In the corridor, Marc said something rude to my neighbor across the hal , just loud enough for me to hear. Sighing, I plucked my keys and cel phone from the coffee table, glancing around the apartment one last time. Why is it that goodbyes always feel so final? Except when I leave home. I always know I’ll be back at the ranch eventual y, not because I want to go home, but because they keep dragging me back.

It’s a smal difference, but an important one.

I followed Marc down the wide hal to the stairwel , and neither of us said a word. Outside, I stayed several steps behind him, trying to gauge his mood as he marched down the sidewalk. He gripped the handle of my suitcase with knuckles white from tension. His stride was long, each step firm and heavy. But most tel ing was his posture as he wove between the cars in the parking lot. Head high and shoulders squared, his bearing was stiff and formal, as if he were truly nothing more to me than my chauffeur.

And in case I missed any of those more subtle signs, when I moved up to walk alongside him, Marc favored me with a growl, low and angry, and too soft for anyone else to hear.

Great. Nothing beats several hours in a car with a pissed-off werecat. Welcome to my life.

Two

The drive home from the University of North Texas seemed interminable, even with Marc driving. He took out his anger at me and Andrew on the car, and by the time we merged with the highway traffic, he was going twenty miles an hour over the speed limit. At that rate, the drive from Denton to Lufkin—220 miles across the Texas prairie into the lush eastern woodlands—would take him two and a half hours.

It should have taken more than four.

When we left the interstate loop around Dal as for state highway 175, the traffic noise ebbed, leaving an awkward silence. Marc glanced at me, his mouth set in a grim line. “Tel me about Andrew.”

“Not for al the money in the world.” Although freedom was the currency I truly valued. I stared out my window at moonlit fields and defunct oil wel s.

Northeast Texas had few trees, fewer hil s and way too many miles of empty highway.

“Why not? You ashamed of him?” Marc’s eyes flashed with smug satisfaction.

Damn him! Five years, and he stil knew exactly how to piss me off. My fist clenched around the “oh shit!” handle built into his car door. The plastic casing cracked, fal ing apart in my hand to expose the steel frame inside. Oops.

I brushed shards of plastic from my lap onto the floorboard, but a few slivers protruded from my palm like spines from a cactus. I plucked them out one by one, dropping them at my feet with the rest.

My palm was dotted with several tiny spots of blood and one long, shal ow cut.

Such minor wounds would likely heal during my next Shift, if not before. That was one of the advantages to spending half your life on four paws, along with increased metabolism, strength and hearing. No superhuman lifespan, though, as cool as that would have been. In fact, in some places, many toms die young, in fights over territory or mates.

Marc glanced at my hand, his face impassive. He didn’t care about the broken handle. His driver’s seat was missing an armrest and his steering wheel resembled a dented hexagon more than it did a circle. My little accident couldn’t begin to compare with the damage he’d done to his own vehicle in past fits of anger.

“I’m not ashamed of him, Marc.” I snatched a tissue from the box he kept on the center console and wiped the blood from my palm in short, angry strokes. “I just don’t want to talk about him.”

“To anyone, or just to me?” His voice was strained, and his eyes flicked to my face quickly, then back to the road before I could read his expression.

To anyone with fur and claws. But I couldn’t say that. “Does it matter?”

“I guess not.” However, the tense lines around his mouth argued otherwise.

“Aren’t you going to cal him?”

I flipped my phone open and closed, considering. As much fun as it might have been to make Marc listen while I spoke to Andrew, it certainly wouldn’t make the ride home any more bearable. “I’l wait til we stop for gas.”

“We won’t be stopping for a couple of hours. Won’t he worry before then?”

I almost laughed out loud. As if he gave a damn whether or not Andrew would worry. “No, he won’t. He’s my boyfriend. Not my conscience, my conjoined twin or my father.”

Marc frowned, and I looked away, dabbing at my palm again, though the bleeding had already stopped. His question was typical of Pride mentality. A tomcat’s strongest instinct was to protect the women at any cost, with no consideration for our desires for privacy or independence. Or for whether we wanted, or even needed to be protected.

As I’d demonstrated an hour earlier, I did not need his protection. What I needed was a life of my own, which was exactly what I’d found on campus. My decision to live outside the Pride confounded the entire werecat community.

Including my parents, which I’l probably never understand. After al , they taught me to think things through and to defend myself. Then they seemed genuinely surprised when I fought for the very independence they’d prepared me to handle.

While a tomcat would be labeled strong and self-sufficient for pursuing his own interests, I was considered stubborn and selfish for abandoning my Pride in favor of an education and a life of my own.

My parents had decided to humor my “phase,” indulging me on the assumption that I would either grow out of it or come home after graduation. They thought they would lose, at most, four years of manipulation and micromanagement. They were wrong.