Someone made a noise, and the hair on the back of my neck rose as my lips pulled back from my teeth. Kyle. They were hitting Kyle.

“Staying quiet isn’t helping, son,” said the soft voice. “I don’t want to do this. Boss don’t want to hold your lover any longer than we have to. Takes a lot of people to hold a werewolf pack—and some of them are going to get dead. If we can get Hauptman’s daughter and wife, we can let the rest of you the fuck go.”

I wonder if Kyle heard the lie.

“Fuck you,” he said.

Maybe he had. A divorce attorney, I expect, would have a lot of practice telling when someone was lying.

They hit him again. Beside me, Ben was vibrating.

Stefan said, sounding hungry, “Mercy, there are only two of them in that room.”

I shifted back to human so we could talk.

Ben nudged my knee, hard.

“I know,” I told him. “Can we take them without alerting the others?” I shivered. The Tri-Cities wasn’t Montana, but it was still too cold to stand around naked in November. Or maybe I was shivering with my coyote’s desire to go kill someone.

The first man said something ugly, and Kyle made a noise.

Yep. It was the go-kill-someone shiver.

“We can,” Stefan said. “And if not—I can kill them all.”

That didn’t sound like a bad plan, standing out here listening to them hurt Kyle. I knew it would be stupid to leave bodies, but his pain was putting paid to my good sense.

“Throw me up,” I told him, and turned back into a coyote.

I looked at Stefan, and when he met my eyes, I jerked my chin to the balcony that came off the bedroom. He frowned at me doubtfully. I rose up on my hind legs and bounced once. Then lifted my muzzle toward the balcony again.

His eyebrows rose, but he picked me up and threw me. I cleared the railing but had to twist hard, so I landed in the middle of a planter instead of on top of the lawn furniture that might squeak under me.

Ben jumped to the top of the railing, and Stefan followed. Stefan hopped off and landed on the balcony with bent knees and no sound. Ben’s ears flattened at me, so I moved off the planter and let the heavier werewolf use it as a stair so that he didn’t have to land so heavily. Hard to land quietly on a hard surface with werewolf-sized claws.

4

4

The brocade drapes were an inheritance from the people who had built the house. Kyle loved the fabric but complained a lot about the way they left six inches between the bottom of the curtains and the floor.