died. But I had to keep up the momentum, make her listen to me, make her listen to herself.
"Who was it that was out there with you?" I asked coolly. "Ben says whoever it was, he has to be more dominant than you. It wasn't Warren or Darryl." Ben would have noticed if Darryl hadn't been at the meeting. He'd have said something to me because if it was Darryl who was running the show, it would have been too dangerous to hold his tongue. The same was true of Auriele.
"How does the pack run from there?" I watched her sweat. Ben was right that it was someone higher up. She was expecting me to name him soon, so not too far down the pack hierarchy. "Auriele. It wasn't her either, was it? She likes Adam. She'd never send him into a burning building to rescue someone who wasn't there."
She stiffened at the dig.
"Then there is Paul." That got her - wasn't that interesting? But I knew better. "It wasn't him, though. Adam doesn't trust Paul at his back. He'd have kept him right here through the whole pack meeting." Paul had been my pick for the jerk who'd influenced me at the bowling alley before I'd understood how angry Mary Jo was. He'd probably been Adam's pick, too. Paul was still angry about losing a fight to Warren, and he'd put the blame on Adam for that. Like Ben, Paul was a bitter and difficult person who didn't like many people. Mary Jo was one he did like, her and her boyfriend, Henry.
I watched her face closely. She was worried I'd guess. Not Paul, then who? Further down the ranks things could get murky to an outsider as I had been and really still was. I ran the wolves I knew well through my head, then stopped. Henry? He was a nice guy. Smart and quick. A banker, I thought, but I wasn't sure, something with finances. He would never - Hmm. "Never" was an awfully strong word.
I wondered how Henry felt about Mary Jo's crush on Adam.
"Henry," I said experimentally and watched her face whiten. Maybe she didn't know how much she was telling me without opening her mouth at all. "Henry was out with you last night. Henry told you to leave the fae alone when they set my house on fire."
Jesse's door opened, and Adam came in and shut it gently behind him. He was obviously stiff, and, from the set of his jaw and the tightness of the skin around his eyes, he was in pain as well. If I could see it, he was hurting a lot more than he showed. And the Alpha didn't show weakness if he could help it.
He was dressed only in a pair of gi bottoms that ended mid-calf, leaving the weepy wounds on his feet clearly visible. Oh, there were other bits in rough shape, but next to his feet, nothing looked all that bad.
"I heard your voice," he told me, pulling my eyes away from his feet and up to his face. "So I pressed my ear to the door, and even with the noise my daughter calls music blaring, I overheard what you said, Mercy." He looked at Mary Jo, who had turned around to face him and lost her formal parade-rest stance. She just stood there, looking vulnerable.
Had it been Samuel standing there, I'd have worried that he would be too soft on her. But Adam didn't really see women as the weaker sex, and he knew how to organize and how to recognize organization when he saw it.
His unreadable face was focused on Mary Jo. "So Henry was there when the fae set Mercy's house on fire. And here I thought you were out there alone. Because I knew Henry was in the house when I had plainly told him to back you up last night. Doubtless if I asked him, he'd tell me that he thought I only meant for him to be there while the meeting was going on . . . or he'd come up with some other explanation."
"Henry was the one to tell you my house was on fire, wasn't he?" I said. Like Adam, I was watching Mary Jo. I couldn't see her face, but her shoulders tightened. A friend of mine from college, a drama major, told me that the shoulders are the most expressive part of the body. I had to agree with him. She was almost