Stealing was quick. Writing all the notes took a lot longer. I was tucking the last note in when I noticed an e-reader sticking out of a compartment in the suitcase I’d taken the shoes from.

I was pretty sure most e-readers had Internet capability, even old ones like this one. I added it to the list of things I owed the nice woman who was going to be short a pair of tennis shoes, too, when she arrived at her destination. I was sorry for it, but I’d make it up to her as soon as I could. If I could.

If I couldn’t, if I didn’t get myself out of this, Adam would know I would want these people compensated for the things I took.

I packed everything in the flowery backpack and pulled it into the far corner of the bus. Then I changed back into the coyote and curled up in the corner, the metal of the bus’s walls on either side of me.

I’d grown used to feeling safe again, ever since Adam and I had become a couple. Okay, vampires, trolls, and a host of other villains that ranged from terrifying to scary had tried to kill me on a fairly regular basis, but Adam had my back. I hadn’t realized how much I craved it until it was gone. Again.

I’d thought I was safe before. I’d left most of the supernatural behind me when I’d left the Marrok’s pack at sixteen. I’d gone to college, had decided that being a mechanic suited me better than teaching. For nearly ten years, I had lived in my trailer, had gone to work every day, and no one had tried to kill me. I’d felt like I didn’t need anyone at my back. Not even when my world had started to fill with the affairs of the supernatural community had I lost my ability to find a place of safety—a home.

But no one is really safe. Not ever. Afterward, after I picked up the pieces and glued them back together with a bit of hope and trust and fairy dust, I’d found another place to be home and safe.

I paused in momentary horror. Had I married Adam just so I could feel safe? The panic lasted only for a moment, because I knew better. I’d had hours and hours of counseling with a pretty awesome counselor. Part of it was to address some bad things that had happened, but part of it was so that I could choose Adam—because I chose him and not because I knew that anything that came after me would have to go through him.

But still . . . I had thought I was safe.

The Lord of Night had come to my home ground and taken me there, then hauled me to Italy as if the pack, as if all of my allies, were no obstacle at all. He’d extracted me as cleanly as if I’d hopped on his airplane—because no way had he brought me here on a commercial plane—of my own volition.

I’d had some time to think while I ran. My current version of why Bonarata had brought me here went like this: he’d wanted to bring me here, thinking that I was Marsilia’s, because the thought that Adam and the pack could be cooperating without her being in charge just never occurred to him. I was a piece on a chessboard he’d decided Marsilia was the queen of. He’d taken me, who Wulfe had told him was the most powerful of Marsilia’s associates, to show her how powerless she was. I don’t know what he’d have done if I were the werewolf he’d originally thought me. But his little pet werewolf was enough to make me wary. She’d smelled off, smelled sick—the kind of sick that made my coyote decide something wasn’t good to eat.

I had other versions of why Bonarata had stolen me—but none of them made sense, including that one. Bonarata was smarter than that; he had to be to have lived as long as he had.

I really was certain that Marsilia was involved somehow. There had been something about the way he’d looked at me when he told me he hadn’t wanted to kill Marsilia, so he hadn’t broken the bond I shared (supposedly) with her.

I shivered, though the bus wasn’t particularly cold and my summer fur coat could have protected me in the heaviest blizzard likely to fall in Lombardy.

He’d thought that I was bound to Marsilia.

I hated that the word for what the vampires did to their victims was the same word that described what was between Adam and me, between the pack and me.

My understanding, from the things I’d learned since Adam and I were bound as mates, was that all magical bonds are formed from the same sort of magic. Humans have those kinds of bonds, too—but theirs are softer and more fragile. Breakable.

Like most things, pack bonds and mate bonds could be twisted, but by their nature, they encouraged empathy because they are emotional links. They were bonds between equals—even the bond between the pack and its Alpha. The Alpha had a job to do, but it didn’t make him more important than the most submissive of the wolves in the pack. Adam was of the opinion that he was less important. We agreed to disagree.

The bond between a vampire and his victim (I say his because the vampire who owned me—and that was exactly the right word—was a him) put the vampire in the driver’s seat. The vampire could, if he so chose, make his pet do anything, feel anything. Whenever the vampire decided to, he could take away his victim’s free will—and the victim might not even know.

The Kiss doesn’t always work. Stefan told me that it was almost impossible to take a werewolf the way they could take humans because of the pack bonds. That Bonarata had succeeded in doing so had added to his legend. There were people who were difficult to break. But given time, a strong vampire could control most any human he wanted to.

Stefan told me he didn’t know if that was true between us—but that he would not test it. I trusted Stefan.

Even so, Stefan owned me. He had saved my life by claiming me, and I’d agreed to it. But I’d thought it was broken, gone. Thought my ties to Adam and the pack had erased it, because Stefan had wanted me to believe it.