I gave his door an experimental swing, as if the problem were in the hinges. “I’ll have a repairman over to fix this within the hour.”
“No.” He scowled. “I’m going to bed. Send him tonight, around nine. I should be up by then.”
“Done.”
Spencer closed his front door behind us, and a heavy scraping sound came from inside as he pushed something in front of the broken door to hold it closed.
“Wow,” Robyn said as I followed her down the stairs. “I thought I was a natural disaster, but you’re hurricane Titus. You took out his doorandhis car, in one fell swoop. Not to mention stealing his sleep and accusing him of murder.”
“If you knew he wasn’t the killer, why did you let me accuse him?” I demanded as I stared into the parking lot, looking for a Toyota that Spencer Cole might own.
“I didn’t know for sure,” she admitted. “I was planning to start that conversation with questions, not accusations, but you handcuffed me to a steering wheel!”
“Yeah. Just how mad about that are you?”
“Less so now than I was before I shredded your driver’s seat, kicked in your dashboard, and slashed your tires.”
I thought she was joking until I glanced past her at the space where I’d parked. How the hell was I going to explainthatto my insurance guy? “Are you going to be this destructive every time I piss you off?”
“Did you not listen when the council warned you about my impulse control issues?”
“Not closely enough, apparently. Speaking of shocking revelations, why do you know how to pick open handcuffs?”
Robyn took Spencer’s keys and pressed the lock button. A Corolla halfway across the lot beeped and flashed its lights. “Instead of answering that, why don’t I show you how I acquired the skill…?” She pulled the cuffs from her pocket and dangled them in front of me with a wicked smile.
“You think I’m going to wear those?”
“I think we won’t be even until you do.” She backed toward the parking lot, and the sun glinted off the metal cuffs as she swung them. “Why? Is the big bad Alpha afraid to relinquish control?”
“To you?” I snorted and snatched the cuffs from her. “Hell, yes.”
Robyn turned and took off for the Corolla, then called over her shoulder. “You should be…”
TWENTY
Robyn
The plan was to go back to Justus’s place and take a nap before we had to head to the zoo. Titus was exhausted—he couldn’t have gotten much sleep the night before—and he’d hardly eaten a thing all day. And with each mile we drove, he retreated a little more into his own head, until his eyes glazed over and his responses to my questions devolved into distracted grunts.
But the moment we stepped into the apartment, his bearing changed. Every muscle in his body tensed and his jaw clenched.
I glanced around the front rooms, expecting to find an intruder or some other danger that had triggered his internal alarm. The kitchen and living room were still trashed, except for the couch we’d put back in order, but the apartment was unoccupied, as far as I could tell. Titus’s gaze locked on the guest room, which stood open and as empty as we’d left it. And finally I understood.
He wasn’t bracing himself against a new threat. He was still battling the last one. “I failed him. Blum is dead, and I was supposed to protect him. Maybe I should have handcuffedhimto something.”
Well, hell. No wonder he’d been so determined to keep me in the car. He blamed himself for Leland’s death, and he couldn’t stand the thought of the same thing happening to me.
I pushed the front door shut and put the chain on the hook, because the deadbolt was still busted from the break-in. “It’s not your fault.”
“Bullshit. I swore to protect them. I accepted oaths of loyalty in exchange for that promise. I told them I would lead them, and teach them, and defend them, and Blum got killed on my watch. Because I left him behind.”
“Titus, we had no idea he was in danger. We took him to his dorm specificallytoprotect him. You can’t blame yourself for this.”
He sank onto the couch and bent forward with his elbows on his knees, his head cradled in his hands. “There’s no one else to blame.”
“Blame the killer. Tonight we’ll find Justus, and we’ll figure out who infected him. And who’s trying to make sure you go down for the strays he’s infected.” Thosehadto be the same person.
“Does any of it matter? I’m a liability to the Pride, but without the weight of my position, I might not have the clout to help Justus.” His expression cracked, exposing the pain beneath his anger. “Robyn, I can’t let my brother wind up like Leland Blum. I can’t let some psycho kill him, and I sure as hell can’t let the council execute him.”
