forward, and changed in a shower of sparks. Not sparks. Not really. Glitter might be more accurate, but it wasn’t anything physical. Sparkly light.
As tigers go, she isn’t huge. Six feet long and perhaps four hundred and fifty pounds. I know an eight-hundred-pound tiger, so compared to him, she’s small.
My wolf weighs what I do — two hundred and ninety pounds. In human form, I’m six foot seven, and it’s all muscle. In wolf form, I’m a giant when compared to other wolves, but still less than three-fourths the size of Kitty’s tiger. It’s all relative, right?
Some species, the mass stays the same. Other species, the mass changes. I don’t understand why or how. Tess turns into a small mongoose, Kitty turns into a large tiger, and Frost turns into a fifteen-pound owl. Probably not that heavy, actually, but he’s fucking enormous for a damned bird. The wolf actually is a little afraid of him when he dives down. He couldn’t do as much damage, but my wolf doesn’t like to be dive-bombed, and Frost’s motherfucking bastard owl figured it out.
The tiger rubbed against me, and I had to fight to stand my ground and not get shoved aside. I ran my hand over her back as she walked and moved around me, scent marking me. Showing affection. And then she leapt away from me, pushing off with her back legs last, her body elongated. She flew through the air, landed soundlessly, and ran out of sight.
Did she want to play?
I went to my knees and let my wolf spring forth.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Kitty
As it turned out, there were two recently-bitten wolves in the basement of the farmhouse when my father and I arrived at Homewood, and Chase had his hands full with them. The two women weren’t in the jail cells the entire time, but he only let them out when he could supervise them. A few times, Squatch went out into the woods to help Chase with them, so my father and I could talk privately.
Daddy had brought the ingredients to fix all my favorite foods. Part of me wanted to be the little princess, certain this meant her father did, indeed, love her. However, the cynical parts of my psyche just saw it as him trying to get on my good side, trying to get me to let my guard down.
And every time he poked at Squatch and tried to start an argument, it reminded me my father couldn’t be trusted.
At some point on the second full day, I think Daddy figured out that he looked bad, being an asshole to my boyfriend, and my boyfriend looked like the good guy by not allowing himself to be dragged into the arguments my father tried to start.
Things got better, but I still didn’t trust it.
I did, however, listen carefully while my father taught me the things he thought I needed to know — the rules of wolf society, how to address the royalty of certain species of shifter, and other ways to camouflage myself if I’m out somewhere when my hair hasn’t been dyed, or if I don’t have contacts with me.
He also took me to the Homewood outdoor range and gave updated lessons on how to shoot a wide variety of weapons.
On the sixth day, Squatch asked me to go with Chase and the new wolves out into the forest, so he could have lunch alone with my father.
Squatch
“Do we eat or fight?” I asked him. I’d had sex with his daughter every night, but I’d kept it to just sex. The night before, she’d needed more, and I’d spanked her and used her. When we’d wakened that morning, I’d given her a morning spanking.
I’d forgone part of our morning routine all week out of respect for what Kitty and her father were trying to do, but she’d needed me to take charge so badly the night before, I’d told her to choose between my hand or belt after she’d given me my morning blow job. When she chose the belt, it confirmed I’d what I’d already figured out — breaking our routine hadn’t been good for her. She needed the stability of our mornings, so I gave it to her.
Vincenzo hadn’t said anything around Kitty, but I could sense how tightly he was wound, and how careful he was being to keep from losing his shit.
He walked out of the kitchen, across the huge screened-in porch, and out onto the clearing beside the house.