged. “Who’s Darren?”

Jace circled him in a blur of movement, and I heard a sudden soft snap. The hunter howled, and I’d never in my life heard such a noise come from a human. When Jace stepped back, Hargrove’s left pinkie finger was broken at a ninety-degree angle. Bone showed through a tear in his flesh and a steady dribble of blood dripped into a growing pool on the floor.

“If I have to ask again, I’ll break the next one,” Jace warned. “Good luck stuffing anything with two broken fingers.”

Hargrove said nothing, so Jace reached for his hand again.

“He’s a cop!” Hargrove shouted through his sobs. “Ten years on the force in a little town about an hour and a half from here.”

“And the other guys in your fucked-up hunting club? I want the names of the ones still breathing.”

When Hargrove hesitated, Jace lunged toward him, and I flinched when I heard another soft snap. Hargrove screamed again, and snot dripped from his left nostril.

“Names,” Jace demanded, and I tapped the edge of the countertop, growing increasingly desperate for a reasonable excuse to stop the interrogation.

“Carl Wilks and Reggie Lewis are the only others I know by name. But they quit. They got spooked when you guys started picking us off, one by one.”

When we’d… I exhaled slowly, relieved to realize that the hunters thought they were being killed off by Jace and his enforcers. However, Hargrove still possessed a fount of information I couldn’t let Jace have.

How the hell was I supposed to stop him from talking, when his silence was rewarded with broken bones?

“Quitting won’t keep them safe,” Jace said while I clutched the countertop at my back to keep from cutting my palms open with my own nails. “Carl and Reggie are dead men.”

Fear tensed every muscle in my body and sharpened my vision. I could see every bead of sweat that formed on Hargrove’s forehead and every clogged pore in the crease of his nose. I could smell his terror, but that only made me wonder if Jace could smell mine. If he could, surely he’d think I was still traumatized from behind held at gunpoint.

“Where is Darren now?” Jace demanded, and my chest suddenly felt tight, as if my heart no longer fit. If Hargrove answered many questions along those lines, I was screwed.

“Hunting. But he’s supposed to be back tonight.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Hunting is his job,” the human said. “I mostly just stuff them. And teach the other guys how to do it. Would you believe some of them used to think we could mount a human head with cat eyes? That’s what they wanted to do with you, until I told them you can’t keep any of the soft tissue. That’s why we use glass eyes. But we could keep your teeth, if they happened to be feline when you died.”

My stomach churned, disgust and fear warring inside me. I needed Hargrove to shut up, for multiple reasons.

When my right hand began to twitch, I tucked it behind me. If Jace thought I couldn’t handle the interrogation, he’d make me wait outside, and even though he shouldn’t hear whatever Hargrove had to say, I had to hear it in order to plan my next move.

“Who’s Darren hunting?” Jace’s voice was a snarl so low Hargrove probably hardly heard it.

“He went after the other tabby so we can—” Hargrove’s sentence ended so abruptly, I could only imagine how he’d planned to finish it.

My fingers began to itch and burn at my back as the bones moved, rearranging the structure of my hand with no conscious instruction from my brain. I felt threatened on multiple levels, and my body was instinctively preparing me to fight for my life.

“So you can what?” Jace demanded, and I shook my head slowly. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to think about it. The slaughter. And whatever came before.

Hargrove shrugged, an awkward movement with his hands bound at his back. “We’ve never had a girl cat. Steve and the others tried with her.” He glanced at me, and Jace snarled and stepped between us again. “But she turned out to be much more…spirited than advertised.”

A stubborn bolt of pride surged through me in spite of the circumstances. They’d been told by the toms they’d tortured that tabbies were largely overprotected and defenseless, and I’d been thrilled to defy the stereotype.

“So, we thought we’d go after one with less experience,” Hargrove finished. “Darren’s on his way to get her now.”

Jace seemed to swell like a puffer fish, only he was full of pure, homicidal rage. “Darren went after my sister?” he roared, and for a second, I thought he might kill Hargrove and solve my problem for me.

But then he stepped back and took several deep breaths. I could see his internal struggle as he forced his shoulders to relax and his jaw to unclench. He was reining his temper in, as any good Alpha would, and I knew from the movement of his lips that he was counting backward silently. Probably from one thousand.