and a friend of mine, but he wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t a shifter, and he wasn’t a known ally. He was the boyfriend of the woman who’d unleashed evil on the city and brought them another round of trouble they hadn’t asked for.
But Berna didn’t need the glares of the shifters at tables around the room to enforce her will. She put a hand on the bar and leaned over it, her bosoms nearly touching the counter as she stared Catcher down.
“You sit. You eat,” she said.
Catcher slid onto the stool beside mine while Berna, a victorious smile on her face, disappeared behind the red leather door that led to the back of the bar.
“Good choice,” I said.
Catcher rubbed his hands over his face. “I don’t want food,” he said. “I want this to be over.”
“I get that,” I whispered back. “But I think part of this exercise is giving up control. Mallory did what she wanted without regard for others; look where that got us. The Pack is intervening, giving her a chance they don’t owe her and she arguably doesn’t deserve. You’re letting them do the heavy lifting; let them make the rules, too.”
Catcher made a sarcastic sound, but he didn’t walk out. I called that my own victory.
Berna and a shifter helper I didn’t recognize brought out plates of food that she set down in front of each of us. Cabbage rolls, by the look of them, which were a particular specialty. While we unrolled paper-wrapped silverware, she poured an unmarked glass bottle of wine into three short cups, then passed those out as well.
“I hope no one’s a vegetarian,” I said, wasting no time digging into the heady, spicy meat and cabbage. There were few things that took the edge off stress like a good, hearty meal, and I thanked the gods—Ukrainian or otherwise—that I could eat what I wanted with impunity. Sometimes, it didn’t suck to be a vampire.
We ate quietly and with purpose while Berna watched behind the bar. She alternated between checking the amount of food on our plates and the status of the soap opera on the small, fuzzy, black-and-white television behind the bar. I didn’t know the show or the characters, but a doctor and a nurse were having an affair over the comatose body of, I think, the doctor’s stricken wife.
When we’d cleaned our plates—Berna allowed no other option—she cleared them away, then made a low whistle.
After a moment, Gabriel walked through the red leather door. He beckoned us to follow him into the bar’s shabby back room, where three other shifters in leather jackets sat around an old vinyl-topped table, cards in their hands and glasses of liquor within easy reach.
I gave them respectful nods and was pleased when they nodded back. Catcher, wisely, kept his mouth shut.
We followed Gabriel through another door into a part of the bar I hadn’t seen—the kitchen, which smelled strongly of disinfectant, meat, and well-cooked cabbage.
A few more footsteps put us in the doorway of the back room, where a petite woman in jeans, a T-shirt, and a hairnet stood in front of an industrial sink, scouring food from dishes with a giant sprayer.
Each time something surprised me, I was pretty sure it was the last surprising thing I’d see for a while. And it never, ever was.
The girl with the sprayer? One Mallory Delancey Carmichael.
“Mallory,” Gabriel said.
She turned off the sprayer and looked over at him, crimson rising in her cheeks when she realized whom he’d brought into what was apparently her new abode.
She hung the sprayer over a hook on the wall and dried her hands on her pants. Her thin T-shirt was nearly soaked through, and her hands were raw and chapped. That was probably less from the water than from the magic she’d just done.
“Hi,” she said meekly.
Cool air flowed in from a screen door at the other end of the room. In front of it stood a beefy shifter in an NAC jacket, a large automatic weapon in his hands. I guessed they weren’t taking any chances on another escape.
“You’re okay?” Catcher asked.
She nodded, gnawing on her bottom lip. “All things considered.” She wouldn’t make eye contact with me, so we stood there in silence for a moment.
“Why don’t we let them catch up?” Gabriel asked. “Mallory has more work to do before the night’s over, and she can finish while she talks to Catcher.”
Given the height of the stack of dishes she hadn’t yet cleared,