And in the desperate hope that she would be willing to help propagate the species she now belonged to.
“What if I don’t want an Alpha?” Robyn lowered her hands and shifted her weight onto her good leg but looked no closer to reclaiming her seat. The sweat gathering on her upper lip smelled like fear, and I could tell from Jace’s forcibly relaxed stance that he could feel her anxiety.
“It doesn’t really work like that,” he said. “Our laws say that you can’t live in my territory unless you belong to my Pride. But beyond that, you need an Alpha, maybe more than any other tabby ever has.”
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.