Bullet Page 0,140

then they want another man to blame.” He said that very smart thing and took another sip of his protein shake. The twins together sipping on their shakes looked like an ad for a sexy malt shop.

“As long as there’s another man who stole you away,” Nicky said, “then the man doesn’t have to look at himself.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Stephen said from the table. “It’s that you prefer the other man, not that there’s anything wrong with him.”

“I could see that if he picked a fight with Nicky, but why Travis and Noel?”

“He knew I’d kick his ass.”

I looked at Nicky.

“I think I would have, but more than that, Haven thought so, too.”

“I forbade you to fight him,” I said.

“You gave me the option that if he or his lions attacked me, I could fight back.”

“I was afraid you’d let them kill you if I didn’t give you the option.”

He gave that half-shrug. “I don’t know, maybe; you had told me not to fight him, but the last time Haven got up in my face in the gym I told him what you’d said. I told him that if he attacked me in the practice ring I’d be able to fight him. That if he attacked me first we could settle it.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“Nothing, and that’s my point. If he thought he could win against me he’d have pushed it, but he didn’t.”

“I was there that day,” Dino said.

I looked at the big man. “Do you think that Haven was afraid of Nicky?”

“Haven was a good fighter, but so is Nicky. There’s more than one reason that none of the werelions but Nicky are on guard duty here, Anita.”

“I thought we just didn’t trust them,” I said.

“That, but Bobby Lee, Fredo, and Claudia looked them over. They didn’t like what they saw.”

“How so?”

“They were muscle, and they were ruthless, but for one-on-one fair fighting we didn’t see them in the same league with us.”

“With the wererats?” I asked.

“No, with the level of training that Rafael demands from his people. Any of the guards here have to keep up those standards regardless of their animal group.”

I raised eyebrows at that. “Graham and Clay meet standards.”

Dino smiled. “They aren’t our best hand-to-hand fighters, and Clay seems weirdly awkward with anything but a gun, but they do the training. They hit the gym just like the rest of us. Rafael wouldn’t trust the safety of Jean-Claude and you to any guard he didn’t trust.”

I thought about that. “Of the other werelions, who’s the best? Who do you guys like?”

“Payne is too much like Haven,” Dino said. “He’s a thug and not a deep thinker.”

“Jesse is okay,” Nathaniel said.

“I think he’d be softer if he were in a pride that let him,” Dino said.

“I agree,” Nicky said.

“What about the women?”

“We haven’t seen them,” Dino said.

“Haven ran his pride like some of the ultramale prides do,” Nicky said. “The women are second-class citizens, almost cloistered away from any other wereanimals. Most werelions take a lot of pride in the fact that their lionesses don’t want or need to go outside the pride for sex.”

“Most animal groups stay within their own animal, right?” I asked.

Everyone agreed.

“There’s a reason for that,” Stephen said quietly. “If we go outside our animal groups, we can have misunderstandings just based on being different beasts.”

I almost let it go, but in the end I did the girl thing and said, “You and Vivian aren’t having troubles because you’re a wolf and she’s a leopard.”

He looked away. “I know that.” His tone, his body language all said, Leave it alone. I did the guy thing; I left it alone.

“So the fact that so many of the St. Louis wereanimals interdate is unusual?” I asked.

“Very,” Dino said.

“Haven saw your rejection of him for Nathaniel and Micah, and all the rest of us, as a direct challenge to both his maleness and his lion,” Nicky said.

“I couldn’t make him my one and only, and he didn’t share well enough to sleep in big kitty piles with us.”

“No, he didn’t,” Nicky said.

“Am I missing something here?”

“Anita, you can’t save everyone,” Nathaniel said.

“I’m a cop, I know that.”

“Do you?” He took my hand in his, and I let him this time. “You’re blaming yourself for Haven and Noel, but the only thing you could have done differently would be to have killed Haven sooner.”

I met those serious lavender eyes. I studied his face. “You believe that, don’t you?”

“Even if you’d let