Charisse shrugged. “There was an upset last night. Mama was really ugly. She was so angry with me for being upset over breakin’ up with Mahieu. She broke all the dishes in the kitchen and tore up a sweater he bought for me when it turned cold on a date we went on. She tore it into strips and threw it in my face. She kept slappin’ me until Armande dragged her away. Then she began weeping and told him I was embarrassin’ her on purpose and ruining the Lafont name. He lost his temper and told her to shut up. Mama went very quiet and wouldn’t accept his apology. She just went away. When she’s like that you never know what she’s goin’ to do. He went to his room and I went to mine.”

The niggling suspicion in the back of Drake’s mind blossomed into a full-blown certainty. She tore it into strips. A woman’s rage. A female leopard’s rage. Saria’s clothes had been torn into strips. His clothes had been torn into strips. He’d believed the men coming to the inn to drive him from the lair had done it, but ripping up clothes wasn’t a man’s temper tantrum—it was a woman’s.

Not Armande. Iris. Iris Lafont-Mercier. She had taken care to keep the inn from burning down even while she tried to murder them all. She had access to the coffee to put the drug in it. She knew the security code. She worked at the post office where she could hear all gossip, keep an eye on everyone and intercept Saria’s letter. She was a jealous, perverted woman, fit for being the mate of a man like Buford Tregre. The man had spurned her because she couldn’t shift. He’d taken another woman as a mate and taunted Iris with his vicious depravity. She’d married the man whose property neighbored his and taunted him right back with her own brand of depravity.

Iris had despised her daughter and worshipped her son. She’d seduced and killed Charisse’s boyfriends and slaughtered Armande’s girlfriends. She’d even corrupted the family business in the hopes of ruining her daughter by framing her for the opium placed inside the perfumed soaps. Drake had to be certain, but Iris had to have her own secret workplace, close to home, probably close to Charisse’s laboratory so suspicion would remain on Charisse.

Iris had given Leopard’s Lover to her sister, one of her only real mistakes. She’d been the one to spread the seeds through Fenton’s Marsh when she killed Charisse’s boyfriends and along the strip between Mercier and Tregre land when she went to meet Buford, which, if he was right and they were mates, would have been often.