Hoping fervently that it was the former, I said, “You look pretty young.” Hopefully much younger than you actually are. I inhaled slowly, then asked the question before I could chicken out. I needed to know, whether I wanted to or not. “How old are you, Kaci?”
“I’m not that young.” She twisted her face into a look of displeasure; it was a bit like watching a pixie frown. A very thin, dirty pixie. “I’m just a late bloomer. At least, that’s what my mo—” She stopped in midword and looked away, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out how the sentence ended in her head. “Anyway, I’m not as young as I look.”
Thank goodness. But her reassurance wasn’t enough to unclench my hands in my lap. “So? How old are you?” Please, please, please say seventeen. Sixteen, even.
“Thirteen. And a half.”
Shit. Ohhhh, shit. Thirteen and a half was too young for…anything. There was no way any enforcer worth his own canines would let a tabby that young out of his sight. Especially with her parents dead.
“Thirteen and a half?” I heard the flat, shocked quality of my own voice and winced at it, even as Kaci frowned. How the hell had a thirteen-year-old survived on her own long enough to become so thin and malnourished? It just wasn’t possible, even if she had been stuck in cat form the whole time, which was how the story seemed to be shaping up.
“Where are you from, Kaci?” I tried to hide the horror in my voice, without much luck. But before she could answer, a loud, persistent knock came from the other side of the door.
Knowing none of the toms I’d left in the hall would interrupt us, I sniffed in that direction and felt the blood drain from my face, even as the voice bellowed from the hallway.
“Katherine Faythe Sanders, get your tail out here now!”
Damn!
“I’ll be right back,” I whispered to Kaci. Swallowing thickly, I started to stand, but then sank back onto the floor when I noticed that Kaci’s eyes had gone huge. “Don’t worry,” I mumbled, shoving sleep-tousled hair back from my face. “It’s just my dad.”
Seventeen
“What were you thinking, disobeying a direct order?” my father demanded, and I had to stand on my own foot to keep from scuffing my bare, freezing toes in the dirt. I hadn’t even had a chance to put shoes on before he marched down the stairs and out the back door, his very posture an unspoken command for me to follow. All the way to the woodpile stretched between two trees behind the main lodge.