Alyssa darted a glance at Zane, watching out of the corner of her eye as he walked over to stand in front of one of the ancient-looking wall murals, studying it as if he were interested in every small detail. His back and shoulders were stiff, his jaw clenched tight. Just another indication of how pissed he was at her.
When she couldn’t take the silence—and the way he was ignoring her—any longer, she forced herself to say the first thing that popped into her head. “So, you’re a…?”
“Monster?” Zane finished for her when she hesitated. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“I was going to say werewolf,” she snapped.
What the hell was his problem? She supposed he was mad she knew his little werewolf secret, but that didn’t explain the disgust dripping from his words or the way he looked at her like she was something on his shoe he’d prefer to scrape off with a stick. Seeing him regard her that way made her feel physically ill. She honestly felt like she was going to throw up every time he glanced her way—when he bothered looking at her at all.
“Yes, I’m a werewolf.” Zane glanced at her briefly before turning back to the wall mural. “Does it make you feel better to hear me say it out loud?”
She refused to respond to his sarcasm, letting it wash over her without allowing it to seep into the cracks of the wall that had already formed around her heart. But it hurt all the same, even if she didn’t want it to. As she sat in the comfortable leather chair, she tried to understand why his sharp tone bothered her as much as it did. He didn’t think much of her, that was obvious. Why couldn’t she feel the same about him?
“Were you bitten?” she asked. “Is that how you became a werewolf?”
Zane turned to look at her sharply. “You’re telling me you’ve been traveling all over the globe investigating werewolf murders for over a year and you don’t know how we’re created?”
It took Alyssa several moments to realize what Zane was talking about, but when everything finally clicked into place, a lot of confusing cases she’d worked suddenly made a lot more sense.
“Not all those cases involved werewolves. In fact, most of them didn’t. But now that I know about werewolves—and hunters—some of the cases we couldn’t solve make a lot more sense.”
Zane’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. Finally, he turned back to the mural. “We thought you were on the trail of the hunters—or working with them.”
The accusation, even delivered as casually as it was, felt like a punch in the stomach. “You really think I’d be involved with scumbags who track down and execute people like you because they’re different?”
He didn’t look at her. “I’ve realized I don’t really know anything about you. I could hear your heart beating as that vampire came at you with his fangs and claws out, ready to tear you apart. You were as calm as if you were taking a walk in the park. So don’t try telling me this is the first time you’ve faced monsters—or the first time you killed them.”
The accusation tore the breath from her lungs. But this one hit closer to home, because there was a grain of truth to it.
“Yes,” she ground out through clenched teeth. “There have been occasions where I’ve had to deal with things that most other people will never have to even know about, much less see. Not werewolves or vampires, but things that leave me with nightmares. But no matter how scary they were, I’ve never killed anything that wasn’t trying to kill me first. As a cop, you should understand that.”
Zane glanced at her, his expression softening. “I do understand. I apologize.”
That made her feel a little better, at least. Alyssa knew she should say something else while he might be willing to listen to her, but no words would come. She was terrified of opening her mouth and shoving her foot in it again.
“I didn’t become a werewolf by getting bitten,” he said suddenly, catching her off guard. “It doesn’t work that way. So you don’t have to worry about it happening to you even though I nipped you when we were…together.”
Her breath hitched. To tell the truth, she hadn’t even thought about that, but now that he mentioned it, she couldn’t help remembering the love bites he’d given her neck and shoulders when they’d made love. She supposed it was good that she didn’t need to worry about turning into a werewolf even as part of her wondered if it would be all that bad.
She shook that crazy thought off, waiting for him to tell her the rest of the story. When he didn’t, she realized she needed to nudge him a little. But gently.
“If a bite doesn’t do it, how does it work?”
He took a deep breath, then moved away from the wall mural, coming over to lean back against the desk, arms folded. Alyssa saw the doubt on his face as he stared down at the floor, like he was hesitant to tell her anything about his kind for fear of where that information would end up.
“Nothing you tell me will ever reach the people I work for,” she assured him. “You have my word on that—if that’s worth anything to you.”
Zane’s expression was hard to read, but after a moment, he seemed to have finally made up his mind. “People who become werewolves are born with a genetic marker in their DNA. If they go through a traumatic event, the gene flips on and they become a werewolf. It can’t be passed on any other way. Every werewolf is born in violence and pain.”
The thought of Zane going through something so awful made her heart hurt. Knowing what she already did about him, it wasn’t difficult figuring out exactly what that event had been.
“The battle in Afghanistan,” she murmured. “When you told me you’d come back as a monster, that’s what you meant. What you went through over there turned you into a werewolf.”
He nodded, his eyes a little distant. “I didn’t realize it at first, of course. I just thought I was dealing with survivor’s guilt or PTSD. Hell, for a while I thought it was brain damage from all the concussions I’d suffered. But it takes a while for the werewolf traits to come out. I’d been having nightmares from day one, but it wasn’t until a month after I got back that I started waking up in the middle of the night growling and tearing the bed apart with my claws. A little while after that, my fangs showed up. Sienna left shortly after that. The rest you know. Gage found me and brought me back to Dallas and put me on his SWAT team, and now I’m in LA fighting vampires.”
“Are the claws and the fangs all there is?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
