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handled?
    His tail flicked again. A dream, maybe…or maybe a memory. His broad brow furrowed. “I’m sorry,” she said, drawn back into their moments of sharing that which she’d learned of him. Of his brother. “I didn’t know. But I still don’t want anything to do with this.” She hadn’t grown up with it, not the way he had—and until now she’d had no idea of the deeply instilled obligations the shifters felt. Even Dolan, who blamed the brevis regional consul for his brother’s death, still found a way to serve their cause. To remain Sentinel.
    Well, Meghan had never been Sentinel. And her mother, tied to the Sentinels only by the virtue of her shape-shifter nature, had never been meant for field duty.
    Jaguar fur lay warm beneath Meghan’s hand, and she felt the massive weight of him as though somehow he lay on her hand and not the other way around. Glossyfur slid between her fingers—and then suddenly the lax muscle stiffened. Meghan felt rather than saw an impending flicker of blue light, and then it was too late to snatch her hand away, to leap away—
    He changed, fur to smooth skin to leather-clad human, and there lay her hand through it all, flickering in the light and for the briefest instant literally a part of Dolan Treviño.
    And, oh, God, she hurt and she couldn’t see and she had two hearts, beating hard and fast, and four lungs, gasping for air, and nerves that sizzled and popped and ached to be every bit as connected as that one hand on that one shoulder—
    She cried out, in fear and astonishment and denial, and the sound came from his mouth. And then the blue light slammed them apart with chastising whips of energy and Meghan quite suddenly lay at the hearth, sobbing for breath and barely able to lift her head to find Dolan coming up to his hands and knees, to his feet, and then down again, full length on the floor.
    He looked just as she felt…stripped away, seared by another’s soul. When he lifted his head he cried, “What did you do?” in a voice ragged and barely audible.
    She heard him anyway. She heard him clearly.
    She heard him within.
    “ What did you do? ” He demanded it again, his voice hardly any steadier. Off to the side, a horse snorted in alarm and annoyance. Meghan looked as wild as Dolan felt, sprawled in front of the hearth with the look of someone who might just bolt.
    No, not her. Not the woman who’d stuck with himthrough this past night. Even now, her expression quickly sharpened. She looked at him; she looked at her hand. It gave him time to think, to realize how every bone and muscle burned and ached, to understand that the memories sitting so freshly in his mind weren’t all his. Weren’t all—
    She’d been just a kid. She’d never known that his brother had died for the cause, trying to reach her mother. Her guardian, her father’s sister, hadn’t been a shifter, hadn’t been Sentinel at all…and the Sentinels—as ultrasecretive, ultracautious as any clandestine organization over two thousand years old—hadn’t told her a thing. They’d cut Meghan loose, knowing she wasn’t a shifter and sacrificing what skills she did have—what she might have been nurtured into. More fools, they. She’d saved his life. What she might have done if fully trained…
    “I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice felt rough-edged in his throat. “If I’d realized they cut you off…I’d have told you what happened myself.”
    “Doesn’t matter.” She tucked back a loose strand of hair, tightening an espresso ponytail gone loose and sloppy, her expression turning her sharp features yet sharper. “The Sentinels let them both die. And you’re still with them?”
    Dolan managed to push himself upright, leaning back against the wall with one leg propped up before him. “You don’t leave the Sentinels. Not if you’re a shifter.”
    “Nice,” she said, prompt and sharp. “They take lessons from the mob?”
    Dolan laughed. Not loudly, not long, but as