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“Great,” I said, “so it’s settled.”

“No,” Cherry said. “If Gabriel taught us anything, it was that you can’t trust anyone unless they want something from you. You don’t have to love us, but pick one of us for a lover.”

I shook my head. “No. I mean thanks for the invitation, but no thanks.”

“Then how can we trust you?” Cherry asked, voice almost a whisper.

“You can trust her,” Jason said. “It’s Gabriel that you couldn’t trust. He’s the one that convinced you that sex was so damned important. Anita isn’t even sleeping with our Ulfric, but Zane saw her last night. He saw what she did to protect me.”

“She did it to protect her vampire. The one she cares for,” Zane said.

“I don’t feel for Damian the way I feel for Asher, but I risked my life for him last night,” I said.

The leopards frowned up at me. “I know,” Zane said, “and I don’t understand that. Why didn’t you let him die?”

“I’d asked him to risk his life to save Nathaniel. I try never to ask of others what I’m not willing to do myself. If Damian was willing to risk his life, then I couldn’t do less.”

The leopards were lost. It showed in their faces, the tension that flowed through their power, as it breathed along my skin.

“Am I yours?” Nathaniel asked. His voice sounded small and lost.

I looked past the others to him. He was still crouched, huddled in the middle of the floor. He was huddled in around himself. His long, long hair had spilled around him, across his face. His flower-petal eyes stared out at me through that curtain of hair, like he was staring out through fur. I’d seen other lycanthropes that did that, hid behind their hair, and stared. Crouched there, he was suddenly feral and vaguely unreal. He brushed the hair back from one side, revealing a line of arm and chest. His face was suddenly young, open, and raw with need.

“I won’t let anyone else hurt you, Nathaniel,” I said.

A single tear slid down his face. “I’m so tired of not belonging to anyone, Anita. So tired of being anyone’s meat that wanted me. So tired of being scared.”

“You don’t have to be scared anymore, Nathaniel. If it’s within my power to keep you safe, I will.”

“I belong to you now?”

I didn’t like the phrasing, but watching him cry, one crystalline tear at a time, I knew that now wasn’t the time to quibble over semantics. I hoped I wasn’t signing up for more up-close-and-personal care than I wanted, but I nodded. “Yes, Nathaniel, you belong to me.” Words alone rarely impressed shapeshifters. It was like part of them didn’t understand words.

I held out my hand to him. “Come, Nathaniel, come to me.”

He crawled to me, not in that wild, muscular grace, but head down, crying, face hidden by his hair. He was sobbing full out by the time he reached me. He held one hand up to me blind, not looking at me.

Zane and Cherry had moved to either side, letting him come close to me.

I took Nathaniel’s hand and wondered what to do with it. Shaking it wasn’t enough, kissing it seemed wrong. I racked my brain for anything on leopards and just blanked. The one thing that the leopards did most often was lick each other. I couldn’t think of anything else.

I raised Nathaniel’s hand to my mouth, bending over to press my mouth to the back of his hand. I licked his skin, one quick movement, and the taste of him was familiar. I knew in that moment that Raina had licked this skin, ran lips, tongue, teeth, down this body.

The munin welled up inside of me, and I fought it. The munin wanted to bite his hand, to draw blood and lap it like a cat with cream. The imagery was too repulsive to me. My own horror helped me chase Raina away. I pushed her down inside me and realized that she never really left me anymore. That was why she came so quickly and so easily. I felt her hiding inside me like a cancer waiting to spread.

I stood there with the taste of Nathaniel’s skin in my mouth and did what Raina had never done: I gave comfort.

I raised Nathaniel’s head gently until I could cradle