“Jelly beans?” he asked.

I drew a deep breath. “Just a dream,” I told him, and took a good look at Libor of Prague, the Alpha who had some sort of secret grudge against the Marrok.

He smelled of werewolf, of butter and yeast and wheat and eggs. And a little of the same fruit filling I’d eaten in the pastries he’d fed me earlier. The smell was sweet and rich: like jelly beans.

Libor looked nothing like I imagined him—at least not as I’d imagined him when I was a child. Probably that was a good thing for him.

His hair was medium brown and cut almost brutally short. His face was clean-shaven but, like Adam tended to, he already had a shadow of a beard making itself felt this late in the afternoon.

Libor, the Alpha of Prague, was a big man, not so much tall as massive. There was something more leonine than lupine about him. His features were of average attractiveness. He was neither beautiful nor ugly. It was a strong face and intelligent. He reminded me, superficially, of Bonarata, in that people would look at him and expect brutality and risk missing the intelligence altogether.

But Bonarata had been cold all the way to the bone. Any warmth I’d seen in him was an illusion created by a master manipulator.

Libor, my coyote informed me, was many things, but cold was not one of them. He smiled as I met his eyes and held them. His smile expected me to turn my gaze away and leave him in charge. His problem was that I had just had a few very bad days and was done with being vulnerable and lost. A minute passed. Two.

“You tread upon dangerous ground, Little Wolf,” he said softly.

“My apologies,” I said insincerely, without dropping my eyes. One of the cool things about my coyote is that dominance battles aren’t usually a problem for me. I could stare down just about anyone except for the Marrok himself. Libor wasn’t my Alpha, and I was just not going to give in.

After a moment, my brain kicked in. Staring down a werewolf was dumb. I’d spent my life trying not to be any dumber than I had to be.

After a few more heartbeats, during which time I acknowledged to myself that I was antagonizing someone I hoped to elicit help from, and being dumb with no end in sight, I said, “I’m trying for strong enough to pay attention to but polite enough not to cause a real fight. How am I doing?”

He lost his smile, which was good because it had become sharp around the edges, and he narrowed his eyes until I could feel his power beating at me angrily.

“As I said,” he told me, his voice as casual as his eyes were not, “dangerous. You should probably consider how . . . thrilled? Yes, that is the word. How thrilled I am to have the daughter of Bran’s heart here in my territory. It is something that gives me great pleasure.”