She really didn’t, he could hear it in her voice. She would never leave her children to fend for themselves. Not ever. There was even repressed fury in her voice, as if she would like to talk to his mother.

“She wasn’t his real mate.” He’d come to know that long before his father disposed of her. “The theory was, they wouldn’t look for their real mates. They wanted nothing that might make them vulnerable. Generations of that made for vicious brutes and equally cruel leopards.”

“So who was she? Where did she come from?”

“Each lair bred women so other lairs could take them as wives to produce sons. I lived in Primorye, in southeastern Russia. We are Amur leopards. A rare breed, now dying out and with good reason.”

He took a bite of the stir-fry, and it was really good. Far better than he’d expected and from Evangeline, he expected a lot. “This is great.”

“If they weren’t meant to be mates, did their leopards mate?”

Very slowly Alonzo shook his head, watching her the entire time. Waiting for her to get it—what his father and uncles had done to their leopards. What he had tried so hard to keep from happening. “Never. They never let them mate. They wanted them vicious. They wanted them mad with hunger and need. When they took a woman they wanted their leopards to roar with rage.”

“That’s just sick.”

“That’s what’s in my blood.”

Her eyes flashed at him, twin emerald stones, glittering in fury. “That’s bullshit, Fyodor, and you know it, or by now, you should know it. They were vicious men because they chose to be, not because it was in their blood. They had the choice to find their real mate and they didn’t do it. For their leopard, they should have.”

She was fierce about it and he could see she didn’t relate what she was saying to their situation. He needed to bring her back to that. “My leopard has had to live with no mate and no hope of one. There was no allowing him freedom to retaliate against what my own family did to me, and it has driven my leopard nearly insane. The constant scent of blood has made him irrevocably mad.”

She held the fork to her lips, chicken on the end of it. He took her wrist, turned the fork around and deliberately ate the bite of food.

“Your leopard has been through a lot, honey,” she said.