Raphael leveled a warning stare at Rebecca, but it had no effect.
“She’s rude and spiteful—”
Ascanio picked up the jar of sugar and emptied it over Rebecca’s head. The white powder spilled over her hair and dress.
She gasped and jumped off the chair.
“Oh no!” I opened my eyes wide. “I’m so sorry. Teenage boys are such a clumsy lot.”
“Raf!”
Raf? What was he, her poodle?
“Why don’t you go outside and wait for me in the car,” Raphael said.
“But—”
“Go outside, Rebecca.”
She marched out of the office, pouting. Raphael’s eyes sparked with a deep ruby glow. He looked at Ascanio, as if deciding what he should do about him. The boy ducked his head and said nothing, his gaze firmly affixed to the floor.
Ascanio was a talented young shapeshifter, but I had fought beside Raphael. He could go through a room full of Ascanios in seconds and leave none of them alive.
“Ascanio,” I sunk so much quiet menace into the word, the boy froze, as if petrified. “Did your alpha look like he needed help?”
Ascanio’s voice was clipped. “No, ma’am.”
“Go outside and wait until I come to get you.”
Ascanio opened his mouth.
“Outside. Stay in the back lot. Don’t speak to Rebecca.”
He clamped his jaw shut and took off. A moment later the back door closed.
Raphael had shattered my heart into tiny little shards and they were hurting me. Never in all of our time together had he so much as mentioned engagement. And now he had found a pretty, empty-headed idiot and he was going to marry her. Why her? What was she giving him that I hadn’t?
The answer came to me in a painful burst. She was there for him. I hadn’t been. I’d shut him out. I’d thought he would wait while I sorted myself out. My own damn fault.
I leaned forward, my voice steady. “Are you high?”
“What?”
“Did you smoke something before you decided it was a good idea to flaunt her in front of me? Maybe you ate some weird-looking mushrooms?”
He smiled at me. It was a brilliant Raphael grin, sharp like the edge of his knives.
“You know I could kill her before you could stop me.”
“No danger of that,” he said. “That would mean you’d act like a shapeshifter and we all know that’s not going to happen.”
Ouch. “My memory must be malfunctioning. I don’t remember your being this cruel.”
“People change,” he said. “Did you expect everyone to pause their lives while you were having your little pity party? Was I supposed to sit there and wait like a good boy, until you were ‘in a good place’?”
It hurt so much, I was beginning to go numb. “I didn’t bar my door. My phone still worked. If you wanted to get in touch, you could have.”
“Please! You think I have no pride? I loved you, I cared for you, I offered you a place in the Pack beside me, and you betrayed everything that was important to me. How did that turn out for you, Andrea? Was it worth it?”
I winced. “No. It wasn’t.”
“My door wasn’t barred either.”
He had saved it all up since the night we’d fought. Now everything was coming out.
“You betrayed me, you let the Order treat you like shit, and then you hid in your apartment. That wasn’t the Andrea I knew. I thought I could count on you. I thought you had my back.” His face was a furious mask. “I would’ve done anything for you.”
I would have done anything for him, too. If it had been him in that Wolf House, I would’ve run there so fast, the entire Order wouldn’t have been able to stop me. My other self was howling in my ears, loud, so, so loud…
“You spat on everything I am. You picked the knights over my people, which means you picked your precious Order over me.”
I was shaking, straining to contain myself. My body struggled to counteract the stress, betraying me.
“Anything to say?”
“I’m sorry I hurt you.”
“Too little, too late. I’m tired of waiting for you to stop running away from who you are. You want to know what the best thing about Rebecca is?”
His eyes were pure ruby and they burned. I was hanging on by a thread.
“She isn’t you.”
My humanity tore and the other me spilled out.
Raphael stared at me, suddenly silent.
The shreds of my clothes fluttered around me. I had this curious feeling that I was watching it all from some point above my head. My arms still rested on the table, but now soft sandy fur with a scattering of brown spots covered the hard muscle. I knew what my face looked like: a meld of human and hyena, with a dark muzzle and my blue, human eyes above it.
Most shapeshifters had two shapes, human and animal. The more talented of us could maintain a warrior form, halfway between animal and beast. I didn’t have an animal form. There were only two choices: my human self and my other me, neither human nor hyena, but an odd creature in between. I was beastkin. My father had started his life as a hyena, caught the Lyc-V virus, and turned into a human. For that, other shapeshifters hated me and some tried to kill me on sight.
I examined myself sitting there. I’d held back for so long. I’d been good for so long. I always did as expected. I followed rules and regulations. Look where it got me. Being good hurt.
“I didn’t mean that,” Raphael said.
Why had I wasted all my time pretending to be someone I wasn’t? I was tired, so very, very tired of standing on my own brakes. I felt…right. I felt free. I hadn’t felt like this since I’d lost control and slapped Aunt B. She had backhanded me right down two flights of stairs, but it was worth it. It was so worth it.
What did I have to lose anyway?
I took a deep breath and let the old good Andrea go. Magic coursed through me, making me stronger, sharper. Scents filled my nose, stole through my mouth, and expanded my lungs.
“Andrea?”
I tilted my head and looked at him. He’d brought another woman into my office. Whatever made him think I would stand for that?
I opened my mouth and showed him my sharp teeth. Most shapeshifters couldn’t speak in a half form, but then I wasn’t most shapeshifters.
“You meant every word. I told you I was sorry. I took responsibility for my actions. It is over now.”
My voice was deeper, permeated with the rough notes of a growl.
“This office is my territory. If you bring your woman here again, I’ll consider it a challenge.”
He leaned forward, inhaling my scent. His upper lip trembled, betraying a flash of his teeth. “Been studying the Pack’s Law?”
I laughed and heard an eerie hyena cackle in my voice. “I don’t have to study. I know all the laws.”
“Then you know you can’t attack a human.”
“Who said anything about attacking a human? If you bring her here again, it will be your fault. I’ll beat your ass and not even your mommy will be able to stop me.”
Raphael leaned closer, his eyes glowing. “Promises, promises, honey.”
I snapped my teeth at him. “I’m not your honey. Your honey is out in the parking lot.”
The beginnings of a snarl reverberated in his throat, but his eyes were puzzled. He wasn’t sure what to make of me.
I wanted to bite something. I wanted to rend and carve things with my claws and get rid of my hurt. I wanted him to leave. But if he left, we would have to do it again. I still had a job to do. This sonovabitch would not keep me from it. I would get the information I needed and I would not let him bother me any further.
I picked up the pen with my clawed hand. “I find your scent disturbing. Let’s finish this up so I can air the place out and get you and your girl candy out of my life. The Blue Heron building. How did you buy it?”
He stared at me.
“We have four dead people. Your people. Do try to keep up.”
Raphael leaned back, studying me. “It was a sealed bid auction.”
“Were there any other buyers?”
“Yes. It was a very valuable building.”
“Do you know who they were?” A sealed bid auction meant that each of the participants submitted a confidential bid for the building, but Raphael would’ve done his homework and researched other buyers to know how much to bid against them.
“I can give you the top three,” he said.
“I’m all ears.”
“Bell Recovery. Kyle Bell has been in the business for a long time. He does decent work, but he’s expensive and slow. I can usually underbid him.”
I wrote it down. “What’s your relationship with him?”
Raphael shrugged. “We don’t like each other.”
“Was he bitter that you outbid him?”
“Kyle exists in a state of bitter.”
“In your opinion, would he stoop to murder?”
Raphael shook his head. “No. Kyle makes a lot of noise and stomps around. He might get his people to rough someone up, but he wouldn’t get into anything that required outside help, like magic snakes. He doesn’t trust anyone.”
So Stefan had already told him about my visit. “Got it. Next.”
“Then there is Jack Anapa of Input Enterprises.” Raphael leaned forward, resting his forearm on the table. His scent was scraping against me like fine-grain sandpaper. “Anapa is an ass. He has mountains of money and he plays with it.”
I squinted at him. “Don’t like him much?”
Raphael grimaced. “He dabbles. He dabbled in construction, he dabbled in shipping, now he’s dabbling in reclamation. He’ll get bored and move on; for him it’s a game. For us it’s business.”
“Was he upset at losing the bid?”
“Initially he won it, but his permits weren’t filed properly, so they went to me as the second-highest bidder. A skyscraper has a lot of mercury. It’s in the thermostats. When a building crashes, mercury drips to the bottom. Before you can reclaim a building, you have to prove to the city—”
