“Any fight you live through is a fight well fought,” said Gary. “That said, I might wander upstairs and see what it is I’m running from.” There was a faint bitterness in his tone, and Honey looked at him. He raised both hands in surrender and grinned. “Tomorrow. Running from tomorrow. Tonight, I’m in the mood for a movie.” He turned around, winking at me along the way, and headed toward the stairway, almost bumping into Christy, who was just coming into the kitchen.
“Hey, pretty lady,” he said. He hesitated, but when she didn’t acknowledge him in any way, he just grinned and kept going.
Christy went right for Adam as if none of the rest of us were there.
“This is your fault,” she said viciously. “I felt so horrible, bringing my troubles here, and it was your fault.”
“Careful,” I murmured, but she didn’t pay any attention to me—which was foolish of her.
“I should have known when Troy was killed.” It took me a second to figure out who Troy was, I’d never heard the name of her boyfriend who’d been killed. “The only time bodies start appearing around me is when there are werewolves involved,” she continued.
“Juan Flores isn’t a werewolf,” I said, but again I spoke quietly, and she didn’t appear to have heard me.
Adam didn’t say anything. He took a deep breath and just—accepted what she said. It was the first time I’d ever seen a real fight between them. Watching him as she spewed guilt all over him, I realized that he enjoyed our fights almost as much as I did. When we fought, he roared and stalked and fought back. He didn’t let his face go blank and wait to be hit again. Being willing to accept responsibility for the well-being of others was part of being Alpha, part of who Adam was, and she was very, very good at using that against him.
Tears leaked artfully down her face. “I tried. I tried, then I had to run. But I can’t get away from you, can’t get away from the monsters. They follow me wherever I go, and it is your fault.”
Adam wasn’t going to defend himself. Honey wrapped her arms around her stomach and turned away. Honey believed herself to be one of the monsters, too, and so Christy’s venom spread over Honey as well.
Enough.
“Adam didn’t make you go sleep with some complete stranger because he was handsome and rich,” I said coolly, but this time at full volume. There wasn’t a wolf in the house who hadn’t heard Christy, so they could listen to me, too.
“Stay out of this,” she snapped at me, wiping futilely at her cheeks. “This isn’t your business.”
“When you blamed Adam, whose only fault that I can see is that he has poor taste in wives, you made it my business,” I told her.
Honey cleared her throat. “You do know you are one of his wives, right?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Happily, he doesn’t know how bad off he is with me—and I intend that he never will.”
Life came back into Adam’s eyes with a wicked glint, and I saw a hint of his dimple. Better, I thought, better.
Christy knew she’d lost control of the scene. Her eyes narrowed at me, and she lost the tears. “Juan came after me because of Adam.”
“You slept with a complete stranger,” I said. “Not Adam’s fault you”—Jesse had come down the stairs, with Ben and Darryl trailing behind her, so I didn’t call Christy a slut—“made a poor choice.”
“He was a friend of my best friend,” she said. “Rich, charming, and handsome, he wasn’t a ‘complete stranger.’ I had no way to tell that he was a monster.”
“You didn’t know enough about him for Warren to find him. You didn’t know where he lived, what country he was from. I bet you didn’t even check to see if he was married or not before you chased after him. How long did you know him before you hopped into bed with him? An hour?”
It probably wasn’t fair to use what Jesse had told me about her mother’s dating habits against Christy, but she hadn’t been playing fair, either. The tears had been cheating, and when she’d realized just how many of the pack had started to filter into the kitchen behind her, she would doubtless use them again.
“He approached me,” she said defensively—not to mention falsely.
“Are you stupid? How long did you live with the wolves?” I asked her incredulously. “You do know that most of the people in this room can tell that you are lying, right?”
Stupid. She wasn’t stupid, just self-absorbed and unwise. She didn’t like people thinking badly of her, so she lied.
I stalked away from her, incensed that most of me wanted to play fair instead of just ripping her to shreds the way she’d ripped into Adam. It felt disloyal to Adam. It felt like I might be letting her manipulate me into feeling sorry for her.
As I turned back toward Christy, I saw Jesse standing a little behind her. Jesse was Christy’s daughter, and I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Jesse. With a good reason not to destroy my enemy, I paced back until I was face-to-face with Christy again.
“Look.” I tried to keep my voice gentle. “No one cares if you sleep with a football team, none of whom you know and all of whom are half your age.” I repeated it so she could hear the truth in my words. “We don’t care.”
Christy went pale in genuine hurt, making me reexamine what I’d just said.
“That doesn’t mean that we don’t care if one of them hurts you. That’s another matter entirely. Call us, and we’ll go take care of it. But you have to quit flinging blame around.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” she said, quietly, believing it. But then she aimed her venom at me and increased the volume. “Not my fault. It wasn’t.”
“Juan came after you because you slept with him, then you ran,” I told her, but then I started thinking about what that meant. “If you had waited and told him you weren’t interested, he might have left you alone.” I worked through the germ of the idea. “If he’d been leaving bodies everywhere he went, Warren would have figured it out. But there weren’t bodies, there weren’t fires until you ran.” I knew there hadn’t been bodies, because Warren had looked for bodies left the same way as his victims here in the Tri-Cities. Why hadn’t there been any other bodies? “That’s not your fault,” I told her, “but it is interesting.”
She stared at me, her fists clenched.