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I nodded. I didn’t know what else to do.

“There’s nothing you could have done for Ethan or for any of the others, but we all know that you would have given anything to save them. Hell, look what you went through for me.” He held up my broken arm and brushed the fingers of his free hand over the fading bruises on my ribs and stomach.

It was just pain. I deserved pain, if only for what I’d done to Marc.

“You’re too good for me.” I shook my head, digging deep for the courage to tell him the truth. It was the very least he deserved, though he didn’t deserve the fallout. “You don’t understand….”

Marc’s mouth crushed against mine, and he kissed me so hard, so thoroughly, that I couldn’t breathe. And didn’t give a damn.

I kissed him back, tasting him, breathing him, hating the plastic encasing my arm because it kept me from properly feeling him. His chest was slick. The muscles shifted beneath my good hand as he moved. I let my lips trail over the harsh stubble on his chin, and he tilted his head back, giving me full access to his throat—the most vulnerable part of his body.

I could kill him in half a second, if I wanted to. Marc presenting me with his throat said he trusted me with his life. It was the biggest compliment one cat could give another.

But the scary part was that he trusted me with his heart.

I forced that thought away and stood on my toes to reach his jaw. His hands roamed up from my waist, brushing the lower curves of my breasts. My tongue traced the line of his neck, following it to his collarbone. I lapped at the water pooled there, then my tongue ventured back up, searching out his mouth.

I pulled his head down for another kiss, and Marc groaned. His tongue found mine, and he walked us one step backward. My back hit the cold tile wall, and he pulled away to lift me beneath both arms, his stance wide for stability. I wrapped my legs around his hips and clung to him, my skin slick against his.

My breasts pressed into his chest. My good arm went around his neck. He lifted me higher, and I half sat on the soap shelf to help support my weight as his fingers slid down my side, leaving trails of fire in their wake. His hand slipped between us, testing, guiding. Then he lowered me slowly.

I held my breath until he was all the way in, and my next inhalation was so ragged it almost hurt. I rocked forward, and he moaned. His eyes closed, and he rocked with me. I draped both arms around his neck, closed my eyes and rode him. I let him set the pace—slow at first, but gaining speed as friction built.

He drove into me, pinning me to the wall, drawing small sounds from me with each stroke. He rocked me back and forth with a grip on both my hips. I clung to the top of the stall with my left hand and lightly clutched the showerhead with the fingers protruding from my cast. Each breath came faster, each thrust harder. My legs tightened around him as I sought more contact. Greater friction. More heat.

Finally, when I was sure I couldn’t hold back another second, Marc groaned and his strokes became frantic. I let go, and sensation washed over me, scalding compared to the now lukewarm water.

Spent, Marc leaned into me, and his head found my shoulder. His heart raced inches from mine, and I could hear each whoosh of his pulse.

After at least a minute like that, he lowered us until we sat on one corner of the shower floor, water spraying my back. I straddled him and leaned back so I could see his face. He stared at me, but he wasn’t smiling. He looked…scared. Determined.

I started to ask what was wrong, but he spoke before I could.

“Marry me, Faythe.”

I nearly choked on surprise. How many times was that request going to catch me off guard?

“This is the last time I’ll ask. I mean it. Marry me so that when all this is over, we can get a house of our own. A little land. A lot of privacy.”

“Marc…” But I had no idea how to finish that thought.

“We can do it however you want. We can have a ceremony, or stop by the courthouse on our way to Venice. You can wear a white dress, or a red dress, or jeans, or nothing at all. We can get married in the nude. I don’t care. We’ll do whatever you want. Just tell me you’ll marry me, so we can get something good out of all this.” His wide-spread arms took in every disaster the past few months had thrown at us, but his gaze never left mine. “Marry me, Faythe. Please.”

His face broke my heart. His eyes seared my soul.

I wasn’t good enough for him.

“Marc, we have to talk about…something.” I swallowed thickly, and put my good hand over his mouth when he started to protest. “I’m not saying no,” I insisted, and he relaxed visibly, as the spray of water across my back continued to cool. “But I can’t…I can’t do this now. There’s too much going on, and we need to talk first.”

He sat straighter, and I slid a few inches down his legs. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. If it’s kids, or becoming Alpha, or whatever, it doesn’t matter. We’ll work it out.”

He looked so hopeful, I wanted to smile, but didn’t let myself. He hadn’t heard what I had to say yet. “I—”

And that’s when the power went out.

“S
omeone give me a flashlight.” My father’s voice rumbled from the other end of the hall. A bobbing shaft of light accompanied heavy footsteps toward him, and a Vic-shaped shadow handed over his flashlight.

Marc tucked his towel tighter around his waist, and the thin beam from his own penlight showed off drops of water still clinging to his chest and dripping from his hair. Having anticipated neither the full-scale air raid nor my wet embrace, he hadn’t brought a change of clothes.

In the deep shadows, the four parallel scars running across his chest looked terrible. Fresh. No doubt they were fresh in his mind, but he’d had them since he was fourteen, when the stray who’d raped and killed his mother had gored him, too, bringing him into my life.

For better or worse.

Three other beams crisscrossed the packed hallway as my father held an informal roll call, but a single steady pole of light caught my eye. Jace stood across from my room and several feet down, his face harshly lit by the beam from the small flashlight my mom kept beneath the kitchen sink. But even poorly illuminated, his expression was unmistakable. His focus jumped from me in my robe to Marc in his towel, and his jaw bulged furiously.

A tangle of emotions churned through me, threatening to wash me away in a tide of confusion, guilt, fear, and regret. And for a moment, I thought Jace was going to expose them all.

But when his gaze met mine, his anger softened into carefully controlled envy. Then he exhaled and dragged his focus to the end of the hall when my father cleared his throat to capture everyone’s attention.

Marc’s hand wound around mine. He hadn’t seen Jace watching us; he was focused on the problem at hand. Like a good enforcer.

“Vic, you and Parker go downstairs and flip the circuit breaker,” my dad said from his position near the front door. “And stay away from the cage. That thunderbird has an incredible wingspan, and he can Shift instantly.”

Vic nodded, already headed into the kitchen with a flashlight. Parker followed, his steps heavy, his grim frown exaggerated by the dark shadows stretched across his face. To my knowledge, he hadn’t spoken since he’d heard what Lance had done.

I knew how he felt—at least better than anyone else could. Lance had let Malone frame us for murder, putting all our lives at risk, including Parker’s. My brother Ryan had sold me out to a serial rapist jungle stray who’d planned to sell me as a broodmare in the Amazon. Betrayal sucks, but I had more faith in my pound-the-shit-out-of-something therapy than Parker’s drink-till-you-go-numb method of dealing.

“Karen, can you pass out candles and matches, just in case?” my dad said, drawing my attention back on track. My mother raised a handful of tapers she’d already collected, then ducked into the kitchen, probably to dig for matches. All of the enforcers kept two flashlights in their cars as part of the standard trunk emergency kit. Except for me; I didn’t have a car.

Unfortunately, venturing outside to raid half a dozen trunks carried more risk at that moment than stumbling around in the dark inside. Especially considering that several of us could partially Shift our eyes, if necessary.

My father’s stern focus skipped from face to shadowed face. “Everyone else, grab a candle and find something quiet to do while you wait. The lights should be back on any minute.” Then, as the toms shuffled toward the kitchen, my father mumbled beneath his breath. “So help me, if one of you sets my house on fire, I will replace the rug in my office with your hide.”

I snorted. An Alpha’s sense of humor was a rare beast indeed.

But my smile died on my lips when Vic and Parker clomped up the basement stairs, yet the house remained dark.

Kai cried out from below, in a screeching, dual-tone voice loud enough to echo in the crowded hall. “They’ve cut your power to draw you out. That means there are enough of us now to take you on in groups!”

“So, what do they expect us to do?” Jace demanded, while my father scowled from the center of a huddle with the other Alphas. “Walk out and surrender?”

“No.” I drew my robe tighter and held my broken arm at my stomach. “They expect us to die.”

My dad’s scowl deepened, and he led the other Alphas into his office with the flashlight they shared.

“This makes no sense,” Mateo Di Carlo said to the house in general, once the office door had closed. He stood as close as he could get to Manx without actually touching her while she nursed Des back to sleep. “Why would they believe Malone’s bullshit story, but not our truth?”

“They’d believe us if we had proof.” I waved Kaci forward when she peeked out of Owen’s room. My injured brother lay inside, listening and watching by candlelight from his bed. Michael sat in a chair beside him, taking it all in. “And that would be enough of a reason for them to break their word to Malone,” I continued. “To nullify the deal they made. But without evidence, they consider themselves honor-bound to uphold their word. And to avenge their dead.”

“They’re trying to kill us?” Kaci whispered.

I wrapped my casted arm around her. “Not you. They could have killed you earlier, but they didn’t. They’re trying to protect you and me and Manx.”

She looked less than reassured.

“This is crazy.” Brian Taylor stepped from the kitchen with a candle in one hand, its flame flickering over his freckles and the pale brown fuzz on his chin, emphasizing his youth. “How are we supposed to stop them? Shoot them out of the sky?”

“Yeah, that’d be great, if we had guns.” Since our ranch had no livestock to protect, they weren’t necessary for typical farm practicality and werecats hunted with their claws and canines. Carrying a firearm was like cheating, thus considered dishonorable in most Prides.

In fact, the only cat I’d ever even seen with a gun was…

“Here.” I stepped away from Marc and nudged Kaci closer to him, for comfort. “I’ll be right back.” I could feel everyone watching me as I marched down the hall, and Jace’s gaze in particular seemed to burn.

“What are you doing?” he whispered, falling into step with me.

“I have an idea.” I stopped at the office door and gave three sharp knocks to announce my entrance; I wouldn’t have been able to hear permission, anyway.

The door was unlocked, so I pushed it open to find all four Alphas watching me. “Sorry to interrupt, but I have an idea, and I need something from your desk. If that’s okay.”

My father raised a brow at my formality, and one corner of his mouth twitched as if he wanted to smile. He knew I was about to ask for something crazy; why else would I grease the wheels with manners?

He waved one thick hand toward his desk in a be-my-guest motion, and I marched across the room. Jace stopped in the doorway, and an intimately familiar breathing pattern told me Marc had joined him.

Eager now, I upended the marble jar on one corner of the desk. Pens and mechanical pencils tumbled onto the spotless blotter like pick-up sticks, and I pawed through them until I found a small, thin key ring, holding two identical shiny keys.

My father stood when I dropped into a squat behind his desk. “Faythe…” he warned, but I already had the bottom drawer open. And there it was: a blocky black pistol. Handheld death. According to the box of bullets next to it, the gun was a 9 mm, which was more than I’d known about it a second before.

I held it flat in my palm, getting a feel for the weight. It was heavier than I’d expected.

Across the room, Jace flinched, and I caught the motion in my peripheral vision. Manx had accidentally shot him with that gun five months earlier, and his recovery had been less than pleasant. And more than memorable. “Faythe…” he began, and I was surprised to realize that his tone almost exactly matched my father’s.

My dad cleared his throat, and I looked up to see that all the Alphas were standing now. My uncle watched me in equal parts caution and curiosity. Taylor looked like he thought I’d lost my mind. And if I wasn’t mistaken, Bert Di Carlo looked…almost impressed. “You don’t know how to use that,” my father said.

“They don’t know that.”

Jace flinched again when I flipped the gun over, looking for the safety. Most cats I knew had an innate fear of guns, which went hand in hand with our fear of hunters. Thanks to our fantastic hearing and reflexes, there really wasn’t much danger of us getting shot, but the chances of dying from a bullet wound were greater than the chances of dying from the average mauling. To which our scar-riddled bodies could attest.

Thus, no one looked particularly comfortable with me waving a gun around the room.

“What are you doing?” Marc started across the floor toward me—brave tom—but my father reached me first.

“I’m checking for bullets. To see how many are in there.”

“What are you going to do, stand on the porch and hold a turkey shoot?” Taylor asked, running one hand over his close-cropped hair.

“I’m hoping it won’t come to that.” I frowned and turned the pistol over again. “How do you open this thing?”

My father calmly plucked the gun from my hand, then pulled back a lever at the top of the grip with his thumb. Something clicked, and the clip slid into his waiting palm. He held it up for me to see, then slid it back into the grip of the gun until it clicked again. “One in the chamber, fifteen in the clip. Safety’s on.”

He gave me back the pistol, and I gaped at my Alpha like I’d never met him. “How did you…?”

My dad lifted both graying brows. “When are you going to stop being surprised by what I know?”

“Where did you learn about guns?”

He sighed but looked pleased by my interest. “Facing your fears is the best way to overcome them. But that’s a story for another day. And Ed’s right. You can’t just walk out there and start shooting.”

“I know.” Even if I wanted to kill one of the thunderbirds—and I wasn’t willing to kill in anything other than immediate self- or friend-defense—if our gunman shot and missed, they’d know we were bluffing. “I was hoping to scare them off long enough for us to…come up with a better plan. Learn how to fight them, or work on finding more proof. Or at least get the power back on.”

Without it, we couldn’t access the Internet, charge our phones, or even cook. Much less heat the house. Heat wasn’t an immediate concern, with all the bodies keeping things warm, but we would get cold eventually. And we would definitely run out of food. We’d stocked up the day before, but two dozen full-grown werecats go through food very, very quickly. We’d eaten fifteen pounds of beef in the chili alone.

“Okay, that’s a solid, attainable goal.” Uncle Rick nodded sagely.

Taylor frowned. “No, it’s spinning our wheels. Even if we get the power back on without any trouble—and for the record, this smells like a setup to me—they’ll just knock it out again. We need a permanent solution.”

“We’re not going to get rid of them without killing them,” Marc said. “And that’ll just bring more of them on the fly. Pun intended.”

No one laughed.

“They’ll lay off if we can come up with proof that we’re not involved,” I repeated. That was our only hope for a peaceful resolution.

“Yeah, and they’d disappear into a wormhole, if we knew how to open one,” Michael said from the doorway, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose. “Why are you holding a gun?”

“I think we should try threatening them. Maybe clip a couple of wings in the process. We have to show them we’re willing to fight back.”

“Even if it brings more birds down on us?” My father eyed me with an odd intensity, as if he were looking for something in particular from my answer.

“Yes.” I nodded definitively to punctuate. “We can’t just cower here, waiting to be picked off one by one. They’re birds of prey, and we’re acting like a bunch of mice trembling in a field. We all need to remember that in the natural order of things, cats hunt birds, not the other way around.”

“Agreed…” my Alpha began. But he looked less than convinced by my proposition, so I sucked in a deep breath and tried again.

“Look, even if they leave long enough to bring reinforcements, that’ll give us time to arm ourselves and get the power back on.”

“Arm ourselves?” Ed Taylor asked, and I turned to see him holding a fresh bottle of Scotch. I’d never seen Taylor drink, but with his eyes still red from crying over Jake, I could hardly blame him. “With guns?”

“Yes.”

Taylor set his glass on the bar and poured an inch from the bottle. “We’ve never resorted to such crude measures before, and frankly, I’m afraid to think where a step like that might lead.”

I met his gaze steadily, trying to strike a balance between confidence and criticism. “We’ve never been held prisoner in our own home before, either. And
I’m
afraid to think where
that
might lead.”

“A valid point,” Di Carlo declared, and I could have hugged Vic’s dad.

My uncle Rick reached for the bottle of Scotch. “So, does anyone know how to fire that thing?” He looked pointedly at his brother-in-law.

My father rubbed his forehead. “I was a decent shot in college, but I haven’t fired a gun in nearly a quarter of a century.”

I shrugged. “Has anyone else ever shot a gun?”

No one spoke, so I held the pistol out to my dad. He sighed but took it and turned to his fellow Alphas. “Are we in agreement over this course of action? Should I call for a vote?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Uncle Rick said, and Bert Di Carlo nodded in agreement. Then, to my surprise, Ed Taylor nodded, too.

“We can’t just sit here and take it,” he said, and a swell of pride blossomed in my chest. They were actually listening to me! Not just my father, but the other Alphas, too. I couldn’t resist a grin, but my smile faltered slightly when I saw it returned by both Marc and Jace. Neither noticed the other beaming at me.

“So, what’s the plan?” Di Carlo sank onto the arm of the couch with the short glass my uncle handed him.

Uncle Rick screwed the lid back on the bottle. “I suggest an ultimatum. Call one of them out for a parlay and explain that if they don’t flock on back home, we’re gonna hold a turkey shoot.” He winked at me, and I couldn’t resist a grin.