I frowned, and Jace shook his head. “I’m kidding. He wouldn’t kill me.” I raised both brows, and he shrugged. “Okay, he’d totally kill me. But not in front of my mom. I’ll stick close to her until I’m ready to head out with Lance.”

“What if Lance won’t go?”

Jace shrugged again. “He will. And if he tries to balk, I’ll take him aside and tell him I have a private message from Parker. He’ll want to hear that, either because he still gives a shit about his brother, or because he’ll see Parker as a way to gather intel on the enemy.”

Marc crossed both arms over his chest. “And if something goes wrong?”

Jace’s jaw tightened. “Plan B. Fight hard and run like hell.”

My stomach flipped and twisted. If something went wrong, we wouldn’t make it out alive. I had no doubt of that. Marc and Jace would die. Kaci would die. And if I couldn’t escape, I’d eventually have to make them kill me. If my choices were death or Calvin Malone, I’d choose death, hands down.

I Shifted into and out of cat form twice more before Jace left, and during my last Shift, Marc went into the bathroom and closed the door to call the car rental place while Jace was still there to watch me Shift, just in case.

After my fourth set of Shifts, the pain in my right arm had downgraded from motherfucker-it’s-breaking-all-over-again to it-merely-hurts-like-hell. I lay naked and sweating and gasping on the floor, my eyes closed, counting my own racing heartbeats in an effort to slow them.

“You okay?” Jace knelt on the floor beside me and ran one hand gently over my shoulder. It was a casual gesture, and one any of my fellow enforcers would have made in his position, with me lying there in obvious pain and exhaustion. But his touch raised goose bumps on my overheated skin, and my heart raced in spite of my best attempts to calm it.

“Physically? Yes. Probably. Except for the fact that I don’t want to move. Ever again.”

He chuckled, and his voice went deep and wistful. “You’re amazing, Faythe.”

I turned my head just enough so that I could peer up at him. “Says the man about to walk into the lion’s den armed with nothing but hope.”

“And faith.” Something about the way he said it made me wonder if he’d spelled it with a Y in his head. “How could I be afraid to face Cal when you faced down a whole Flight of thunderbirds with nothing but a cell phone? And look what you’re putting yourself through to save Kaci.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I got her into this. I have to get her back.”

“You were trying to keep her away from Calvin.”

“Yeah, that went well.”

“It’ll work out,” he insisted, as Marc’s voice echoed from the tiny bathroom while he haggled with the rental car clerk. “We’ll make it.”