Bullet

Nathaniel said, “I’ll clean it for you.”

“It’s done,” I said.

He touched my arm, then turned me to look at him. “Anita, what do you want to do?”

I blinked at him. “I don’t understand the question.”

“What would make you feel better?” He leaned his butt against the sink, and looked nifty in his black jeans and black T-shirt. I realized that from the boots to the clothes, we were both dressed like we’d started the night in the same closet. We matched. He’d probably laid out my clothes for me today, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. I stared down at the shirt and realized it was low-necked, not as much as some I owned, but enough that there was a lot of creamy goodness going on in the front of my shirt. The moment I realized I hadn’t really seen what I was wearing all day, that sort of scared me.

“Am I in shock?” I asked.

He laid his hand over mine where I was gripping the sink. “I’m not sure, but I think it hurt you to have to . . . kill Haven.” He wrapped his arms around me, pulling me into a hug. I kept gripping the sink and stayed stiff in his arms. He laid his head against my hair. “Anita, please, talk to me.”

I let go of the sink and wrapped my arms around his waist. I held on and didn’t know what to say. I said the truth. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say how you feel.”

“I don’t feel anything.”

He held me tighter, kissing my hair, pressing me against him. “He had to die, Anita.”

“I know that.”

“But you didn’t have to do it. Any of the guards would have done it.”

I pushed against him, until he let me go. I backed away, shaking my head. “I did have to do it. It was my fault. I thought I’d tamed him. I thought it would all be all right and I was wrong. I was so wrong, Nathaniel, so wrong.”

“He wasn’t willing to share,” Nathaniel said.

“It was more than that and you know it. The signs were all there. He attacked you and Micah and got pissed because I helped you win the fight. He kept wanting me to put him first in my bed if not in my heart.”

“You told him that wasn’t going to happen,” Nathaniel said.

“I know that. I didn’t lie to him. So how did we end up with him trying to kill you and Travis, and killing Noel? How did we end up with Haven dead? How could I have let it get that out of hand, Nathaniel?”

“You did not make Haven do any of this,” he said.

“But I’m supposed to be this uber-dominant of all the wereanimals, and I’ve just finished failing the lions so badly. How can I add more wereanything? I can’t handle what we have already. How can I add more when I don’t know what went wrong with the lions?”

“Haven went wrong with the lions,” Nicky said.

I looked at him. “You told me just a couple of hours ago that if I’d let you fight him, you’d have killed him, and Noel would be alive and Nathaniel wouldn’t have gotten hurt.”

“I didn’t say that,” Nicky said.

“You said that I felt guilty about mind-fucking you and that made me not want to let you and Haven work things out, or something like that.”

“But it shouldn’t have been necessary for me to fight Haven. If he’d had his pride well organized I would have just been more muscle, but he let his personal feelings get in the way of being a good Rex. He let his obsession with you ruin everything else.”

“Gee, Nicky, that makes me feel so much better.”

He sighed, frowning. “I don’t mean it like that. I mean that Haven wasn’t a good Rex, you know that. The fact that he tried to beat Noel and Travis to death for having sex with you when they hadn’t had sex with you says that he was letting his feelings blind him.”

“I didn’t have sex with them, not until last night anyway. I still don’t remember everything I did last night, but I know I did something with Noel.”

“A strong wereanimal can tell when someone is lying, Anita. We can smell it, taste the pulse speeding, like a furry lie detector.”

“I know that,” I said.

“But Haven couldn’t tell that Travis and Noel were telling the truth about not sleeping with you.”

I looked at Nicky. “Say that again.”

“Haven was a powerful werelion. He should have known that Travis and Noel were telling the truth, Anita.”

“Yes,” I said, “he should have. Why didn’t he know?”

“He let his emotions overwhelm what he smelled, or tasted,” Nicky said, and that was an insult among the wereanimals. To say someone was nose-blind, or couldn’t taste his way out of a wet paper bag, meant essentially that he was doing the human equivalent of refusing to see the truth.

Gregory said, “Some men don’t want to believe that it’s them you don’t want. If they want a woman badly enough and she doesn’t want them, then they want another man to blame.” He said that very smart thing and took another sip of his protein shake. The twins together sipping on their shakes looked like an ad for a sexy malt shop.

“As long as there’s another man who stole you away,” Nicky said, “then the man doesn’t have to look at himself.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Stephen said from the table. “It’s that you prefer the other man, not that there’s anything wrong with him.”

“I could see that if he picked a fight with Nicky, but why Travis and Noel?”

“He knew I’d kick his ass.”

I looked at Nicky.

“I think I would have, but more than that, Haven thought so, too.”

“I forbade you to fight him,” I said.

“You gave me the option that if he or his lions attacked me, I could fight back.”

“I was afraid you’d let them kill you if I didn’t give you the option.”

He gave that half-shrug. “I don’t know, maybe; you had told me not to fight him, but the last time Haven got up in my face in the gym I told him what you’d said. I told him that if he attacked me in the practice ring I’d be able to fight him. That if he attacked me first we could settle it.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“Nothing, and that’s my point. If he thought he could win against me he’d have pushed it, but he didn’t.”

“I was there that day,” Dino said.

I looked at the big man. “Do you think that Haven was afraid of Nicky?”

“Haven was a good fighter, but so is Nicky. There’s more than one reason that none of the werelions but Nicky are on guard duty here, Anita.”

“I thought we just didn’t trust them,” I said.

“That, but Bobby Lee, Fredo, and Claudia looked them over. They didn’t like what they saw.”

“How so?”

“They were muscle, and they were ruthless, but for one-on-one fair fighting we didn’t see them in the same league with us.”

“With the wererats?” I asked.

“No, with the level of training that Rafael demands from his people. Any of the guards here have to keep up those standards regardless of their animal group.”

I raised eyebrows at that. “Graham and Clay meet standards.”

Dino smiled. “They aren’t our best hand-to-hand fighters, and Clay seems weirdly awkward with anything but a gun, but they do the training. They hit the gym just like the rest of us. Rafael wouldn’t trust the safety of Jean-Claude and you to any guard he didn’t trust.”

I thought about that. “Of the other werelions, who’s the best? Who do you guys like?”

“Payne is too much like Haven,” Dino said. “He’s a thug and not a deep thinker.”

“Jesse is okay,” Nathaniel said.

“I think he’d be softer if he were in a pride that let him,” Dino said.

“I agree,” Nicky said.

“What about the women?”

“We haven’t seen them,” Dino said.

“Haven ran his pride like some of the ultramale prides do,” Nicky said. “The women are second-class citizens, almost cloistered away from any other wereanimals. Most werelions take a lot of pride in the fact that their lionesses don’t want or need to go outside the pride for sex.”

“Most animal groups stay within their own animal, right?” I asked.

Everyone agreed.

“There’s a reason for that,” Stephen said quietly. “If we go outside our animal groups, we can have misunderstandings just based on being different beasts.”