Her forehead furrowed in disappointment. Then her features smoothed and she took my hand—her first voluntary physical contact—and pulled me over to the bed, where she’d laid out all the clothes. “This one’s my favorite.” She ran one hand down the sleeve of the sweater she was wearing. “But I like this one too. And that purple top? I have one kind of like it at h…”

Her voice faded into strained silence, and her gaze found the floor. I was eager to hear more about her family, and what her homelife had been like with no enforcers and a big sister, but this was not the time for those questions. I had fifty-five minutes to find out how and why the girl who hadn’t even known she was a werecat until that morning had already managed to break one of our most serious laws.

She was the only girl I’d ever met who could get into trouble faster and more thoroughly than I could. Kaci fascinated me. And worried me more than a little.

“Kaci?”

“Hmm?” Denim rustled and plastic popped as she tore the tag from another pair of jeans, still avoiding my eyes.

I sat on the end of the bed and pulled her new leather jacket onto my lap. “We need to talk about something very…serious.”

She finally looked at me, holding the jeans up to her waist to test the fit. “Like, you-look-stupid-in-those-pants serious, or you-have-terminal-cancer serious?”

I smiled, impressed all over again with her fortitude. “More like, where-were-you-on-the-evening-of-November-eighth kind of serious…”

“What?” Kaci frowned in bewilderment, and the jeans slipped from her grip. Then her expression relaxed, and her arms fell to her sides. “Is this about that guy you killed?”

“What?” My hand clenched around the sleeve of her coat. “Where did you hear that?”

She shrugged, flushing lightly. “That’s all anyone talked about while you were shopping. I could hear them through the walls and the floors. And the vents.”

Curious in spite of myself, I arched my brows at her in question. “What did they say?”

“Just that you killed a guy.” She hesitated, then met my eyes boldly, as if she’d suddenly decided she deserved answers. “Did you?”

Um, yeah. The problem was that I couldn’t say for sure which “guy” she meant. Eric, whose throat I’d ripped out over the summer? Or Luiz, whose skull I’d crushed with a dumbbell ten weeks ago? Or maybe the stray I’d tenderized forty-eight short hours before.

While that last one was a decent possibility, the most likely suspect was Andrew, the reason for our little vacation in the mountains.

“Yes.” My hand found my forehead, rubbing before I’d even realized I felt the beginning of a serious migraine. “But it was self-defense. I had no choice.”

Kaci sat on the opposite bed, facing me. “They don’t believe you.”