caught out having sex, but she wasn’t embarrassed about this. She could hear the ringing confidence in her voice, and she hoped Coop could hear it too. “It’s a long story, but he’s my mate, I might have a secret shifter form, and I know what I’m doing. I promise.”
To his credit, Martin took this string of revelations as well as anyone could have. “If I know anything about you at all, Gretchen, it’s that you know what you’re doing. And if I know anything else about you, it’s that there’s no way the perfect match for you would be anything other than a good guy. Cooper, I believed you before, but I believe you even more now.”
Lately, Gretchen had been hit by a lot of epiphanies. She might be a shifter after all. She had a mate. Keith was mildly likable.
But one of the biggest realizations was that the people in her life really did—or should—trust her judgment, so she was certainly right to trust it herself. She’d let one mistake in her childhood overshadow all her other choices. She’d trusted her family’s love for her so much that she’d overlooked the fact that the way they’d protected her had left her with scars that she was only just now starting to deal with.
It wasn’t their fault, but she had to let go of some of the ideas they’d given her. Maybe she could risk her life. Not because it was less valuable if she wasn’t a shifter... but because she was smart enough to know if she’d really found something or someone worth risking it for.
“Thanks, Chief,” she said quietly.
“Thank you, sir,” Cooper echoed.
“You’re going to have to start calling me Martin again if you’re going to be one of the family. Only Theo calls me ‘sir,’ and that’s just because dragons hoard their habits, too, and it’s too damn hard to get them to stop. I wish I’d known you could shift, Cooper. I would have recruited you years ago.”
Now Cooper looked like he was the one with a lump in his throat. If Gretchen had to guess, she’d say that no one had ever called him family before, let alone invited him to be part of theirs.
Cooper had known so many jerks. Gretchen was determined to introduce him to a ton of good people. She squeezed his hand.
Cooper shot her a glance that was so full of love it made Gretchen’s toes curl—what she wouldn’t give to take him back to bed!—and then he cleared his throat, like he didn’t want to sound openly emotional on the phone.
“Before Ford came in, you were telling us Keith woke up?”
“Right,” Martin said. “Keith couldn’t remember everything that had happened around the gunfight, but he said he remembered that there were snakes.”
“There weren’t snakes,” Gretchen said, though—didn’t she remember Keith having said something like that at the time? Maybe that they needed to run away from the snakes? It was weird how often snakes were coming up lately. “Trust me, if there’d been snakes, I never would have gotten out of the car.”
“I have an idea that’s a little off-the-wall,” Martin said, “but maybe he didn’t mean actual snakes. Maybe he meant basilisks.”
Cooper went completely still. “Did you say basilisk?”
Martin, of course, couldn’t know exactly what that meant to Cooper. “I know, they’re not supposed to be around anymore. It’s a wild guess, but it fits.”
Gretchen’s hand tightened around Cooper’s. She felt like he was holding onto her for dear life.
If his old teammate Monroe had been responsible for this, then Cooper hadn’t just been framed. He’d been betrayed. The idea had clearly knocked him for a loop, which meant she had to be the one to get to the bottom of this.
She kept her voice steady. “What do you mean? Are they supposed to be extinct?”
“That’s what I always heard. There were purges, like the Salem Witch Trials. Even other shifters turned on them. It was a nightmare.”
That sounded even worse than what had happened with pegasi, and Gretchen remembered Martin soberly telling her about how they’d been hunted for their wings back in Ancient Greece.
“The basilisk hunters were stirred up by fear and hate,” Martin said. “And some people say they wiped the basilisks out forever.”
“What were they afraid of?”
“The basilisk stare?” Cooper said, finally speaking up. His voice sounded lifeless, though, and it worried her. “Because they’re supposed to be able to kill people by looking at them? Because Monroe—” He cut himself off. “Because I