“When I was taken to the police station, he tortured me.”

It was as if he was an overfilled balloon that had been pricked with a pin. He visibly deflated. Weakly, his face paling, he said, “What?”

“They know, somehow, about us. They were”—she grimaced, then went on, determined—“experimenting on me. Running tests, seeing how I reacted to different stimuli, that sort of thing. They know about us, but they don’t know, and we have to protect ourselves if we’re going to take the risk to be out. Maybe it started with that video a few years ago,” she muttered, “stupid Constantine and his stupid disco fight—”

“Wait. Wait.” Gregor sat forward in the chair again, hands spread wide. “The infamous video in the disco in Rome? With the…the uh…” He trailed off into silence, unable to say it himself.

Eliana gazed at him from beneath her lashes. “Panthers. Yes.”

He visibly blanched. She saw him replay it in his mind, the grainy cell-phone video caught by a bystander at a popular nightclub that showed the bizarre sight of six impossibly huge black panthers engaged in snarling, bloody battle on a dance floor before the police had shot one and captured two others. She’d seen it herself because it had received a lot of air time before being roundly dismissed by the authorities as fake. At least publicly.

“Huh. Huh,” he said, turning it over in his mind, wrapping his head around it. He leaned back in his chair and exhaled a long, quiet breath. “Cat sidhe after all, eh?”

“Every culture has their shape-shifter myths,” Eliana said gently. “Some of them are just closer to the truth than others.”

He sat on that for a minute, recalibrating, and Eliana waited, watching his expression flit from one emotion to another, her heart in her throat.

Had she done something very, very stupid?

After a while, his lips quirked. “Should have known when you stole my soul,” he murmured.

Relief coursed through her, and she let out the breath she didn’t even know she’d been holding. “Silver-tongued devil.”

“Thieving feline.”

She grinned at him, and he leaned over and grasped her hands, suddenly grave again. Vehemently he said, “Promise me you’re not going to pull a Montecore on me. Or anyone else for that matter.”

“Montecore?” She was confused. “What’s a Montecore?”

Utterly serious, firelight shining red and gold off his ginger hair, Gregor stared at her and said, “The white tiger that ate that fruit loop Las Vegas magician. Roy what’s-his-name. You know, in the show at the Mirage hotel.”

She laughed weakly and leaned over and pressed her hot forehead to their joined hands. His fingers against her flushed skin were ice, ice cold, and she guessed he wasn’t nearly as composed as he was pretending to be. With a low, rumbling laugh tinged with the merest hint of entreaty, he said, “Because I fancy keepin’ my head attached to my body, lass, if you don’t mind.”

“I promise I will not eat you,” she said solemnly. “But that little dog of yours…”

Gregor gasped in mock outrage, and she lifted her gaze to his face. His hazel eyes sparkled down at her. “Although you might be doing me a wee favor there.”

Eliana shook her head, overwhelmed by gratitude and the dawning realization that her father’s dream of living in the open—the dream she was working toward—might actually be plausible. If one human could accept her, why not ten? Why not a hundred?

Why not all of them?

“Well, then, let’s see what you can do, princess. Go ahead and show me.” He made a gesture with one hand, encouraging, but she shook her head.

“I can’t,” she said, knowing what he wanted. “I can’t Shift when I’m hurt.”

He snorted in disbelief. “Oh, how convenient! A few little scratches on the soles of her feet and the great shadow cat is spayed!”

She sighed and shrugged her shoulders beneath the throw. “That would have done it, yes, but the bullet holes didn’t help, either.”

His merriment instantly fled, and his voice dropped low and menacing. “Bullet holes.” His gaze swept her and settled on the bandage on her lower leg. He hadn’t mentioned it earlier, and now she didn’t respond to the question in his eyes. After a moment he said in that same low voice, “So the king’s assassins have caught up with the runaway princess.”

“It would seem so.”

Tension radiated from his body as if a switch had been thrown. He stiffened, looking around the sumptuous boudoir as if expecting to find them hiding behind the curtains. “Can they all do the vanishing Cheshire cat bit?”

Demetrius could. As for the rest of his new gang, The Hunt, whatever he’d called them, she didn’t know for sure, but if they were on his team, she had to guess yes. Miserable again, she nodded. “But they didn’t follow me here. I’m sure of it. I wouldn’t have put you in danger that way. And I disguised my scent so they wouldn’t be able to track me like that.”

When his brows pulled together in confusion she explained, “Water dampens our scent. I ran through every damn sprinkler, fountain, and wading pool in the city on my way here.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he muttered, staring at her in dismay.

“Tell me about it.”

A knock on the door produced Merck, returning with a dry set of clothes purloined from Céline’s closet. They both rose, and Gregor took the proffered items—gauzy loungewear, gossamer thin, and a drapey silk knit sweater in the palest pearl gray, things she would never choose for herself—and set them on the bed. Merck excused himself, and Gregor turned to her.

“You’re staying here tonight. I’ll call the doctor, but it might take an hour or so before he gets here, so get some sleep in the meantime.”

“The doctor?” she said, alarmed, remembering the German from the police station.

“For the bullet holes,” he explained gently, glancing at her bandaged leg. His gaze traveled up her body, searching for the others.

“Hip. But it’s already stitched up, the wounds are clean. I’ll be healed in a day.”

“From a bullet wound?” His face remained neutral, but his tone was clearly disbelieving. She only nodded. He accepted that with a shake of his head and then said, “You stitched your own bullet wounds? I’ve known hardened mercenaries who weren’t able to do that.”

She faltered. “I…no. It’s, um, complicated.”

His brows slowly lifted. He said, “Go to a veterinarian?”

She rolled her eyes. “If you must know, the same person who shot me and broke me out of jail was the person who stitched me up.”

He stared at her, nonplussed. “Walk me through this, princess. Someone who wanted you dead took the time to blow up the largest jail in France to spring you, then shot you—more than once—then took you somewhere safe, removed the bullets, and sewed you up?”

Put like that, it sounded less than reasonable. Eliana chewed her lip. “He only did that because he was trying to get information out of me. About the rest of us. Where we are. Where we’re staying. So then he could—”

“Assassins generally don’t have to perform surgery in order to get their marks to divulge information,” he interrupted, reasonable. “A pair of pliers would be sufficient. If this guy worked for me, he’d be fired.”

Eliana opened her mouth to say something, but found she had no reply.

“And you escaped from this do-gooder assassin…how?”

“He…well, he let me go. When his friends showed up. The other assassins.”

Of all the unbelievable things she’d told him in the last few minutes, this was the one with which Gregor chose to find issue. His face assumed an expression of extreme incredulity, as if he’d walked into his bedroom to see a unicorn reclining with a yeti on the bed. “Ah-ha. And he would do that because…”

Her lips twisted. “Like I said, it’s complicated.”

“That’s not complicated, Eliana. That’s nonsensical.”

“Well,” she said, defensive, “that’s what happened! Who knows why Demetrius does anything—”