She felt her cat leap in anger. In a few sentences he’d reduced her real grief to self-pity. And maybe it was time someone did. She was tired of carrying her anger and wrapping it around her as armor. She’d run like a child and hid in the rain forest instead of tracking Conner down and confronting him as she should have. She’d loved him with every breath in her body, but she hadn’t even tried to find out why he’d used her feelings for him.

She hated that this man, looking so cool and calm, with the mist swirling around him and the night shining in his eyes, was the one to make her look at herself. She should have looked in the mirror and found the courage herself. She’d never been much afraid of anything, certainly not expressing her opinion or confronting someone if she had to. Yet she’d run like a rabbit, and hid herself away with her plants and work instead of picking up the pieces. Instead of admitting her father had been a criminal, she should’ve at least demanded some kind of closure with Conner.

When had she become such a coward that she needed a snarling leopard to threaten his friend because her little feelings might be hurt when someone told the truth? She was ashamed of herself. She straightened, letting go of her death grip on the cat’s fur. “Self-pity is insidious, isn’t it?”

Elijah shrugged. “So is righteous anger, of which I’ve felt plenty in my lifetime. Come on back to the cabin, you two. We have a lot of work to do in the morning. And, Conner, someone has to take that cub in hand. You didn’t let us kill him, so he’s on you.”

Isabeau scowled at him. “He fell in with the wrong crowd. He didn’t deserve to die. Are all of you this blood-thirsty? He can’t be more than twenty.”

“He sank his claws into a female, and you wouldn’t be saying that if Adan was lying dead at your feet,” Elijah pointed out, his tone mild.

She noted that he’d put the sin of clawing a female before killing Adan. She had a lot to learn about the world of leopards. It was strange how she was more comfortable with these men than she should have been. She looked up at the high canopy where the wind swirled the mist into strange shapes that wrapped around the trees, forming gray veils she couldn’t see through, not even with her superior night vision. This, then, was the world where she belonged.

Conner had said there was a higher law. Before she closed all doors and made judgments, she needed to learn the rules. In any case, while she was in the presence of so many leopards, she needed to learn as much as she could from them.