The focus wasn’t sharp enough for me to tell for sure, but suddenly, every move Abby’d made—every lie she’d told—came through in perfect clarity.

“Robyn’s a shifter.”

Teo shook his head. “She’s human. We both saw her in that cabin, after Abby killed those hunters.”

“She must have been infected after that, because she’s a shifter now, Mateo.” I stared at the photo as the ramifications of what we’d just discovered—and the implications of Abby’s cover-up—pelted my brain like hail against a window.

Abby knew Robyn had been infected, and she’d hidden that from the council.

She’d hidden that from me.

“Wait.” Mateo’s eyes widened, and he looked like his late sister, the tabby we hadn’t been able to save. “You’re saying Robyn’s a stray? A female stray? That’s not possible.”

“According to Manx, it is.” From the beginning, she’d insisted that the warlord shifter bastards who’d used her as a broodmare had also succeeded in creating a female stray, but because we’d never seen one, in the entire history of the US Prides, we’d dismissed her stories as the misrememberings of a tabby traumatized enough to kill multiple men, in the grips of post-traumatic stress disorder.

But Manx had been right all along.

“Okay, but even if that’s true—and I’m not going to believe it until I see it,” Teo said, “what does that have to do with Abby killing Hargrove? How would she even know he’d known about Robyn, if she didn’t know they were being stalked until she saw his board yesterday?”

And I was sure that was the case. Abby had been as shocked and horrified to find her pictures on his wall as I was. So, what had she been trying to hide when she’d insisted on going to Hargrove’s house—the scene of a murder—if she hadn’t known the rogue stray we were after had actually been taking out the hunters? Or that the hunters had been stalking her and Robyn?

What had we gotten from that first crime scene other than the stalker-board?

We’d gotten Darren’s name and the names of two other remaining hunters, but she couldn’t have anticipated that, because we hadn’t known the mauling victims were the hunters. All we’d hoped for, going in, was to identify the scent of whoever’d murdered someone in Hargrove’s house, and in the end, we hadn’t even been able to isolate that scent. Thanks in no small part to Abby, who’d managed to get her own scent—and Robyn’s—all over the place, because of that stupid borrowed…

A groan slid up from my throat.

“What?”

“She did it on purpose. Abby bumped into and rubbed up against everything she could in Hargrove’s house so there’d be a legitimate reason for me to smell her there once she let me in. She was planting her own scent to cover up the fact that it was there already.”

“Well, you’d think that would have been easier to do if she’d been wearing her own clothes. Thanks to Robyn’s jacket, she got her roommate’s scent—” Mateo and I came to the same conclusion at virtually the same moment. “She wore that jacket for a reason,” he whispered, and I nodded.

“Nothing she’s done or said has been an accident. She’s not clumsy, or forgetful, or unprofessional. She’s been playing us this whole time.” I slammed the picture down on the taxidermy table, as the intricacies of Abby’s deception finally fell into place. “She wore her roommate’s jacket to confuse us with the scent. We smelled Robyn, whom we knew to be human, so we assumed the shifter scent was coming from Abby herself.” Which was true, in large part. “And we smelled that scent combination so much, so often, that we mentally began to dismiss it, just like we dismiss our own scents.”

Teo whistled. “Damn, that girl is smart. Too smart for you.”

“Probably,” I agreed. “And too smart for her own good.”

“But you don’t think Abby’s the rogue who killed Joe Mathews, in Hargrove’s house, do you? Or either of the other hunters? We’re thinking that was the roommate?”

I nodded slowly, still puzzling things out, while fear for Abby threatened to overcome all logic. She’d broken nearly every law we had. She was in much more trouble than I’d thought. Way more trouble than I could get her out of.

Maybe too much for even her father to get her out of.

“Jace?” Teo cleared his throat to recapture my attention. “You think Robyn’s the killer, right?”

“She has to be. Why else would Abby wear that jacket, if not to cover Robyn’s scent at the crime scenes? She’s protecting her roommate.” That was the only conclusion that made sense. Abby would definitely risk her own life to protect those she loved. Including the roommate who’d helped bring her out of her shell her freshman year, then had seen three of their friends killed for no reason other than their proximity to Abby.

“Why wouldn’t she tell us? Why wouldn’t she tell you? I mean, why hide a new tabby from the people best equipped to protect her?” Teo asked, and my head spun as I tried to pull all the facts, theories, and assumptions into line. I could only think of one reason Abby would keep her secret from me, even after we’d gotten together. After I’d told her I loved her and had threatened to kick her out of the Pride.

“Abby’s hiding Robyn because she’s the one who infected her.” Infection was a capital crime, punishable by execution, if the council convicted her.

My hands clenched into fists at just the thought of this new threat. If Abby had infected Robyn, she’d done it by accident, and I could not let her pay for that with her life.

Teo’s brows rose. “Wait, you think Abby bit her?”

“Abby bit who?” Warner called from the top of the steps, his head hidden by the empty boxes I’d asked him to bring down.

“Robyn,” Teo said. “But we don’t think that’s true, right?” He glanced at me as Warner dropped the empty boxes at his feet. “I mean, that’s just a theory.”

I shrugged, trying to look less apprehensive about that possibility than I really was. “They are roommates, and Abby’s been known to have nightmares. If she partially shifted in her sleep, and Robyn tried to wake her up…who knows? It happened to Faythe.”