Ten shots, she told herself as she belted out Brian May’s lyrics. Keep count and use them wisely.

The lights were brighter than she remembered. Either the stint in the darkness had made her more sensitive or there was magic at work, but she could see Zander as if he had a spotlight on him.

He was barefoot and shirtless. His only clothing was his jeans, and they were unbuttoned and unzipped. His skin was damp and a little shiny, as if someone had covered him in oil. On his collarbone and navel, the shiny substance thickened to clear blobs that clung to him as if it were something sticky.

There was a roundish red mark on his hip, visible because his jeans were riding low. Another of those marks was halfway up his throat. He was breathing hard and he smelled like sex.

His face had been flushed with triumph, but even as Anna watched, his expression went blank. He stared at Leah like a rabbit in the face of a hungry wolf.

“Mother?” he said, voice raw.

Leah didn’t say anything. Anna couldn’t read anything from her body language. Leah had a pretty good game face; she probably wasn’t showing what she thought there, either.

Anna, on the other hand, promptly forgot where she was in the song, so she started the chorus up again. On the whole, it had been a good thing she hadn’t found a song with words she’d have to think about.

Mother.

She remembered that when she’d seen Leah enter the bedroom cave, for an instant she had thought the woman looked like Zander.

“I thought you were dead,” Zander said. Anna noticed his pistol was a Glock, though she wasn’t familiar with the model. It was something a lot bigger than her own. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t have bothered with silver bullets—he hadn’t known Anna was a werewolf—but a head shot would probably still be fatal.

“I knew you were not,” Leah said, speaking for the first time. “Though I had hoped so. He needed you too much.”

“You betrayed him.” Zander’s voice cracked out and he gestured with the gun, as if with so much emotion he could not contain his body. “You helped the Beast come into our home and kill all of Father’s children. All of them except for me.”

“I intended for it to be you, too,” she said. To someone who did not know her, her voice would have sounded flat.

But Anna had heard Leah’s flat voice before, and this time she heard the roughness in Leah’s consonants. Leah was feeling something powerful—the echoes of it washed up through the pack bonds and made Anna’s wolf spirit tense in readiness. But Anna suspected that not even Leah would be able to put a single name to those roiling emotions.