“There’s nothing to discuss,” Michaela said. She turned her back on Serena, facing off against Elisabeth again. “No one wanted me to go for a run alone, so I took a drive instead.” She smiled sweetly. “You should be happy. When Serena told me, ‘No’ to a run alone, I accepted her at her word.”
“We’re not playing this game here, Michaela,” said Elisabeth. “Serena, get her out of here.”
“Touch me-” hissed Michaela, “-and you’re all tasting silver.” She had crossed her arms in front of her, and her hands were on her wrists, her fingers underneath the sleeves of her blouse. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but everyone froze.
And Elisabeth took a full step backwards, away from Michaela.
“Do not get heavy-handed with me, Head Enforcer,” Michaela said in a cold voice.
You could have heard a pin drop. I shrank further back into the sofa.
And then Elisabeth’s posture changed, and she nodded. “My apologies, Alpha. You’re right. Are you ready to go?”
“Not quite. I wasn’t finished here. Everyone out. You can guard me from the hallway. You, Sister, will stay.”
No one moved until Elisabeth nodded. The enforcers filed out, Serena and Angel last. When the door closed, Michaela relaxed, lowering her hands.
“You shouldn’t make a threat you aren’t prepared to carry out,” Elisabeth told her. “You weren’t going to knife Angel.”
“If she’d laid hands on her alpha, damned right I would have,” Michaela said.
“What?” I screeched.
They both turned to me.
“I wouldn’t have hurt her,” Michaela said, “well, not too badly. They’d have disarmed me eventually, but there would have been blood.”
I looked between the two of them, my eyes wide. “You would have stabbed her? She’s your friend!”
“She would have healed,” Elisabeth said. “It wasn’t going to come to that. I was out of line, and Michaela was only reminding me of it. Alpha, I’m sorry.”
Michaela moved to her and offered a quick hug. “Forgiven. Now, I was just in the process of finalizing Zoe’s plans for her scuba lessons. They begin tomorrow afternoon. I was going to have Karen take her out to get the things she needs, but with you here, you can do it.”
And she grinned at me.
Damned matchmaker.
“She needs mask, fins, and a snorkel. Also make sure she has a sexy swim suit.”
“Michaela!” But she grinned at me again.
“In fact, make her model it for you.”
“Michaela!” I screeched.
In response, Michaela took three steps towards me then reached out and grabbed my hands. She pulled me to my feet and wrapped me in a hug. Reflexively, I wrapped my own arms around her.
The hug felt really good.
She held me for a minute before relaxing her grip, but then she slid her hands down my arms until we were clasping fingers. “I want us to be proper friends, Zoe. This is important to me. I know things have been difficult, but I am being utterly heartfelt. I hope you can learn to trust me.”
She didn’t wait for a response but stepped away. “I’ll see you later, Elisabeth. Or perhaps not until tomorrow.” Then, chuckling, she headed for the front door, and a moment later I heard it open and close.
Both Elisabeth and I stared after her.
“Wow,” I said.
“Yeah,” agreed Elisabeth. “She has half the pack wrapped around her little finger.”
“Where do you all fit?”
Elisabeth turned to face me. We stared at each other awkwardly. “I’m sorry,” she said finally.
“For what?”
“We scared you.”
I lowered my eyes. “Do I smell?”
“You’re fine.”
I looked back up. “Do you want me to lie to you, too?”
Before she could respond, there was a buzz. She pulled her phone out, glanced at it, and sighed.
“Have to go?”
“No. Orders from my alpha.” Then her phone buzzed again. She glanced at it and chuckled. “And more orders for you.”
She turned the phone around and held it out for me to read the screen. She’d received two messages from Angel’s phone, but they were each signed, “Your Alpha”. The first said, “Invite her on a date tonight.” And the second was, “Zoe, tell her yes.”
We both sighed.
“What are you doing tonight, Zoe?” Elisabeth asked.
I stared at the phone, the looked up at her. “It appears I have a date.”
She looked away. “You.” She paused and looked everywhere but at me. “You don’t have to consider that an order.”
“Neither do you,” I replied. “Put your phone away.”
She glanced at me and then accepted my suggestion. Then she turned to me. I waited to see what she would do.
“Zoe, would you have dinner with me?”
“Carly’s?” I asked.
She laughed. “I have a partial interest in this lovely steak house.”
“Elisabeth…”
“Green Room?” she offered.
“I’d love to go to dinner with you,” I said. “I’m not in date clothes. What do you recommend?”
She moved closer, and I thought she was going to kiss me. Instead, she lifted a hand and ran it through my hair, then leaned over and sniffed.
“You just sniffed my hair?” I asked. With a screech.
She chuckled. “Your hair smells good,” she said. “Shower and change. We’ll go hit the scuba shop and then have dinner.”
I hurried.
* * * *
Twenty minutes later, we stepped out of my apartment building and together, turned to the small parking lot. Elisabeth came to a stop, and I was two steps past her before I halted and turned towards her. “What’s wrong?”
She was shaking her head. “That.” She pointed into the parking lot. I turned and saw a small SUV.
“Yes?”
“That’s Michaela’s.” She laughed. “They left me Michaela’s car, and you know whose idea that was.”
I smiled. “Got a key?”
“Yes.”
“So no problem. At least they left you a car. I don’t have to drive you home.”
“No, no problem.” She chuckled again. Then she stepped forward, grabbed my arm, and escorted me to the passenger door of Michaela’s car.
I arranged myself as Elisabeth walked to the other side, then sat calmly while she climbed in. She couldn’t help but notice my legs, which amused me greatly. She stared at them for a moment then shook herself and started the car.
“I could have sworn that skirt was longer.”
“It seems to have shrunk,” I replied.
We turned to each other. “You’ve been turning me down,” she observed. She gestured at my legs. “What is this?”
I glanced down at my legs. “Did you want me to pull the skirt back down?”
“No. I want to know what’s going on. We were doing so well-”
“Before.”
“Yeah. Before.” She looked away. “It wasn’t an act, Zoe.”
“I’m going to ask a question, Elisabeth, and I want an honest answer.”
“I can’t promise that, Zoe.”
“If you lie to me, and I ever find out you lied, I won’t betray pack secrets, but I will do everything in my power to hurt you.”
She snapped her head back, scowling. “Do not threaten me.”
“I’m serious,” I said. “I deserve an honest answer.”
“What?” she snapped.
“Is my apartment bugged?”
“Not by the pack,” she replied. “And Gia says it’s clean; no one else is bugging it.”
We stared at each other for a good thirty seconds. Then I asked, “You promise?”
“I promise.”
She continued to scowl at me. I studied her face. I couldn’t tell if she was lying, but I decided I was done distrusting anyone. I smiled then looked away and down at my legs. Then, very deliberately, I pulled the skirt up another half inch.
She didn’t move, and I didn’t look at her. Instead, I sat sweetly with my hands in my lap. I’d made my move, and now I would wait.
“My turn,” she said.
I turned back to her, still smiling softly. “Yes?”
“What would you have done if I’d said ‘Yes, it is’?”
My smile faded while I thought about it. Elisabeth watched me carefully. Then the smile returned. “I would have adjusted my skirt and thanked you for telling me the truth, but I would keep it in mind if I ever decided I wanted an overnight guest.”
“You haven’t answered my question. What’s going on?”
“You asked me on a date. I said ‘yes’. Or is this just dinner between friends? I can pull my skirt back down.”
“I like your skirt just the way it is,” she said, glancing at my legs.
And so I set my hands back in my lap, relaxed, and looked out the window.
Neither of us said anything for a minute. Once we were on the road, I said, “I want to ask you something.”
“Of course you do.”
“Did Michaela engineer all of that just to get us together?”
Elisabeth barked a short laugh. “Not literally all of it. She wouldn’t need to be that convoluted just to get us in the same room. But from the moment she got in her car? Yes, probably. But with her, there’s oftentimes more than one thing going on at once.”
By this time, I was watching her. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed watching her. She glanced at me.
“It doesn’t do you any good to try to outguess the fox.”
“Clever as a fox?”
“Yeah.” She smiled.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. She just keeps all of us guessing. She has since the very beginning. Did you see her stand up to me today?”
“Yes, I did.” I paused. “You like her.”
“I admire her a great deal,” Elisabeth said. “I’ve never seen anyone bounce back the way she does. The things she’s been through.” She looked over at me. “It drives all of us crazy when she does what she did today. You didn’t notice, but I aired your apartment out while you were showering.”
“Was my fear scent that overpowering?”
“It was masked by the fear scent wafting off the rest of us.”
“Seriously?”
She nodded. “I suppose not all of us. Portia always remains cool, and Eric was awfully cavalier. But Serena was terrified, and I was pretty worked up. Angel was biting her nails, something she hasn’t done since she was thirteen. And Rory kept screaming at us to drive faster.”
“So the tension I felt wasn’t imagined.”
“No.” She looked over. “Thank you for not fighting me when I told you to sit.”
I scoffed. “Fighting you? Are you serious?” I paused. “Does Michaela know all of you were that upset?”
“Of course she does.”
“How do you know that she knows?”
Elisabeth didn’t answer.
“Maybe you should tell her,” I suggested quietly. “And maybe when she says she needs to go for a walk by herself, you should treat her like an adult.”
At that, Elisabeth snapped her head to me. “Don’t tell me how to do my job.”
I held my hands up defensively. She returned her gaze to the road.
“I’m sorry,” she said after a minute. “Clearly I’m still a little stressed from this.”
“Did you need a shower, too?”
“Probably. Or a beer.”
“Forgiven. Are you going to think about what I said?”
“Count on it. Thank you.”
We drove quietly for a few minutes. Then Elisabeth chuckled. “So she roped you into scuba diving, and she roped me into paying for it.”
“She didn’t have to work very hard to entice me, and you’re not paying for a thing. She already did.”
“Oh?”
“She bought a few of my pictures. I have no idea how much I’m spending today, but she said it was enough to get started.” But I looked out the window, embarrassed, and didn’t say anything further. Michaela was a schoolteacher, and she had bought my pictures so I would have money.
“What’s wrong?” Elisabeth asked me after a quiet minute had gone by.
“Nothing.”
“Zoe…”
“I’m embarrassed. Don’t worry about it. When she told me to check my sales today, I was thinking about her as the pack alpha, and I have a vision of her being very rich. But it just occurred to me she’s a schoolteacher. She can’t afford to be paying for this.”
“I’m not going to talk to you about Michaela’s finances,” Elisabeth said. “Did she ask for anything special with the photos?”
“My largest size printed on canvas, numbered, framed, and signed. They come specially boxed so they present well as gifts. She bought six. I only offer printing on canvas of my very best photos, and I charge accordingly. I sell about two a year. They’re my ‘you’ve got more money than sense’ product. Where is she going to put them?”
“She’s probably going to give them away to some of the more important members of the pack. Christmas is coming, and she does a lot of shopping.” Elisabeth paused. “I don’t believe you should be embarrassed. Your photos are coveted. Gifts from Michaela are also coveted. The people who receive those will value them. It wasn’t charity, Zoe.”
I looked back at her. She wasn’t watching me; she had her hands on the wheel and her eyes on the road.
“Thank you.”
After that, we made small talk for the rest of the drive. We pulled into a strip mall parking lot, coming to a stop at the end in front of a shop called “Blue Water Divers.” I recognized the red and white dive flags on either side of their name. I was about to get out, but Elisabeth said, “Zoe…”
I turned to her.
“Are you afraid of me?”
I looked down. I found myself doing that a lot with her. “A little,” I said in a small voice. “I’m sorry.”
“I would never hurt you.”
I didn’t say anything. She reached out and clasped my chin, raising my eyes towards hers.
“You believe that, don’t you? I would never hurt you.”
“I have nightmares, Elisabeth,” I said. “We shouldn’t talk about this.”
“If you’re so afraid of me, what are you doing here with me?”
“I didn’t say I was ‘so afraid’. I said I was a little afraid. And for the record, it’s not because of what you are.”
“Then why?”
I closed my eyes. I wanted to pull away from her clasp, but I didn’t.
“I wouldn’t hurt you,” she said again.
“I’m here with you,” I said. “I dressed for you. I pulled my skirt up for you. For now, isn’t that enough?”
“I need to know why you’re afraid.”
“Do I smell bad?”
“Not right now, no. Just tell me. I can’t fix it if you don’t tell me.”
“I have nightmares,” I said in a small voice. “Please, Elisabeth, I don’t want to think about this.”
“Nothing from your nightmares is going to come true.”
I opened my eyes and looked into hers. “Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? They already have. I wonder what I might be dreaming about. Figure it out for yourself.”
And then I pulled away and opened the car door. Elisabeth reached for me, but I slipped out of the car before she could grab me. However, she climbed out her side and met me at the front of the car before I could make it more than a few steps. She grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me to face her.
“What dreams?” she asked. “Tell me.”
“If I talk about it, I’m going to start to smell again. Can we talk about this some other time?”
“What dreams?”
I huffed at her. “Everything from that week, especially Karen and her damned wire around my neck. But all of it. Do you really need details? I can give you details. They’re lovely. I can tell you how sure I was that I was going to die. Every time the door to that cell opened, I was sure it was going to be someone coming in to tell me I was going to be executed. Murdered. While I was there, I wondered how you would do it. Would it be Karen and her wire? Would you do it yourself? Maybe Lara would handle it. The most frequent thought was that you’d take me from the cell, and every wolf in the pack would be waiting. You’d tell me to ‘run’. Runner up was Karen and her wire. Do you know I haven’t worn a necklace since? I can’t stand anything around my neck. I was feeling a little butch one day and tried to put on a tie, and I had a panic attack.”
I pulled away from her hands. Just thinking about it all had my heart pounding in my chest.
“Of course, there were other ways you could kill me. You could snap my neck. Or beat me to death. Sometimes it was a bullet in the back of my head while I knelt in front of you, sobbing. I spent a week sure you were going to kill me, so I had plenty of time to come up with no end of ways you might do it.”