She slammed her fork down; the table trembled and then was still. “The full moon is eight days away. And when it comes, you’re going to get a big fucking surprise. Your little oak doors won’t hold me then. I’ll be out of here—possibly eating your head on my way out the door—and you’ll realize you fucked up, bad. You’ll know I was telling the truth the whole time, but you couldn’t see past your stupid injured male pride. I’ll be gone forever, and you’ll have the next hundred years to realize what an asshole you were.”

She was so convincing, he actually panicked for a moment. To add drama to her little speech, she stopped eating, walked to the bed, got under the covers, and faced away from him the rest of the night. She never said another word, or looked at him, not even when he tempted her with a brimming bowl of frozen custard.

Chapter 7

He was right. The doors—this one, anyway—were oak.

Thick and heavy, with the hinges on the outside where she couldn’t get at them. She threw her shoulder a few times—okay, thirty—into the door, but it barely rocked in its frame. “Fucking Brit wood,” she mumbled, rubbing her aching shoulder.

She’d prowled around her cage for the last couple hours. It was a gorgeous room with plush, wine-colored carpet, a soft queen-sized bed with about a zillion pillows, and a truly glorious attached bathroom (free of all razors and other sharp things, she was sorry to note). But as far as Janet was concerned, if you couldn’t leave, it might as well have a cement floor and bars on the window.

She went through the bureau and found several robes in her size, in various materials. No real clothes. No television, either, but several books. She saw some classics—Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and Tolstoy—as well as—too funny!—the entire collected works of Stephen King. She supposed she might stand half a chance if she threw Hamlet at Dick as hard as she could. She’d gotten the drop on him before in the alley, but she wondered if it was possible now. He didn’t believe she was a werewolf, the stupid dickhead, but he’d be careful. He thought she was one of the monkeys, but he respected her anyway. If he wasn’t such a fuckstick, she could have really liked him.

She wondered what the pack was thinking—what boss man Michael was thinking. Probably that she’d been run over by a train or something. Death was about the only acceptable reason for skipping a meeting with the big dog. Interestingly, that thought—she’d unwillingly disobeyed a command from her pack leader—brought no anxiety. In fact, it was kind of nice, knowing Michael wanted her on the Cape, and here she was, still in Boston.