“There were finger-size bruises on her thighs and more mixed in with claw marks on her neck. Danny thinks he raped her, then Shifted to tear out her throat.”

Marc glanced away, but I caught a glimpse of raw fear and outrage in his eyes before he could lower them. “Then he ripped into her stomach.”

My breath caught in my throat as I choked on my own horror. A jade pawn slipped from my fingers. Marc’s hand shot out, almost too fast to see, and the pawn fel into his palm before it could hit the floor.

That poor girl, I thought, watching as he carefully placed the piece on the chessboard in line with its comrades. I cleared my throat, drawing his eyes back to mine. “How old?”

“Faythe, you don’t need—”

One sharp glance stopped him cold, and I was glad to see that at least one of my old tricks stil worked. “How old, Marc?”

“Nineteen.”

My eyes squeezed shut as I gave in to my need to wallow in denial. That kind of thing didn’t happen in our territory. In South America, yes. But not in the States, and definitely not in the south-central territory. At least, not since it happened to Marc’s mother.

I ran my thumb over the cold, smooth chess piece in my hand, noticing absently that it was the marble queen, stately in her white robes and pointed crown.

She lay on my palm, the features only hinted at on her polished stone face. But the expression I saw on her was one I’d seen in a photograph once, before Marc snatched it from my hand to shove it back beneath the socks in his top drawer.

Sonora Ramos. He never spoke about her, so I knew nothing but her name, and I only knew that because I’d overheard a private conversation between my parents.

The territorial council recognized only three capital crimes. The first was murder, the second was infection of a human, and the third was disclosure to a human. The wildcat who’d invaded our territory fifteen years earlier was guilty of al three.

We never discovered his real name, but there was a note in his back pocket made out to “Jose,” so that’s what we cal ed him, when we cal ed him anything at all. Jose snuck into our territory after being run out of a Pride somewhere in Central America for crimes I couldn’t stand to even think about. From what we could tel , his presence in southern Texas was reported the very day he arrived. It was an incredible stroke of luck. Pure chance. And if it hadn’t happened, Marc would have died that night.

As soon as he got the cal , Daddy dispatched his three best enforcers with instructions to find the intruder and escort him back to the border with as much force as necessary. Unfortunately, a simple escort proved to be much too little and far too late.

The enforcers found Jose, in cat form, in the home of a widowed Mexican immigrant. He kil ed two of them while the third Shifted. The remaining enforcer took out the now-wounded Jose with little more than a scratch to show for his trouble, but it was too late for Sonora Ramos.

Jose had broken into Marc’s house and attacked his mother while she slept.

The details of the assault were eerily similar to what happened to the girl in Oklahoma, including the fact that Jose used his victim to satisfy more than one kind of appetite. He’d had his muzzle buried in what remained of her stomach when Daddy’s enforcers found him.

Marc woke up at some point during the attack and tried to defend his mother, but Jose swatted him away with a single paw full of unsheathed claws. With Jose dead, the enforcer found Marc between his mother’s bed and the wal , bleeding and unconscious. The claw marks on his chest were already swollen at the edges and festering—sure signs that he would soon be one of us.

He was only fourteen years old.

Marc waved a chess piece in front of my nose, drawing my attention back to him. “Are you okay?”

I tried to smile, but my effort felt more like a grimace. “Yeah. You?”

He nodded. “I’m fine.” But I found that hard to believe. How could he be fine, faced with such a graphic reminder of what had happened to his mother?

I studied Marc’s face, conscious suddenly of how much he’d changed since the day we met, the morning after his mother died. He’d looked so scared, lying alone in the guest bed, a wisp of a boy with dark curly hair and deep dimples. He’d arrived at the Lazy S with nothing but a threadbare suitcase and a sad scowl. But he was a fighter. Even as an eight-year-old, I’d recognized the will to survive in the quiet defiance in his eyes and hard line of his mouth, both of which said that he’d seen the worst the world had to offer, and that nothing I put him through could possibly compare.

He was right.

Sitting on the floor across from him fifteen years later, I thought back to his first year with us. His adjustment period was long and hard, and his first Shift sent his body into severe shock. He wouldn’t let anyone near him at first, and didn’t say a single word until he’d been on the ranch for nearly two months. But in the end, he not only survived, he thrived, against the predictions of the entire council.

Except for having watched his mother die, Marc was probably the most fortunate stray in history. Because he was so young when he was scratched, and because his attack happened on our territory, my parents felt responsible for him.

They took him in and nursed him through the initial sickness—the scratch-fever—when most other Alphas would have let him die, not out of callous disregard, but out of practicality. Survival of the fittest. In the wild, when a mother dies, her cubs die too. But my parents couldn’t let Marc die. They saw in him the opportunity to try to make up for the solitude and tragedy that define the lives of most strays.