Night Broken (Mercy Thompson #8)(69)

“You slept with a complete stranger,” I said. “Not Adam’s fault you”—Jesse had come down the stairs, with Ben and Darryl trailing behind her, so I didn’t call Christy a slut—“made a poor choice.”

“He was a friend of my best friend,” she said. “Rich, charming, and handsome, he wasn’t a ‘complete stranger.’ I had no way to tell that he was a monster.”

“You didn’t know enough about him for Warren to find him. You didn’t know where he lived, what country he was from. I bet you didn’t even check to see if he was married or not before you chased after him. How long did you know him before you hopped into bed with him? An hour?”

It probably wasn’t fair to use what Jesse had told me about her mother’s dating habits against Christy, but she hadn’t been playing fair, either. The tears had been cheating, and when she’d realized just how many of the pack had started to filter into the kitchen behind her, she would doubtless use them again.

“He approached me,” she said defensively—not to mention falsely.

“Are you stupid? How long did you live with the wolves?” I asked her incredulously. “You do know that most of the people in this room can tell that you are lying, right?”

Stupid. She wasn’t stupid, just self-absorbed and unwise. She didn’t like people thinking badly of her, so she lied.

I stalked away from her, incensed that most of me wanted to play fair instead of just ripping her to shreds the way she’d ripped into Adam. It felt disloyal to Adam. It felt like I might be letting her manipulate me into feeling sorry for her.

As I turned back toward Christy, I saw Jesse standing a little behind her. Jesse was Christy’s daughter, and I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Jesse. With a good reason not to destroy my enemy, I paced back until I was face-to-face with Christy again.

“Look.” I tried to keep my voice gentle. “No one cares if you sleep with a football team, none of whom you know and all of whom are half your age.” I repeated it so she could hear the truth in my words. “We don’t care.”

Christy went pale in genuine hurt, making me reexamine what I’d just said.

“That doesn’t mean that we don’t care if one of them hurts you. That’s another matter entirely. Call us, and we’ll go take care of it. But you have to quit flinging blame around.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” she said, quietly, believing it. But then she aimed her venom at me and increased the volume. “Not my fault. It wasn’t.”

“Juan came after you because you slept with him, then you ran,” I told her, but then I started thinking about what that meant. “If you had waited and told him you weren’t interested, he might have left you alone.” I worked through the germ of the idea. “If he’d been leaving bodies everywhere he went, Warren would have figured it out. But there weren’t bodies, there weren’t fires until you ran.” I knew there hadn’t been bodies, because Warren had looked for bodies left the same way as his victims here in the Tri-Cities. Why hadn’t there been any other bodies? “That’s not your fault,” I told her, “but it is interesting.”

She stared at me, her fists clenched.

“Had your friend slept with him before?” I asked.

Christy was competitive. I knew, because Jesse talked to me, that Christy had slept with her best friend’s husband just to prove that she could. Maybe she’d done the same thing with her best friend’s lover, assuming that Flores had been her friend’s lover. I didn’t care. I just needed to know if Flores had slept with women other than Christy.

Christy didn’t answer, but her clear skin flushed pink, telling me I’d hit the mark. All the marks.

“He didn’t stalk her?”

“No,” she whispered. “He didn’t stalk her. One night, and he was done with her. She was pretty bitter about it. But she doesn’t have an ex-husband who is a werewolf.”

Guayota hadn’t sounded like he cared if Adam was a werewolf, he sounded like he wanted Christy back. Why stalk Christy and not her friend? What was different about Christy?

The question rang in my head while I answered the nasty venom in her last sentence. “The only thing Adam has to do with this is that you bragged about being an Alpha werewolf’s ex-wife to catch Juan’s attention.” Juan had known that Adam was a werewolf and that he was Christy’s ex-husband. Could have been that he’d researched it, but there was a hint of competitiveness in the way he’d confronted Adam. The kind of competitiveness that happens when a man’s lover brags about a previous lover.

She didn’t answer me, so I knew that my shot in the dark was right that time, too.

“This guy has nothing to do with werewolves,” I told her. Guayota hadn’t cared that Adam was a werewolf, hadn’t cared about Adam, really, except that he stood between Christy and Guayota and that he had been Christy’s husband. “Congratulations, Christy. You just met one of the weird things in the world that don’t fit neatly into the fae or werewolf category.”

“Weird like you,” said Christy.

“Well, yes,” I agreed. “I thought that went without saying. Weird things like me.”

“What are you, exactly?”

I hadn’t realized she didn’t know, but I wasn’t going to let her change the direction of the conversation. Not when I’d been getting some interesting information about Guayota, and not while Christy was still trying to make the situation be someone else’s, be Adam’s, fault.