“And you’ll be a deconstructed masterpiece once the worms get ahold of you. But only one of those two things is going to happen.”

Hargrove actually laughed. “Ambitious for such a tiny little thing. Are you the one who gave Steve and his boys so much trouble?”

“Size means nothing to a shifter.” Though that wasn’t entirely true. I was nowhere near as strong as my brothers, or even as Faythe, but surely I could give a pudgy, middle-aged human a run for his money. “I could probably throw you across the room with one hand.”

“Too bad we’ll never find out. You’re going to step quietly out the back door and down the steps, then head toward the truck in the driveway. If you even look like you’re going to run, I’ll blow a hole right through you.”

“Wouldn’t that put a kink in your plan to mount my head on the wall?” If I died in human form, he’d have no cat to stuff.

Hargrove shrugged one shoulder, without compromising his aim. “We’ve already got an eye on the other little girl cat. What are you called? Tabbies?”

Rage tingled like needles poking me all over, and I silently refused to answer.

“Darren’s gonna bring her in tonight. Now march. And keep in mind that if you holler and bring Mr. Hammond or any of his men to your rescue, I have no problem shooting every last one of them.”

Chill bumps rose all over my skin, and they had nothing to do with the cold. Hargrove knew who Jace was. Not just his name, but that he was in charge. Before I’d killed Steve, he’d told me that several of the shifters they’d slaughtered and stuffed had given in to interrogation, hoping for a quicker death. Had Leo been one of those?

Hargrove gestured with his gun for me to get moving, and my hands shook. How many bullets did a rifle hold? I knew nothing about guns, except that he wouldn’t get a chance to reload.

But that wouldn’t help the first couple who got shot.

I backed carefully toward the ruined backdoor, afraid to look away from Hargrove even for a second. “Jace is going to rip your head right off your shoulders.”

Hargrove took a soft step forward, forcing me closer to the door. “Those old stairs squeak if you don’t know exactly where to step. We’ll have plenty of warning if he heads back up. Though it’d be a shame to have to kill an Alpha in human form. No real point in hanging that head on the wall, is there?”

A man-shaped shadow fell on the floor behind him, and I had to fight not to look directly at it. Jace stepped silently out of the pantry and deliberately shoved the door open wider. The hinges squealed, and Hargrove turned.

The instant the gun barrel swung away from me, Jace pounced—a denim-clad blur streaking across the kitchen.

He ripped the rifle from the hunter’s grasp, then rammed the butt of it into his gut. Hargrove bent over with a breathless grunt. He never even got a chance to shout.

“You okay?” Jace set the rifle on the kitchen counter, and I nodded while he hauled Hargrove up by the back of his thick neck. He wrapped his free hand around the human’s throat, digging in lightly, then leaned forward to whisper into his ear. “You’re obviously used to dealing with strays. If I didn’t want you to see or hear me, you’d already be darkening the devil’s doorstep without any clue how you got there.”

Jace winked at me, and my heart thudded in my throat. The loss of his rifle didn’t make Hargrove any less of a threat to me.

But Jace couldn’t know that.

“You so much as twitch before Abby gets back, and I’ll rip your throat out,” he growled. “Understand?”

Hargrove nodded frantically, his eyes wide. A bead of sweat rolled slowly down the side of his face, in spite of the frigid draft blowing in through the open doorway.

“Where am I going?” I asked, silently scrambling for a solution to my newest problem—Jace and Hargrove face to face.

“To get a roll of duct tape from the tool bench downstairs. Make it fast, Abby.”

I raced into the pantry and down the creaky stairs, thrilled to have caught at least a little bit of a break. Either Jace hadn’t found anything he shouldn’t have in the basement, or he hadn’t had time to look before he heard Hargrove upstairs.

At the bottom of the steps, I glanced around the basement to find a much smaller space than Hargrove had at his own house. The workbench was smaller, the stash of tools and chemicals was meager, and there was no bulletin board at all, though that hadn’t stopped the hunters from hanging pictures on the wall with scotch tape.

A quick glance at the photos showed that they were reprints of the ones hung in that other basement—there was nothing I’d need to hide or destroy.

Dried blood caked Hargrove’s work surface, but the scents were all unfamiliar and mostly faint from the passage of time and from chemical degradation. A four-drawer metal filing cabinet stood against one wall, but I wouldn’t have time to go through that, and an empty three-by-five dog cage took up most of one corner. It smelled like bleach.

“Abby!” Jace shouted, and I jumped.

“Sorry!” I grabbed the duct tape from the workbench and clomped up the creaky stairs again. “I got distracted by all the creepy crap down there.”

“Here.” Jace took a step back from Hargrove without letting go of his neck. “Tape his hands up. Make it tight.”

I tore a long strip of tape from the roll, then knelt and reached between them to wrap the tape around Hargrove’s wrists, praying that the next strip would cover his mouth. When I’d stood and backed away, Jace let go of Hargrove and grabbed the rifle from the kitchen counter.

“Abby, call the guys back.” He flipped up a lever on the rifle then shoved it back, and the bullet popped out, then rolled around on the floor.

I pushed my sleeve up and reached into a pot full of greasy water to fish my poor phone out. “Can I use yours?”

Jace swore when he saw my cell dripping on the kitchen floor, then handed his to me.

“You move and I start breaking bones,” he told Hargrove while I scrolled through his contacts for my brother’s number. The hunter looked ready to wet his camouflage pants. “You refuse to answer a single question and I start breaking bones.”

Shit. I could not let him interrogate Hargrove.

“Jace?” Lucas said into my ear.

“No, it’s me. We got Hargrove. Jace wants you all to head back.”