The waterways weren’t safe. Everyone knew that. People were kidnapped so often and held for ransom, no one even blinked anymore on hearing the news. Most of the ransoms were paid and the prisoners released. It was business. Just business. But there were a few groups she’d read about, terrorist camps that tortured and murdered prisoners, always milking the families of those they kidnapped for more until there was no more and the bodies were sent back in pieces. The money was used for guns and bombs and more terrorist camps.

She’d been horrified, and then she’d been in denial. Of course her father wasn’t involved in such a thing—and she’d decided to bluff her way inside. The leopard rubbed along her leg, probably sensing her distress. She realized she had fisted her hands in the leopard’s fur, burying her fingers deep, trying to push back her thoughts.

“I know what you’re doing,” Isabeau whispered. “You don’t want me angry at Conner so you think by making my father look bad, I’ll forgive what he did.”

“I don’t need to make your father look bad, he did that all on his own,” Elijah said. “But the thing is, you don’t have to defend him.” He ignored the threatening roar of the leopard, although he adjusted his position slightly, preparing for defense. “My father left me a drug empire when his own brother killed him. I don’t have any reason to defend his lifestyle choice. It makes a great cover for me to move between the underworld and the business world, but no matter what, that’s my legacy and I have to deal with it. I choose my life. You choose yours.”

She felt her cat leap in anger. In a few sentences he’d reduced her real grief to self-pity. And maybe it was time someone did. She was tired of carrying her anger and wrapping it around her as armor. She’d run like a child and hid in the rain forest instead of tracking Conner down and confronting him as she should have. She’d loved him with every breath in her body, but she hadn’t even tried to find out why he’d used her feelings for him.

She hated that this man, looking so cool and calm, with the mist swirling around him and the night shining in his eyes, was the one to make her look at herself. She should have looked in the mirror and found the courage herself. She’d never been much afraid of anything, certainly not expressing her opinion or confronting someone if she had to. Yet she’d run like a rabbit, and hid herself away with her plants and work instead of picking up the pieces. Instead of admitting her father had been a criminal, she should’ve at least demanded some kind of closure with Conner.

When had she become such a coward that she needed a snarling leopard to threaten his friend because her little feelings might be hurt when someone told the truth? She was ashamed of herself. She straightened, letting go of her death grip on the cat’s fur. “Self-pity is insidious, isn’t it?”

Elijah shrugged. “So is righteous anger, of which I’ve felt plenty in my lifetime. Come on back to the cabin, you two. We have a lot of work to do in the morning. And, Conner, someone has to take that cub in hand. You didn’t let us kill him, so he’s on you.”

Isabeau scowled at him. “He fell in with the wrong crowd. He didn’t deserve to die. Are all of you this blood-thirsty? He can’t be more than twenty.”

“He sank his claws into a female, and you wouldn’t be saying that if Adan was lying dead at your feet,” Elijah pointed out, his tone mild.

She noted that he’d put the sin of clawing a female before killing Adan. She had a lot to learn about the world of leopards. It was strange how she was more comfortable with these men than she should have been. She looked up at the high canopy where the wind swirled the mist into strange shapes that wrapped around the trees, forming gray veils she couldn’t see through, not even with her superior night vision. This, then, was the world where she belonged.

Conner had said there was a higher law. Before she closed all doors and made judgments, she needed to learn the rules. In any case, while she was in the presence of so many leopards, she needed to learn as much as she could from them.

“I don’t think he would have killed Adan without provocation,” Isabeau defended. “He was actually quite gentle and a few times he whispered to me that he wouldn’t really hurt me.”

“That’s bullshit with his claws in your throat and blood dripping down.” Now there was suppressed rage in Elijah’s voice.

Isabeau felt the echo of it in the shudder that went through the leopard pressed so close to her. Jeremiah had come very close to death. For touching her. That was where the anger was coming from. Not because he’d threatened any of them or Adan. She was somehow sacred to all of them. Because of Conner? Because she was a female leopard? She didn’t know, but there was solace in the knowledge. A kind of security she’d never felt before.

There was also a newfound confidence that came with her knowledge. She realized Conner hadn’t shifted at the sight of Elijah, not because he was in a better position to protect her as a leopard, but because he didn’t want to embarrass her with his nudity in front of another man. He’d deliberately stayed in animal form, although he couldn’t join in the conversation. She stroked a thank- you down his back, trying to convey silently her appreciation.

Modesty was a foreign concept to these men, she was certain of that. Isabeau walked in silence for a few minutes, enjoying the way the mist enveloped them so closely. She couldn’t see very far in front of her, and the steam rose from the ground so that their bodies appeared to be floating through the clouds without feet.