Cipher

“Yeah, the sausage stuff.” Anna eyed her and shook her head. “Did you tell Andrew you didn’t want me anywhere near you or your roommate?”

Kat froze, one hand suspended over the table in the act for reaching for a glass of water. “I—what?”

“Come on, Kat. I’m not a rocket scientist or an empath, but I know when people wish they didn’t have to be looking at me.”

There it was, blunt and so unrepentant that it took a few moments for Kat to realize that the emotion churning through her was relief. The truth had been festering, an ugly emotion that shamed her so deeply she’d never given it voice. She was Kat—nice, sweet Kat, and she wasn’t allowed to be petty and jealous.

Kat dropped her hand to rest on the table. “It’s hard sometimes,” she admitted, and the truth felt like dropping a heavy bag full of schoolbooks at the end of a long walk home. Light and freeing, even if her words carried the ghost of pain. “He ditched me and picked you. Not your fault, but it didn’t make it easier. Especially since you’re not that easy to hate.”

“You’d be surprised how many people manage it,” Anna told her. “But you’re wrong about one thing.”

According to Andrew, she’d been wrong about everything. “What’s that?”

“He never ditched you.”

“Yeah, he tried that line too. He disappeared from my life and never talked to me. That’s my definition of ditched.” Kat gripped the edge of the table and met Anna’s gaze squarely. “If this is some shapeshifter thing I’m not getting, I wish you’d tell me. Because no one else will.”

The blonde laid down her fork. “It’s not human emotion, for starters. It’s not that sentimental. It’s visceral. Andrew damn near ripped out his own heart to protect you, but not because he had some macho, noble idea that it was better for you. In our world, if you don’t know how to take care of someone, you have to walk. Make room for someone else, someone who can.”

Well that was…typically egocentric shapeshifter bullshit. “Because obviously that’s your choice to make, right? I mean, what say could we have in it?”

Anna snorted. “I hope that’s a rhetorical question, because you should know the answer by now.”

This time, she said it out loud. “Well, it’s bullshit. You can’t trade the rest of us around like baseball cards. And if it’s such a universal truth, why the hell has Alec been giving Andrew such a shit time over it?”

“He’s an alpha shifter,” Anna reminded her. “We’re hypocritical assholes.”

Apparently. Kat laid both hands on the table. “So let me get this straight. If Andrew sticks around and I get hurt, it’s his fault. If he sticks around and hurts me, it’s his fault. If he leaves and I’m sad…it’s his fault. If he leaves and someone else hurts me…” She trailed off and tried to come up with a polite way to ask a question that didn’t feel polite at all. “Could you all be any more self-centered or condescending?”

“Nope.”

Yelling about it was less fun when Anna agreed with her. Slightly perturbed, Kat sat back. “I don’t know how shapeshifters survive, if almost all of you are like this. How do you stand each other long enough to have babies?”

“You think we’re all like this?” Anna tossed her head back with a laugh. “Sweetie, if that were true, we’d definitely all have killed each other by now. I’m only talking alpha shifters, and it just so happens that New Orleans is lousy with us. Lucky you.”

As many times as she’d noticed that all of the shifters in her life—save Sera—seemed obnoxiously dominant, she’d never stopped to consider why, or if that was unusual. “Why is New Orleans different? I mean, I know Alec’s made it into the safe place, but if shit is so bad everywhere else, wouldn’t the submissives want to live here?”

“You think all the subs run away from home like Nicky Peyton?” Anna shook her head as she drew one leg up to rest on the vinyl seat. “Hell no. Even if they want to, they stay put. Right where their more dominant relatives or spouses want them to be. Usually,” she added with a nod toward Sera.

Kat glanced around to where Sera was leaning over the bar. She said something Kat couldn’t hear, and the man on the other side burst out laughing.

Sera had run away from home at seventeen. Walked off her high school campus one day and climbed into a car with Josh. They were across state lines before anyone realized she was gone. She hadn’t told anyone, hadn’t tried to talk her friends and family around. Not that Franklin would have been talked around, and Sera would have had to obey.

So she’d run. And she’d regretted it.

Shivering, Kat turned back to Anna and lowered her voice. “Josh made my skin crawl. He treated her like a princess, but it was never right. It was like…deathless love that you knew was going to end badly.

It was Romeo and Juliet.” If Romeo had been in his midthirties and had a mullet.

Something feral and angry sharpened Anna’s gaze for just a moment before vanishing. “Sometimes you think someone’s being treated like a princess, but what they’re really being treated like is a favorite pet or a doll. Property.”

Harsh words for the possessive interest Kat had never been able to put into words. Maybe she’d been too innocent to understand then. Now she knew better. “Thanks for looking out for her. I didn’t want to drag her into another mess. Not when she’s getting back on her feet.”

Anna picked up her cup again. “She’s a good kid.”

“For what it’s worth, Anna, I never hated you. Maybe I wanted to, and maybe I hated myself for the urge, but I never hated you.”

“Believe me when I say it’s understandable.” Anna finished her coffee and propped her elbows on the table. “Now, are you ready for the good news?”

That depended on if their definition of good diverged as sharply as their definitions of ditched. “Lay it on me.”

“He’s figured it out. That he’s the one who can get it done.”

“Oh.” Maybe to Andrew, it was that easy. Walk away when he couldn’t handle it and come back when he could. It was instinct after all, and humans weren’t allowed to hold instinct against shapeshifters, no matter how much they’d hurt you. Derek had pulled that one on her for years, smothering her like she was a kid and blaming instinct every time she tried to push back.

Before she could frame a more meaningful response, Sera appeared, squeezing into the booth next to her. “Y’all playing nice over here?”

“Mostly.” Anna tilted her head and sighed. “It’s hard as hell trying to explain some of this crap without losing a lot in translation.”

Sera flipped her ponytail back over her shoulder and pushed a cup of coffee toward Kat. “If you thought coming in here smelling like you spent the night under Andrew is going to distract me from the part where you got shot, you’re going to be massively disappointed.”

Kat flinched, heat filling her cheeks. She’d forgotten—again—and her conversation with Anna seemed a hundred times more awkward now. “Shit, Sera.”

“Don’t ‘shit’ me. You got shot.”

Relating the story from the start took most of Sera’s break, and earned Kat a blistering lecture on communication and asking for help that only ended when the bartender flagged Sera down to pick up an order.

When she was gone, Kat took a sip of her coffee and grimaced when it turned out to be lukewarm. “Do they teach that speech about protecting your people in shapeshifter school?”

“Closest thing to shapeshifter school is Conclave training, and you don’t want to know what they teach you there.”

Kat had more guesses than she wanted. “How to rip up men and torture psychics?”

“For starters. And hey, maybe they’ve expanded the curriculum since I left.” Anna prodded at her cold omelet. “What’s this shit you’re mixed up in that’s got people trying to off you?”

“I don’t even know.” The zip disk was a foot away, tucked safely in her bag, and it took effort not to reach out and touch it. “Someone who doesn’t want me knowing why my mother was so dangerous she ended up dead.”

“Got any leads?” She shook her head without waiting for an answer. “Of course you do, or they wouldn’t be after you. Dumb question.”