Night Broken (Mercy Thompson #8)(2)

“Call the police,” Adam said. “That’s what they are there for.”

“He’ll kill me,” she whispered. “Adam, he’ll kill me. I don’t have anywhere else to run. Please.”

Werewolves can tell when people are lying. So can some of the other supernatural critters running around—like me, for instance. Over the phone is a lot trickier because a lot of the telltale signs involve heartbeat and smell—neither of which is possible to detect over a phone line. But I could hear the truth in her voice.

Adam looked at me.

“Tell her to come,” I said. What else could I say? If something happened to her when we could help … I wasn’t sure if I could live with that. I knew that Adam couldn’t.

Auriele continued to watch me. She frowned, finally turned away, and started to dry the dishes again.

“Adam, please?” Christy pleaded.

Adam narrowed his eyes at me and didn’t say anything.

“Adam,” Mary Jo said from the doorway. Mary Jo is a firefighter, tough and smart. “She is owed by the pack for the years that she was yours. Let her come home, and the pack will protect her.”

He gave Mary Jo a look, and she dropped her eyes.

“It’s okay,” I said to Adam, and tried to make it not a lie. “Really.”

I bake when I’m stressed. If I had to make enough chocolate chip cookies to feed Richland while she was here, it would be okay because Adam needed me to be okay with it.

If she tried anything, she would be sorry. Adam was mine. She had thrown him away, thrown Jesse away—and I had snatched them up. Finders keepers.

Maybe she didn’t want them back. Maybe she just needed to be safe. My gut wasn’t convinced, but jealousy isn’t a logical emotion, and I had no reason to be jealous of Christy.

“All right,” Adam said. “All right. You can come.” Then, his voice gentle, he asked, “Do you need money for plane tickets?”

I went back to the dishes and tried not to hear the rest of the conversation. Tried not to hear the concern in Adam’s voice, the softness—and the satisfaction he got from taking care of her. Good Alpha werewolves take care of those around them; it’s part of what makes them Alpha.

I might have been able to ignore it better if all the wolves still in the house hadn’t drifted into the kitchen. They listened to Adam’s finalization of the details that would bring Christy here and snuck occasional, furtive glances my way when they thought I wouldn’t notice.

Auriele took the last cup from my hand. I unplugged the sink and shook the water from my hands before drying them off on my jeans. My hands aren’t my best feature. The hot water had left my skin pruney, and my knuckles were red and swollen. Even after washing dishes, there was still some black grease embedded in my skin and under my nails. Christy’s hands were always beautiful, with French-manicured nails.

Adam hung up the phone and called the travel agent he used to coordinate his not-infrequent business travel: both business business and werewolf business.

“She can stay with Honey and me,” said Mary Jo to me, her voice neutral.

Mary Jo and Honey were the other two female werewolves in the pack. Mary Jo had moved in with Honey when Honey’s mate had been killed a few months ago. Neither of them liked me very much.

Until Mary Jo made the offer of hospitality, I’d been half planning to put Christy up with one of the other pack members because I hadn’t thought it through. I knew that putting Christy in with Mary Jo and Honey would be a mistake.

Adam and I were working hard to increase the pack cohesion, which meant that I was trying very hard not to further alienate either Mary Jo or Honey. I was doing pretty well at keeping our interactions to polite neutrality. If Christy moved in with them, she would use their dislike of me and fan it into a hurricane-force division that would rain down on the pack in a flood of drama.

Once I recognized the power of Christy as a divisive force, I realized that it wasn’t just a problem for my relationship with the pack, but also for Adam’s. Putting Adam’s ex-wife in the same house with Honey and Mary Jo would be stupid because it would force Mary Jo to take Christy’s side on any tension between Christy and Adam or Christy and the pack. The same thing would be true of anyone Christy stayed with.

Christy was going to have to stay here with Adam and me.

“Christy needs to be here, where she’ll feel safe,” said Auriele before I could reply to Mary Jo.

“Uhm,” I said, because I was still reeling under the weight of just how much it was going to suck having her not just here in the Tri-Cities, but here in my home.

“You don’t want her here?” asked Auriele, and for the first time, I realized that Auriele, like Mary Jo, had liked Christy better than she did me. “She’s scared and alone. Don’t be petty, Mercy.”

“Would you want Darryl’s ex staying at your house?” asked Jesse hotly. I hadn’t realized she’d come back downstairs. Her chin was raised as she flung her support my way. I didn’t want her to do that. Christy was her mom—Jesse shouldn’t be trying to choose between us.

“If she needed help, I would,” Auriele snapped. It was easy for her to be certain because Darryl, as far as I knew, didn’t have an ex-wife. “If you don’t want Christy here, Mercy, she is welcome at my house.”