Page 9 of Beware of Dog

Oh, shit.

She kicked her chin up. “Yes.” Sipped her coffee, trying to make her face do Raven things.

Perhaps not the best strategy, given Toly was married to Raven and had never been buffaloed by her haughtiness.

“Which friend?”

“Jamie.”

“Your roommate Jamie?”

Damn him. “Yes.”

“You were at her house?”

“Yes. She and her mom got in a huge fight, and it was awkward, so I called Shep to come and get me. I didn’t call Raven because I wastryingto be kind and not wake Natalia. Was that wrong of me?”

His gaze narrowed, the effect only a little ruined by the hair sticking up from the side of his head.

She took his judgy silence as answer enough, and headed around the island toward her room. She hadn’t had space to take any of her furniture to the dorm, so it still very much felt likehers. When she got there, she shut the door firmly and sank down on the edge of her bed.

Alone for the first time all morning, the weight of last night settled across her fully; bowled her over, actually, and she flopped back across the mattress and stared up at the smooth plaster ceiling.

She knew Shep was right: she’d been drugged. Which meant someone she’d been partying with last night, who went to class with her, had wanted her unconscious.

There was no way to spin that in a positive light.

~*~

Shep expected an interrogation, and wasn’t disappointed. The second they heard a door click shut down the hall, Toly turned to him, eyes nothing but dark slits, jaw set at a tenseangle. The whole effect was ruined by the squirming baby on his shoulder and the disaster of his hair, but Shep was going to enjoy that rather than point it out.

“Where was she?”

“Sounding awful fatherly there, Moscow,” Shep drawled.

Toly exhaled forcefully and didn’t deign to repeat himself. He was serious, Shep saw, and he could respect that; in this case, he was serious, too.

He dropped the asshole act. “Big white townhouse on the UWS. She was sitting on the sidewalk when I got there, halfway to hypothermic, and some little punkass was trying to give her something in a Solo cup.” His hand clenched on empty air at the memory of seeing her like that, clearly incapacitated, weaving where she sat in an inelegant heap on the cold concrete, some chinless little shit looming in her face and waving around more drugs in a cup. “When she called, she was slurring and out of it. She said she only had three sips and shouldn’t have been drunk.”

Toly’s expression darkened. “And you believed her?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“She just lied straight to my face.”

“Yeah, well, she doesn’t lie tome.”

Toly opened his mouth…and then closed it. A groove appeared between his black brows.

Shep found that he didn’t want to backtrack or otherwise diffuse the statement. It was true, and he liked that it was. In fact, it felt satisfying to define it out loud that way. Maybe she was a little shit, but she didn’t feed him fibs the way she did other people. He got the truth; it almost felt, strangely, satisfyingly, like he’dearnedthat truth.

“Her pupils were big as quarters,” he explained. “Someone in that house dosed her, and thank God she had the sense to get out of there and call somebody she trusted.”

Toly’s brows flew up. “Dosed with what?”

“Can’t be sure without a tox screen, but somebody had some very bad intentions, and she’s lucky she’s as smart as she is.”

Toly sipped his coffee and mulled that over. “Raven wouldn’t take this well.”

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