Bullet Page 0,85
enough for you. There’s nothing I can do to be more important in your life.”
“Yeah, there is, but you won’t do it.”
“What? Tell me. What do I have to do to be higher up on your list?”
“Share better,” I said.
He glared at me, and that hot, trembling energy rose a notch so it felt like the air was pressing on my chest. It was hard to breathe through the heat of his power.
He stood up, and the energy radiated off of him like heat from a summer road. I could see it in the air around him. “I am Rex, and I don’t share, because I don’t have to share. It’s my pride and I get to run it the way I want to run it, and that means I don’t share my Regina with anyone.”
“Then find a nice little subservient werelion to settle down with and you can be master of your little kingdom, but I don’t work that way.”
He gave a harsh laugh. “I thought I was God’s gift to women before I got to St. Louis, and you. But I can’t be nearly as good as I think I am, or you wouldn’t have been able to kick me out of your bed for almost a year.”
“You tried to slice up Nathaniel and Micah, Haven. What did you think I’d do?”
“I was trying to make a point.”
“And that point would be?”
“That I can kick both their asses. You do know that I could have taken all three of you, but I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“I know you stopped fighting as hard when I joined the fight. I appreciate that, but you need to appreciate that I didn’t get a gun and shoot you when you started cutting up the men I love.”
“They aren’t men, Anita. They’re wereanimals, and in our world if you can’t fight your way out, you don’t lead, you don’t win, you don’t get to fuck the queen.”
“So why do all the other wereanimal leaders listen to Micah?” I asked. I was angry now, too, or just frustrated to a point where I didn’t know what else to say but the truth.
His hands were flexing into fists at his sides. “They shouldn’t.”
“But they do. Why is that, Haven?”
All the energy, all the fight seemed to go out of him at once and he sat back down on the bed. “Because everything I was taught about what it means to be a man and a werelion doesn’t work here. Rafael and his wererats could eat your wereleopards for breakfast, but he bows to Micah, and to you. Physically he could take Micah. Hell, all the other leaders fought their way to be leader, but not Micah.”
“Who told you how Micah became leader of his wereleopards?”
“Merle, the leader of their group before Micah. He’s bigger than me, and he fights dirty. I wouldn’t want to turn my back on Merle in a fight.” That was high praise from Haven.
“Merle’s a good guy in a fight, and he’s a lot happier being able to go back to a regular job than just be muscle to the new Nimir-Raj,” I said.
“Yeah, he loves working on the motorcycles.”
“Harleys. He always reminds us he’s a Harley mechanic,” I said.
Haven gave a small smile. “Yeah.” The smile vanished as he looked at me. “Wereanimals from the group that Chimera brought to St. Louis still talk about him. I’m a bad man, Anita, and I’ve done bad things, but I’ve never heard of anyone doing some of the shit he did.”
“He was crazy and evil,” I said.
“And you killed him personally and saved everybody,” he said.
I shrugged. “Someone had to do it.”
“Yeah, but most people couldn’t have done it.” He looked at me as if he’d never seen me before, and I knew that wasn’t true. He’d seen me a lot.
“What?” I asked.
“I was pretty pissed at Micah, because I didn’t understand why everyone followed him. It went against everything I knew about wereanimals until Merle told me the story.”
“Micah told me,” I said.
Haven kept talking as if I hadn’t said anything, as if he were talking more to repeat the words to himself than to me. “Chimera liked to force the wereanimals into their animal forms and keep them like that. He was going to force one of Merle’s least powerful leopards into animal form for a long time. Sometimes the weakest of us never come back from that. They get trapped as animals. Not like the wolfman that’s knocked