“It’s just now midnight. It looks like someone’s still awake.” Titus looked toward the house, where lights were on in several rooms. “Probably Abby and Jace.”

“How do you know?” I couldn’t stop staring at the house. “Don’t you have, like, a zillion enforcers?”

“A dozen. But most of them stay in the guest house, behind the pool. And at any given time, at least half of them are out on patrol. Right now, I have seven spread out around the territory, and five defending our home base.” He gestured beyond the windshield at the property spread out around us.

“So, this is like any normal Pride? Only bigger.”

“Kind of.” Titus pulled the car to a stop on the half-circle drive between a massive set of curved brick steps and a three-tiered water fountain at the center of a semicircle formed by the arch of the driveway. “Geographically, my territory is the smallest in the country. But we have about twice the shifter population Jace said they have in the Appalachian Pride. Ninety percent strays.”

“The other ten percent rogues?” Natural-born toms who left shifter society for one reason or another.

“Yes.” He turned off the car.

“Donna Di Carlo says they’re all criminals.” My gaze roamed over the front of the house. “That your territory is nothing more than a penal colony.”

Both Titus’s smile and his eyes seemed to shine at me in the dark. “We’re much more than just a penal colony.”

“So they are criminals?”

“According to the council’s rulings? Yes. Most of them. Including Abby and Jace.” His smile faded into a thoughtful look. “As are you.”

I blinked, surprised. He was right. “I—”

The front door flew open, and Abby raced down the arched brick steps, leaving Jace’s backlit silhouette in the doorway. “Titus! How did it go?” But then she stopped short, her jaw falling, when she saw me through the car window. “Robyn?”

“Hey.” I pushed the door open and stepped into her hug, and the tension I’d been battling for the past hour of my car ride with Titus just melted away.

Abby was the only person in the world I knew I could trust. She’d risked her life to shield and protect me.

“Faythe said you were missing.” She seemed to be trying to squeeze all the breath from my body. “Titus found you? Does the council know where you are?”

“No.” Steps clomped down the stairs behind her, and I looked up to find Jace looking not at me, but over my shoulder. At Titus. “Faythe would have called us if they knew.”

“Hey,” a new voice said, as two more toms—one on two legs, one on four—stepped out of the house onto the porch. “What’s going on?”

Titus cleared his throat as Abby finally let me go. “Robyn, this is Drew Borden, my lieutenant.”

“In the ‘right-hand man’ sense of the word, not the G.I. Joe sense.” Drew stuck his hand out, and I shook it. “I’m the lead enforcer in this Pride. This is Knox.” He patted the glossy, black-furred head of the shifter standing next to him.

“Knox what? I assume he has a last name?”

“Actually, it’s Alistair Knox,” Drew said, and the cat standing next to him gave a throaty growl. “But he hates his first name, so we only use it when we want to piss him off. To what do we owe the pleasure…Robyn, right?”

“Yes. Robyn Sheffield.” I turned to Titus, to see how he wanted to explain my presence.

He only crossed his arms over his very well-formed chest and shrugged. “That’s your confession to make.”

“Confession?” Drew’s brows rose.

I couldn’t imagine that Titus’s men would be any happier than he was to hear about the position I’d put their Pride in. “Can I have something to drink first? Maybe a sandwich? I’m starving.”

“Of course.” Abby wound her arm through mine and tugged me toward the steps.

Titus stepped into our path. “No,” he declared, his voice deep and…final. “Tell them.”

“Titus?” Drew’s posture tensed in response to his Alpha’s tone. “Everything okay?”

“Robyn?” Abby looked worried now too.

I took a deep breath, then let go of her arm. “I kind of…defected. Unofficially. But I didn’t know I’d be starting such a shitstorm.”

“Damn it,” Jace mumbled, and Knox gave another low growl, not of aggression, but of…displeasure.

I was starting to feel distinctly unwelcome.

Abby frowned. “What does that mean—unofficially?”

Titus exhaled, as if he were fighting for patience. “She snuck into my car and hitched an unauthorized ride out of the Southeast Territory. To see you.”

Jace scrubbed one hand over his newly short brown waves. He met Titus’s gaze. “We have to send her back.”

“I’m staying.” I sucked in a deep breath and met each set of eyes in turn. “They’re trying to marry me off. I heard them. Your dad said that wouldn’t happen, but I heard them!” I told Abby.

“I tried to tell her they won’t do that,” Titus said. “Faythe would never let that happen. Your dad would never let that happen.”

“They didn’t ‘let’ Jace get exiled, either, yet that happened,” Drew pointed out.

“Technically, they can’t make Robyn get married,” Abby said, and though normally I hate being discussed as if I weren’t present, that probably wasn’t a good moment to start complaining. “But there are enough old-school Alphas left to make her life very difficult until she does what they want.”

“Even with your brother on the council?” Titus asked. “Won’t he take your dad’s side?”

“Isaac might swing the other way just to show he’s not biased. Either way, he’s a pawn,” Jace growled. “The council only accepted his Alpha status after they exiled me because they knew they could manipulate him.”

“He’s a good man in a tough position, Jace,” Abby insisted. “You’re holding a grudge because he got your sister pregnant.”

Drew chuckled, and Knox gave an amused feline snort.

Jace rolled his eyes. “Good men can be pawns, Abby. Especially young good men, with no leadership ability, who have an intense desire to please their elders and safeguard their own status.”