Page 106 of Golden Eagle

“I know.” He opened his arms. “But I’m still sorry.”

It turned out she couldn’t hold out against that kind of sincerity and kindness very long, not from him. She stepped into his hug, and even though he was lean, his arms were strong, and he wrapped her up tight, his cheek warm against hers.

She shivered, and closed her eyes against the tears, and would not let them fall. She hugged him back, though, for all she was worth.

“It must have been very scary,” he murmured in her ear.

“Not any scarier than the stuff you’ve seen.”

“That’s not the point,” he chided gently.

It felt like a moment of weakness, holding onto him like this, letting him hold her up, but she took it. He smelled faintly of a dense wood, of pine and clear water.

There were things to do, though.

She sniffed hard, and was proud to be dry-eyed when she pulled back. Sasha kept one hand lightly on her elbow, and she didn’t try to shake him off. “Where’s everybody else?”

“Outside.” A crease formed in the smooth skin between his brows. “Will and Much showed up.”

“Ah.” Shit was about to get even more complicated.

“They have some ideas, and I think Nik might finally be willing to listen.”

~*~

They went to The Lion’s Den. A big circular corner booth under a Tiffany lamp, enough low conversation around them to create a sense of privacy. Lanny sat too close to her, their sides pressed together, his hand sweeping slow and mindless up and down her thigh beneath the table. He needed to touch, Sasha had explained to her before they’d walked out of the precinct earlier. It was instinctual, a mate thing, needing to comfort himself with the fact that she was in one piece.

Sasha was on her other side, and Nikita beyond him. Robin Hood’s men sat across from them, a practical arrangement; Trina didn’t have to crane her neck to meet Will’s gaze when he said, “What happened earlier?”

It was different telling a wolf about it. She didn’t have to edit anything, and he didn’t watch her like he was trying to decide if she was fit to stay on the force. He folded his hands together on the tabletop, ignored his glass of dark beer, and listened with his head cocked at an angle of lupine attentiveness. Nodding occasionally.

The second she was done, he said, “You did the right thing.”

Something inside her unclenched. He wasn’t her pack, wasn’t really even her friend, but she’d needed to hear that, she realized. Badly.

“The thing with ferals,” Will continued, “is that it isn’t a case of mental illness. It isn’t an injury. It’s not something that can be improved over time. Left alone, they can at best be insensate, and at worst murderous. They kill to live, but they’re incapable of any kind of interaction. I’ve seen some cases, over the years, of a feral or two running with a regular wolf pack. They are always liabilities. They can be steered, occasionally, by a powerful master. But they understand neither reason nor morality.”

She frowned, thinking of the second wolf, the one who’d looked up at her and whimpered. “They were friends. He knew that I killed the first one, and he was unhappy about it.”

“Of course,” Will said, head tilting the other way. “But as I said: you did the right thing. The only way to stop their violence is to put them down, and that’s what you did.”

“You wanna come tell my boss that?” she asked wryly, and reached for her glass. One vodka was definitely not going to be enough right now.

“I understand that your career is in jeopardy.”

“Do you?” Lanny asked. “’Cause I don’t think you do.”

Will took a slow breath, and showed the first hint of something like frustration. “Seeing as how we weren’t there this morning, I’m afraid I have no control over what happened – though I do put forward my condolences for any harm that may become of it. But I do think I – we–” Much snorted “–can help in another way. Nikita tells me you’ve come to an uneasy truce with the Ingraham Institute.”

“More like we threatened each other into a standoff,” she said. “But, yeah, more or less. Given what I was threatening them with, I find it hard to believe they’d just turn their wolves loose to eat random civilians. Showing up on the news isn’t really their style.”

“I agree, but they’re the source of those ferals. That’s where they were turned.”

“So they escaped,” Lanny said.

“Or.” Will’s eyes caught the lamplight, a fast, inhuman gold shimmer. “They were stolen.”

The penny dropped. “Shit,” she murmured, and wanted to kick herself for not having added it all up before. She’d been…distracted.

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