Fair Game

justice once more? Accepted that there were other answers than death—but that death was the proper and fitting one? Or had it been when he’d seen blood and known that Travis hadmanaged to hurt her even with her mate so close, when guilt and right and wrong had become only words next to the reality of his mate’s wound?
    But Anna was hurt and there would be time to figure out what had happened later.
    He used their bond to soak up her pain and take as much of it into himself as he could. Then he set the bone of her nose back where it needed to go before the werewolf’s ability to mend quickly made it heal crooked. She didn’t flinch, though he knew he couldn’t take all the pain from her.
    Stop that,
Anna scolded him.
You don’t need to hurt because I do.
    But I do,
Charles replied, more honestly than he intended.
I failed to keep you safe.
    She huffed a laugh.
You taught me to keep myself safe—a much better gift for your mate, I think. If you had not found me, I would have killed them all. But you came—and that is another, second gift. That you would come, even though I could have protected myself.
    She was confident and it pleased him. So he didn’t think about the three experienced, tough wolves these men had killed at their leisure. Let her feel safe. So he didn’t argue with her about it, just ran gentle fingers through the ruff of her fur.
    The ghosts are gone,
she pronounced with regal certainty, and was asleep before he could answer her.
    But he did anyway. “Yes.”

CHAPTER

13
    When Charles was a boy, every fall his grandfather had taken his people and met up with other bands of Indians, most of them fellow Flatheads, Tunaha, or other Salish bands, but sometimes a few Shoshone with whom they were friendly would travel with them. They would ride their horses east to hunt buffalo and prepare for the coming winter.
    He was no longer a boy, and traveling east was not a treat anymore, not when it meant that he and his mate were back in a big city instead of settled into his home in the mountains of Montana. Three months had passed since he’d killed Benedict Heuter, and they had come back for his cousin’s sensational trial. Boston was beautiful this time of year—the trees showing off their fall colors. But the air still smelled of car exhaust and too many people.
    He had testified; Anna had testified; the FBI had testified. Lizzie Beauclaire on crutches with her knee in a brace, and the scars that the Heuters had left her with, had testified. She might, with enough surgeries, beable to walk without crutches again, but dancing was out of the question. Her scars could be reduced, but for the rest of her life she would bear the Heuters’ marks as reminders every time she looked in a mirror.
    When the prosecution was done presenting its case, the defense began.
    They’d spent the last week guiding the jury through the hell that had been Les Heuter’s childhood. It had almost been enough to engage Charles’s sympathy. Almost.
    But then, Charles had been there, had seen the calculation on Les Heuter’s face when he shot his uncle. He’d been planning this defense, planning on blaming his ills on the dead. His uncle had been wrong; Les Heuter was smart.
    Heuter sat in front of the court, neatly groomed in slacks, shirt, and tie. Nothing too expensive. Nothing too brightly colored. They’d done something with his hair and the clothing that made him look younger than he was. He explained to the jury, the reporters, and the audience in the courtroom what it was like living with a crazy man who’d made him come help him clean up the country—apparently Travis Heuter’s name for the torture and rape of his victims—when he was ten years old.
    “My cousin Benedict was a little older than me,” he told them. “He was a good kid, tried to keep the old man off my back. Took a few beatings for me.” He blinked back tears and, when that didn’t work, wiped his eyes.
    Maybe the tears were genuine, but Charles thought that they were just too perfect, a strong man’s single tear to create sympathy rather than real tears, which could have been seen as weakness of character. Les Heuter had hidden what he was for more than two decades; playing a role for the jury didn’t seem to be much of a stretch.
    “When Benedict was eleven, he had a violent episode. For about two months he was crazy. Tried to stab my uncle, beat me up, and…” Acareful look down, a faint blush. “It was like a deer or elk