by Lauren Esker
It would make her look less like a Fallon, and right now, that sounded like a good thing.
"This better be important," she snarled hoarsely into the phone.
"Debi! Good morning!" chirped a too-bright, too-familiar voice. "How are you?"
Great. Trainee Agent Veliz, the persistent thorn in her paw. Debi pulled the phone away from her ear to check the time. It was 6:52 on Monday freaking morning.
"I don't have to be at work 'til nine, Veliz." A hint of feline growl crept into her voice.
The cheerful voice turned serious. "No, but you have a meeting with me at eight, and I wanted to make sure you were up. According to your boss, you've been coming in late a lot, and you're meeting with a big client this week—"
"Do you have to micromanage my every waking minute?" Her head throbbed. Fast shifter healing tended to get rid of hangovers, which meant she must really have overdone it last night. "Isn't it enough that you know exactly where I am at all times?" As if she could ever forget. The weight of the deeply loathed monitor anklet against her ankle was a constant reminder.
"Debi, believe it or not, I'm trying to help you—"
"See you at eight," she snapped, and hung up.
She dropped the phone in the clutter of cosmetics on the nightstand and plunked her head back down on her pillow. For a moment she considered sleeping for another half hour. But if she slept through the meeting with her SCB caseworker, that would go in the report too.
No. By the time she met with Nia Veliz, she had to be perfectly put together, with every piece of her makeup-and-power-suit armor in place. As their final insult, the SCB had assigned her a caseworker who was a chinchilla shifter—and it would be a cold day in hell before she let herself appear weak in front of prey.
She had to look perfect. Be perfect.
She was never getting out of this hell and back to her old life if anyone realized what a mess she'd turned into.
She peeled herself painfully out of bed. There was an empty vodka bottle on the nightstand, and through the open door she glimpsed the clutter of wine and whiskey bottles in the living room. She had to stop doing this. Drinking herself into oblivion while watching TV was no way for a Fallon to behave. Roger would have thrown her to the ground and put his teeth on her throat for acting that way.
But Roger wasn't here anymore, was he?
And that was the problem.
One quick shower later, with her wet hair wrapped in a towel, she picked her way through crowded furniture and a mess of discarded clothes, DVDs, magazines, and other detritus to the kitchen. She'd tried to cram a luxury condo's worth of stuff into the one-bedroom apartment that was all she could afford now, and it wasn't working. It especially wasn't working when she couldn't seem to find the energy in the evenings to tidy up. It was so much easier to throw herself on the couch, turn on the TV, crack open a microwave meal (or just eat a raw steak, as a sop to her lion side) and open a bottle of cheap white wine to wash it down.
She loathed clutter; that was the worst part. In her huge, beautiful condo, she'd had a cleaning person who came in three times a week, but she had also enjoyed an evening routine of wandering around picking things up, adjusting all her little art objects, and making nice meals in her big kitchen with its marble counters.
Now she couldn't even see this low-rent hell-hole's plastic kitchen counters underneath all the high-end kitchen gadgets and the takeout boxes she hadn't bothered to throw away. She whacked her knee on a marble-and-brass Bernhardt end table as she tried to edge around it.
I need to just sell most of this stuff. If I ever have anywhere to put it again, I'll also have enough money to buy more.
Why in the world had she thought it was necessary to keep two espresso machines and a French press, anyway?
But she couldn't get rid of the Nuova Simonelli Musica espresso maker, even though she never used it. Her brother Rory had given it to her for Christmas last year. And the French press had been a gift from Mara.
Everything in the apartment was like that. Half of it was stuff she'd picked out on her own, decorating her old condo with careful taste and an eye for quality; she couldn't give any of that up. And the rest were gifts from her siblings. The pride had always been close. They'd lavished presents on each other. Roger in particular had considered it his duty as pride alpha and eldest to make sure his siblings never wanted for anything.
Roger ...
She dug the French press out of the clutter on the counter, and desperately tried not to think about Roger, dead for almost a year after a standoff with the Shifter Crimes Bureau.
A standoff that would never have happened if she hadn't broken and told the SCB where to find her siblings and the latest victims of their shifter hunts. Roger had died that night along with their brother Derek. Her two surviving siblings, Rory and Mara, were in prison and flatly refused to speak to her. She'd effectively been disowned by what was left of her pride.
And for turning her back on her family and helping the SCB, she got to exist in this half-life, wearing a tracking monitor like a radio-collared moose and scraping by at a small-time accounting firm. As the firm's newest employee, she was convinced they were giving her all the worst jobs. Such as today's nightmare project: doing the books for a local real estate development company that was currently being used as the rope in a tug-of-war between its divorcing owners.
Debi glumly sipped her coffee and scratched at the hated monitor anklet with her toes. The worst part, worse even than the SCB knowing where she was at all times, was that she couldn't shift. Her ankles, as a lion, were too thick for the cuff. She would break her leg if she tried. And that was no accident.
Veliz had told her that she would be allowed to shift again someday, once they trusted her more. Her family used to shift into lions and hunt people, so she got why the SCB didn't want her running around as a lioness anymore. But damn it, she'd helped them. She never even used to go along on the hunts; the one time she'd tried it, she had been privately horrified and had stayed home afterwards. It wasn't fair to punish her for something she hadn't done.
Except you knew about it, a small guilty voice inside her said. You knew they were killing people out there, and you helped them cover it up.
Because they were family. Because they were pride.
And didn't that work out wonderfully for everyone involved.
She was going to get it back, she told herself. She was going to fix it; she was going to restore her old life, and get her family out of prison (the surviving ones, that small voice whispered). She might be the baby of the family, but she was the one who had to save them now.
And heaven help anyone who stood in her way.
Chapter Two
Halfway across the city, a very different morning scene was unfolding in a spacious two-bedroom condo not unlike the one Debi had been living in until a year ago.
"No! Nononononooooooo ..."
The shrieking trailed off on a miserable wail as if the shrieker was being forced into an Iron Maiden rather than pried out from under her bed.
"Olivia ..." Fletcher Briggs struggled not to laugh, although laughter was better than yelling at the annoying bundle of squirm trying to slither out of his arms. "You have to wear pants. You can't go to daycare without pants—"
"I hate pants!"
"Or a dress. You have a lot of lovely dresses. Would you like to—"
"I hate dresses! I hate you!"
Oh, here it came, Fletcher thought. She was about to pull out the big guns. And she was going to do it at the top of her impressive lungs.
"MOMMY WOULDN'T MAKE ME DO THIS!"
"Yes, Livvy. Yes she would. In fact, I have it on good authority that she makes you wear pants every single day."
"I want Mommy!"
You and me both, kid. Or rather, he wanted the woman he'd thought Chloe Sperlin was before he married her. But that woman, he'd come to realize, had never existed outside his romantic fantasies.
The only truly good thing t
hat had come out of his marriage to Chloe was currently writhing in his arms with a particular squirming motion that Fletcher, his heart sinking, knew all too well.
"Olivia—Livvy, no, your mother and I have both told you—Olivia, Daddy said no—"
Too late. Olivia's frilly blouse and underwear collapsed around her, leaving him holding a handful of clothing with a small brown snake slithering from the leg hole of her pink big-girl panties.
The snake plopped to the floor at his feet. Fletcher instinctively jumped back.
Chloe had a lot to answer for.
"Livvy, sweetheart," he said, keeping his voice calm with an effort as the tiny viper raised her head, tongue flicking out to taste the air. "Olivia, please change back. You know—no, don't come this way—" It was all he could do to take a calm step back instead of running and locking himself in the bathroom, which would do nothing for his authority over his four-year-old daughter. Chloe had told him that snake shifter parents were immune to their offspring's venom, but Fletcher had no such protection, and he wasn't sure if Olivia was old enough to understand that she was capable of killing Daddy with a careless bite.
Fortunately he'd been the parent of a venomous toddler for much too long to go unprepared.
Olivia was wriggling quickly for the safety of the bed. Fletcher dived for the net leaning beside the door of her bedroom—there was one in every room of the house, discreetly tucked into umbrella stands or leaning against closet doors, probably making him look like some sort of deranged naturalist. With a deft scoop, he nabbed her just before she disappeared from view, carried her at arm's length into the bathroom, and dumped her in the tub.
She would be able to climb out of the tub when her snake form lengthened a little more, but at this point she couldn't, so after a few frantic wriggling circuits—during which Fletcher went and fetched her clothes—she shifted back and sniffled pathetically at him. Her enormous brown eyes filled with tears under a mop of dark chestnut curls that were exactly what Fletcher's hair would have looked like if he hadn't carefully slicked it down every morning to maintain his professional business image. There was a curl hanging down springily in front of his eyes right now, because all the hair gel in the world wasn't adequate to the gymnastics involved in chasing a toddler around the house.
"Here, I brought both your princess skirts so you can choose. Do you want the purple skirt or the yellow one?"
A little more sniffling gradually resolved itself into the word "yellow."
"That's a good choice. I like yellow too. Tell you what, if you get dressed quick, we have time to get you a hot chocolate on the way to daycare, okay?" Where they would hate him for giving them a sugar-hyped four-year-old. It was a shifter daycare, which Chloe had helped him find, but it wasn't as if a hyperactive snake would be any easier to deal with. Probably a good deal less so. Right now, though, he was willing to resort to even the most shameless bribery if it got him out of the house sometime before noon.
"And Mom's going to pick you up afterwards."
She'd better. If Chloe was late, he was going to document every single minute and sic his lawyer on her at the custody hearing.
As he coaxed Olivia into one item of clothing at a time, the thought occurred to him that if everyone at work could see him now, they'd hardly recognize him. If only he could be this patient while working through personnel disputes or trying to deal with his soon-to-be-ex-wife's lawyers ...
But you couldn't, he reminded himself as he helped Olivia with the Velcro buckles on her shoes. You didn't get ahead by making friends, and you didn't run a successful real estate development company by being nice. People wouldn't respect you if they knew they could walk all over you. And when you came from the kind of background he did, when you didn't have a rich family's connections to rely on or the sort of pedigree that opened doors, you had to work for every ounce of respect you got, and then fight like hell to hold onto it.
The business world was no place to be kind and generous, no place to be weak. Life wasn't, not unless you wanted to be stepped on all the time.
When it came down to it, he and his ex weren't all that different, he thought as he gathered Olivia into his arms. Not really that different at all. But they'd had Olivia, and Olivia was perfect and beautiful, so they were capable of making good things in the world. And he had every intention of giving Olivia the childhood he hadn't been able to have himself.
Olivia wrapped her arms around his neck, the rebellion temporarily quelled, and he carried her into the living room. The entire condo was not just childproofed, but also snakeproofed, with fine mesh over the vents and a number of plastic pet surgery collars on furniture legs and floor lamps to stop her from climbing them. As well as stashing butterfly nets around the room, he'd started hanging onto empty containers that could be used to contain a small snake. Empty coffee cans, appliance boxes, and other items of similar size, padded with washcloths or old T-shirts, were tucked under chairs or placed as inconspicuously as possible on countertops.
He'd instructed the cleaning lady not to throw them out, probably making her think he was a hoarder, but it was better than being caught unawares with a baby viper in his lap and no empty cracker box on the coffee table.
The pièce de résistance of his unusual living room decor was the large glass tank in the corner containing his alibi snake. Bought from a local pet store a couple of years ago, she was a corn snake named Lydia—a name intentionally chosen to be close enough to Olivia's name to cover for the times when he was forced to hunt his shifted daughter in the stairwell. As a side benefit, Olivia loved Lydia's warm tank with its soft sand and multiple places to hide, and seemed to enjoy having another snake to ... well, not to play with exactly, but to do whatever it was snakes did together.
Chloe thought his many precautions were ridiculous, but Chloe had grown up in a snake shifter family in a rambling lakefront house in Seattle's Madrona neighborhood. She'd been home-schooled and had mainly spent her childhood in the company of other shifters, primarily her family. She didn't understand how different it would be for a shifter child to live in the non-shifter world, since she'd always been insulated from it. But Olivia was half human. Fletcher felt that she had a right to connect with both sides of her heritage.
Since their separation, Chloe had moved back in with her family. Olivia had been primarily living with Fletcher except when Chloe took her back to the Sperlin house (which Fletcher had started uncharitably thinking of as "the viper pit"). After they got through the custody hearings and finalized the divorce, that arrangement would either become permanent ... or it wouldn't.
Fletcher refused to consider the latter possibility—all the terrible permutations of it, all the many ways he could lose custody of the best thing in his world. There was no option but winning for him in any area of his life, but especially this one.
"Now sit here," he told Olivia, depositing her on the sofa. "Daddy needs to grab a few things. You're spending the night with Mom, so you need your blanket and your stuffie. And don't take your shoes off!" he called over his shoulder as he hurried back into her bedroom.
On the way, he grabbed his phone and glanced at his emails and messages as he shoved Olivia's things into her favorite kitty-shaped travel bag, conducting hasty message triage. An email from his lawyer confirmed their 8:15 a.m. meeting—with a glance at the time display in the corner of the screen, he thought it would be a friggin' miracle if he made that. There was a message from the temp agency letting him know they'd be able to send someone over to replace the receptionist Chloe had fired, and a voicemail from his office manager, Janice—okay, that couldn't be good news—
"Daddy! I have to go to the bathroom!"
"You can use the bathroom at the preschool!" he called back, opening Janice's message.
"I have to go to the bathroom now!"
"Well, do it then!"
"Fletcher, I'm so sorry," Janice was saying on the phone. "Nathan has an ear infection and he was up all night. I'm calling from
Urgent Care. I'll try to come in later, if I can—"
"Daddy, I can't get my skirt off!"
"Coming, coming." He tapped out a quick one-handed text telling Janice it was fine, grumbling under his breath, and abandoned the packing to go take the skirt off Olivia that he'd just put on her.
He got to the bathroom to find his stark-naked daughter perched on the toilet. Her clothes were crumpled in a heap on the bathroom door, abandoned in the sort of pile you got when the child in them turned suddenly into a snake.
"I took it off, Daddy," she announced.
It was definitely going to be one of those days.
Keeping Her Pride – Book 1 in a new series!
Coming June 2017!
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