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and angry, and it wasn’t us. Hunter stopped biting me to look across the room. Reba had a knife in her hand. The hem of her dress was still shifted so that I saw the thigh holster. She’d slashed the other woman’s face open and was holding her by her wrist while she bled. Reba turned her tiger eyes to me and roared, “You can’t have us!”

The nameless male stood up and started back toward them. “Lacey.”

“She’s his sister; his twin,” Hunter said.

“You had to use a blade on her,” I said. “You can’t shift just your hands.”

“She only has one form,” Jared said.

I’d never seen a wereanything use a blade on another wereanimal before. Reba had just admitted that she was too weak to shapeshift fast enough to fight. She only changed into a big tiger, no half-human form for her. So weak.

She pulled the woman’s arm up hard, meaning it to hurt. The woman made a small, hurt sound for her. It pissed me off, and better yet it pissed off the red tiger. She’d missed her own kind. They all smelled like home, and she didn’t like them getting hurt.

“Let her go,” I said, and my voice echoed as if the red mist were more solid than it looked behind my eyes.

“She’s mine!”

“No,” I said, “she’s not!” And that last word growled out from between my lips. I could feel the rumble of it all the way down my chest. I didn’t think what I’d do next, I was just moving toward them faster than I should have been able to move. It was as if I were there beside them before I’d had time to think. Reba tried to move the woman back with her, as she slashed at me. That one slash let me know that she didn’t know how to fight with a knife.

I smiled; I couldn’t help it.

“I will cut you.”

I shook my head. “No, you won’t.” I moved into her, and she had the speed, but now so did I, and I had the training. She tried to keep the girl’s arm in hers, like a hostage, and that put her off balance even more. I got close, and she did what I thought she would do, slashing at the air in front of her. It was more trying to keep me back than trying to cut me. I blocked her arm at the wrist, grabbed her elbow, applied pressure, and hooked my leg behind hers. I brought her to the ground with her arm and its knife still trapped in a joint lock, so that when she hit the floor I already had pressure on her elbow.

The woman that she’d cut ran toward the other red tigers. It was just Reba and me. “Drop the knife or I break the arm.”

She didn’t drop the knife, so I added a little more pressure to the elbow. She cried out, then sent the knife clanging to the floor. I kicked it out of reach and found Truth there to pick it up. So hard to bodyguard someone when they have to do their own fighting.

“It’s against every rule for you to use a knife to discipline your people. If you aren’t queen enough to shapeshift and do it right, then you aren’t allowed to be queen at all,” I said.

“Look who’s talking, human!” She spat that last word at me.

I called out, “How bad is Lacey hurt?”

“The blade was silver,” one of the men said.

“If she’s scarred for life, Reba, I promise you, you will be, too.”

Her eyes widened and she struggled. I leaned on the joint a little more, and it stopped her moving. I couldn’t grow claws and discipline her like a real queen, but I could do something that most dominants couldn’t do. It was a rarer gift, and depending on how you did it, it hurt more. I’d been gentle with the white tiger, Julia. I wouldn’t be gentle with this one.

I gazed down at her, and I could almost see the red tiger over me like a hood. The energy of it called to her tiger. I whispered, “Change for me.”

“I will not, and you can’t make me. You are a survivor of an attack. You are not pureblood.”

She was so angry, but anger was food, too. I drank her anger down through the feel of my hands on her skin and the pulse of her blood beating against my hands. There wasn’t much anger; it was a