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don’t you tell us what happened,” Cooper commanded. Looking around the room, he added, “Without any interruptions.”
    “I, ah, woke up this morning at Wild Oaks. I needed a ride to get my car. So I called Cassie. She said she was coming in anyway. She had some stuff to drop off at the bookstore. I didn’t think anything of her driving Laney’s car. I dropped my guard, it was unacceptable.” Dusty kept her voice strong, her shoulders back. Any punishment Cooper wanted to dish out was well deserved.
    “I’m the one who told her to take my car.” Laney’s voice held yards of self-reproach.
    “Enough,” Cooper ordered. “I’m waiting to hear the rest.”
    “We stopped about a quarter mile from Mackenzie’s Rock. This car came up behind us and I saw someone exit, a gun in his hand. He fired and hit the back window. We took off but we were never going to outrun him. He was trying to force us into the ditch. There was a turnoff coming. I was hoping we’d make it, that he’d overshoot it to give us some more time. But we didn’t.
    “We went into a spin, landing in the ditch. I was sure whoever it was would come down and finish us off. But another car came along. It was an older couple. I must have blacked out because the next thing I knew, you, Cain and Jay were there, and well, you know the rest.”
    “What were you doing at Wild Oaks?” Cain asked.
    “Doesn’t matter.” She couldn’t meet his gaze.
    “What color was the car?” asked Rye, Laney’s oldest brother.
    “Dark gray.” She straightened at the command in his voice. Rye was the head enforcer, her boss until she’d been injured.
    “Make?”
    “Ahh, it was a sedan, a Ford.”
    “Number plates?”
    “Started with SIY, but the rest was dirty. It had tinted windows. They must have been following us.”
    “They were probably watching the bookstore. If they’d been watching the estate, we’d have seen them,” Rye concluded.
    “So you think this person was staking out the store on the chance that Laney would come in? Pretty big supposition. They’d have to want her badly to waste that much time waiting around,” Cain commented.
    Rye frowned, pulling out his cell. “Go over Laney’s car with a fine-tooth comb,” he ordered whoever was on the other end. “Yeah, see if you can find a tracking device.”
    Laney stared at her brother. “Shit.”
    Rye ended his call and sat next to Laney, drawing her into his arms. Laney was the only person Dusty had ever seen Rye touch in a loving way. The normally cold werewolf softened visibly around his sister.
    “I’m going to change Cassie,” Jay spoke up suddenly. “I’m going to make her a werewolf.”

Chapter Three
     
    Everyone went silent, turning to gape at a clearly distraught Jay. His shoulders were tense as he stared out the window. He braced his hands against the window frame as though he was using it to prop himself up.
    “Jay, you know that’s not possible,” Cooper pointed out reasonably. When the packs had revealed their existence to the world, they’d agreed to the Government’s stipulation that they would never change a human.
    Converting a human was punishable by death—a sentence carried out by the guilty werewolf’s pack. Not that the Government knew that. The death sentence was a secret held by the packs. It had come about to prevent the human authorities from being able to dispense their own brand of discipline. The packs wanted to keep the human authorities out of their business as much as possible.
    The sentence was strict, dire. But it was there for the greater good of all werewolves. There were many humans who hated werewolves, and would like nothing more than to prove they were dangerous, lethal beasts who needed to be controlled or eliminated.
    Werewolves lived outside human society, on estates set away from human cities and towns. Some liked it that way. Others, like Cooper, believed that segregation was only going to lead to the demise of the packs. That