Rick appeared in the hallway looking edgy, almost vibrating with awareness. Occam sat up in his chair, watching down the hallway. Aya appeared in his office door, watching.
Margot walked past Rick. “I’ll let her in the outer door,” she said stiffly. The werecat walked down the stairs and let the visitor in. The outer door shut behind Rettell, leaving them together in the stairwell. Margot leaned in and sniffed. Rettell stiffened like she’d been jabbed with a hot poker.
Margot said, “Well. That explains it.” And led the way up.
I looked at Occam, who was watching them on-screen. The last time Rettell had shown up, Rick had acted strangely, wearing a besotted and hungry expression on his face. And then Occam had escorted me out of the building.
Rettell walked up the stairs behind Margot, sniffing the air. When she reached the top, she walked up to Rick and dropped her bags. She made fists of both hands and belted him in the gut with a hard right. Faster than I could think, she took him down with an uppercut. Rick fell flat.
THIRTEEN
Rick managed a breath, but it sounded painful. I took a step back, confused. Occam snorted and had to turn away to hide laughter. Aya’s brows twitched in surprise. Rettell shook out her hands, looked FireWind over, and said, “That was werecat business, not law enforcement business.”
She locked gazes with Occam down the hallway. “You best teach him some werecat manners. I’ll not have my mate acting like a kit.” She bent, lifted her bags by the straps, and traipsed down the hallway toward us. “You have far better mating manners,” she said to Occam.
“Thank you,” he said, forcing his expression to smooth. “I’m a lot older than LaFleur.”
“Margot,” she said. “They were together?”
“For a while,” Occam said, the humor gone. “Didn’t work out.”
Rettell placed her bags on the big table. “Hmmm. I know a guy. I’ll send an invitation and do an introduction. If they get along, I could make a transfer to a local office happen.”
FireWind was standing in the open doorway.“Mate?”
She looked him over again and turned her back on him. FireWind’s mouth fell open just a bit. The boss-boss was more than a foot taller than the petite woman, but she was unimpressed with his mass, gorgeous looks, law enforcement status, and…most everything.
FireWind wasn’t used to being snubbed. We knew parts of his history. In his long life he had been spat upon because of the color of his skin, hated, desired, hunted, and, in recent years, honored. Being disregarded clearly wasn’t something he expected or had familiarity with.
Rick stumbled to the side of his boss, one hand rubbing hisjaw, the other to his gut, his glistening white hair disheveled, strands hanging over his face. He leaned against the doorjamb as if it was the only thing holding him up, but his eyes looked clear and less haunted after the violence, and the tension running through him was gone.
“You,” Rettell said, pointing at Rick. “You arranged for the werelion cubs to be turned over to responsible werecat fosters. You won four wives in Africa, in one of the black wereleopard clans there, in a battle of dominance.”
My body went tight. Occam placed a hand gently on my arm, his touch soothing.Rick won four wives?InAfrica?
Rettell continued. “It’s said you offered them several options, one of which was to remain under your protection, so they couldn’t be taken by another mate. But then you set them free to live like they wanted. They’re living like queens, and the males in the area are allowed in only to mate and are then kicked out. You turned the werecat world on its head.”
“And that’s why you hit me?”
“No. I hit you to take you out of mating cycle, which clearly you never experienced before, even when you went home to meet your wives. And I’ll hit you again if necessary. We don’t have time right now for yowling at the moon and cat foolishness. When this is over, we’ll talk and decide how we’re going to manage this.”
“She’s wired,” JoJo said casually. “It went active right after she hit LaFleur.”
FireWind didn’t shift position. His eyes simply landed on Rettell. Slowly, a smile spread across his face, as if she was a particularly interesting tidbit he might dismember for supper. “Wired?” he asked softly. The tables of power in the room had just done a one-eighty.
Rettell gave a sigh that was a tad too theatrical for the circumstances. She turned up her shirt collar and spoke into it. “I told you it wasn’t going to work. Permission to go dark. Thank you, sir.”
She unbuttoned her coat and tossed it over the nearest chair. Under it she was wearing a tailored dress shirt with a thin tee beneath. She peeled a tiny mic off her collar and unhooked its narrow cord from her waist. With two fingers she freed a thin black object, about the size of a lipstick tube, from her backpocket. She pushed a spot on it and handed it to JoJo. “You really are as good as they say.”
JoJo accepted the device and inspected it. “Nice.” A wicked smile curved her full lips. “Is this mine?”
“No.”
Jo handed it back to Rettell and checked her screens again. “Nothing else live, but that’s not saying she’s clean. She probably has others she can turn on at will.”
Rettell didn’t respond to that and turned her attention back to FireWind. She said, “We need to talk about the arcenciels. Plural.”
* * *
