The next surprise came after dinner. And while she had been alternating between planning escape routes and thinking about a distressingly sexy alpha, nothing had prepared her for the newest wrinkle.

A blonde young woman sneaked in. She would have never made it as a thief, but for a novice, her stealth was serviceable. And Mel immediately recognized her as the woman from the night of the robbery. Luke's questions about the shifter girl started to make sense. So who was she to him? Not the girlfriend, according to him. While her pale skin and blonde hair threw Mel off for a moment, she took a closer look, seeing the line of her jaw, her nose, and the shape of her eyebrows. This girl's face bore a striking, feminine resemblance to the man who had begun to haunt her dreams.

A sister?

"It's a bit late for visitors." Mel sat up from the cot and motioned for the girl to take a seat at the table.

The girl's eyes widened and she shot a glance back at the door. "You're the person Luke is being all secretive about, right?" She hissed it. She didn't take a seat.

"Your brother has a lot of secrets, I'm sure." A hit with the brother comment. The girl didn't try to deny it. "I'm Mel, by the way."

"Cassie." She still whispered.

Mel almost felt sorry for this kid. Scratch that. She flat out felt sorry for her. Any young woman who walked into a prisoner's cell in the middle of the night had to be desperate. And she had no defenses against anything Mel would do to her.

"How did you get past the guards?" If the girl was going to let her lead the interrogation, then that was what she would do. Already a plan was beginning to form. And she probably wouldn't even need to go against Luke's edict. Not that she'd actually promised him anything. But what he didn't realize could be used to her advantage later.

Cassie waved a dismissive hand, her lips curling up into something unconcerned and vaguely fond. "Mick is on shit duty, so when I offered him some cookies to pass the time, he didn't question it."

One guard? She was insulted. And glad. "You drugged my guard?"

Cassie's cheeks heated. She finally sat down. Mel took the opportunity to stand, walking to the table and leaning against the side, her hip jutted out. Cassie looked up at Mel, her eyebrows drawn down. "You're not going to tell, are you?"

Desperation made the kid seem even younger. Because Mel couldn't imagine her eighteen year old self acting this way. Showing fear. But she placed a hand on the girl's shoulder and smiled her best comforting smile. When Cassie didn't flinch she knew that she'd succeeded. "Of course, not. Why don't you tell me what you came here for?" The girl looked ready to stall, so Mel kept talking. "Whatever you gave the guards won't hold for long. So open your mouth or get out."

Cassie's shoulders straightened and she sat up tall, clenching her hands together. "I would like to propose a trade." She didn't waver.

Mel had an idea of where this was going. "Yes?"

"I'll get you out of the house, if you bite me." She couldn't meet Mel's eyes.

That didn't matter. Mel tilted the girl's chin up with her own hand and waited until Cassie would meet her eyes. It took several moments. "A bite won't do the trick. Not just a bite."

Cassie knocked down Mel's hand. "I was speaking figuratively. I didn't think someone like you would object."

"Who exactly do you think I am?" Mel didn't let her words hurt. The girl was so far out of her depth she was mistaking the ocean for a swimming pool. "Do you even know why I'm down here?" Exactly how much of a liability was Luke's little sister?

There was a slight shake to her head, "You'd be in the Cage if you were that bad. Or he would have killed you." If Mel hadn't known Cassie was a born shapeshifter, that would have proved it. Few spoke so easily of their brothers committing homicide. "You only have a few minutes to decide. The distraction won't last long."

"What distraction?"

Cassie crossed her arms. "They don't exactly tell me shit," she scowled. "I heard something about vampires on the eastern perimeter. That means that they're not watching for people leaving right now. They're trying to stop them from getting in."

Smart, opportunistic kid. Mel could have molded her into something if she had the time. "You have a car?"

Cassie dug in her pocket and held up a set of keys. "Tank full of gas, too."

Mel pretended to think about it. "Walk me through it. You seem prepared, but I'm a professional."

Cassie's plan was straightforward. Simple, but possible. The house was nearly abandoned with the disturbance on the perimeter and reinforcements hadn't yet taken position. Mel smiled and pulled the keys from Cassie's hand. She pushed the girl's palm down to the table, holding her in place. She maneuvered herself behind the girl and wrapped her free arm around her neck, not quite hard enough to make her pass out.

"One tip, though." Cassie's pulse pumped against Mel's arm, fright flowing through the girl's veins. "Never give away the plan to a criminal all at once. We'll always betray you." She hauled the girl up and held her against the wall with one hand on her neck. "You know not to scream, right?"

Cassie nodded, her eyes wild.

Mel concentrated, letting her free hand shift, claws forming at the edge of her now furred, spotted fingers. She ripped up the sheets of the bed, giving herself usable rope and forced the girl into the bathroom. Without a word, she tied Cassie up, securing her to a bit of pipe behind the toilet.

If Cassie had already shifted, the cotton wouldn't have held her for long. But she only had human strength. It gave Mel more than enough time to get out. But something compelled Mel to say something before she left. She knelt out of reach of Cassie's feet. "Don't be an idiot about your shift. You're still a teenager. It might happen, but you just fucked up so beyond belief that no one is going to be willing to turn you even if it doesn't."

The girl flinched and Mel could see tears forming in her eyes.

Good. She needed to hear this.

"So here's my advice. Convince yourself that it's going to happen, and try and shift every day. That's all you can do."

Mel stood and left, wedging a chair under the door's handle behind her. She took a deep breath and grasped the small red pendant on her necklace between her thumb and forefinger. It didn't take much pressure to break the charm, but Krista had made sure that only Mel would be able to do that damage. If anyone else had handled the charm, it would have seemed indestructible.

By breaking the stone, Mel triggered a secondary concealment spell which acted much like the one she'd used to break in to Luke's house in the first place. It also alerted Krista and Bob that she was coming. They had a rendezvous point set up close enough that she should be able to make it before the spell failed or she was caught. As long as she could get out of the house in the first place.

Cassie's assessment of the situation was spot on. Mel's guard was asleep on one of the staircases, drool dripping down the side of his jaw. She walked slowly through the halls, up two flights of stairs until she reached the kitchen. She stopped in the hall, before entering the brightly lit room.

How big of a threat was out there? An alpha's house, especially one housing a prisoner, was always somewhat occupied. It was the cost of doing business. And she couldn't imagine he would leave his sister unprotected. Mel stopped walking and pressed her back against the wall. She waited a moment until she could hear the faint sounds above the loud beating of her heart. Standing still under a concealment charm was as close to invisible as a person could get, but she knew they could still smell her.

She heard footsteps in the distance, they were above her, on one of the upper floors. Faint, moving away from her. Nothing to worry about at the moment. So that made three people in the house: the unconscious guard, Cassie, and whoever was upstairs. If the threat was big enough, it wasn't outside the realm of possibility to leave the house under so little protection.

Sure that the kitchen was abandoned, Mel stepped inside. But she didn't let her certainty make her lazy. A thorough glance confirmed her instinct.

The light on the security panel blinked red. The alarm was active. If she wasn't worried about being heard, she would have cursed. It was set to a defensive mode. The house's interior motion sensors weren't active, but all door sensors were. Unless she put in the right code before leaving an alarm would sound when she opened the door to the garage and the garage door would be locked, impossible to open without breaking through.

That would be sure to send the lions running.

She studied the keypad. Five buttons were more worn away than the rest, but she would eat her metaphorical hat if the code wasn't at least six digits. She had no tools to hack her way through. Her options were to either look for tools to improvise rewiring the alarm or to guess the code.

Every moment she stood there was a moment wasted. The footsteps from upstairs tapped directly overhead, but Mel kept her cool. Cassie wasn't making a peep and she couldn't hear the other guard. She decided to guess the password. It was quicker than any alternative. And she hoped that she'd learned enough of her alpha in the past few days to give it a go.

Her first guess was his birth month and full year. Six digits, one repeated. Since the zero was the most worn or them all, it should have fit. But the panel beeped. She would have between three and five tries to get it right before the alarm was tripped anyway. So if it wasn't his birthday, what could it be?

She racked her brain, trying to decide what to try next. He couldn't be the only one to know the code, so it was either written down somewhere or easy to remember. She looked at the refrigerator, but there was nothing conveniently stuck to the stainless steel surface. What other information had their research shown? What was important to a pack of shapeshifters?

Of course.

She punched in 123006 and smiled when the light turned green.

Obviously they would care about when their alpha came to power. Simple enough in the end.

She opened the garage door and looked at the cars. Luckily, there were only four spots, and only two cars there. She would assume that the others were guarding the roads away from the house. There was only the long driveway and then the lonely state highway all the way back to town. If they setup a checkpoint in either direction, she would be caught.

Simple enough to fix.

Cassie's keys unlocked a dirt stained pickup truck. Mel needed to get out of the house quickly, but she took a moment to recreate the map of the outlying area in her mind. Cassie said that the problem was east, so she would go west. She could circle back east to the rendezvous point eventually, but not until she was well out of the danger zone.

There were county roads which connected to the state highway about a mile out in either direction and no other properties between those two roads. So if she were posting guards, she would leave a bit of a buffer, at least a quarter of a mile, maybe half. The night was dark enough that they would see her headlights from a distance. Any moment that she was on the road, she would be a beacon for any shapeshifter looking her way.

Of course, without the kid in tow, she didn't need to worry about a vehicle. Mel stripped down, tossing her clothes into the large trash can. Her charm was specially fitted to withstand her shift and stay around her neck, even in leopard form. She pressed the button to open the garage and crouched to change shape. It took nearly a minute to complete the shift. She'd heard that some people could do so in seconds, but she was nowhere near that level.

She took off into the forest at a run. No one was in the house to send up the alert that she'd gone. And while she kept her ears open for anyone in pursuit, she crossed over the border of Luke's property in a few minutes. But she didn't breathe easy.

She was open to the night around her. In her cat form all of her senses were improved. She could hear small branches rustle as nocturnal animals ran through them. The scent of greenery, of life, engulfed her, singing through her nose and into her veins. If she were free to do so, she would range through this forest, mark it as her own, and dance with all of the night creatures.

But she couldn't become enchanted by this animal magic. It always tried to take over in the dizzying moments after a shift, tried to lure her away from humanity with the siren song of the wild. Mel was too enamored of the finer things in life to be seduced, but that didn't mean she didn't have to fight the temptation each time.

She headed west, quickly covering miles, only slowing when her heart threatened to burst in her chest. Even in this superior running form she felt the weight of days stuck in a cage. She heard a semi-truck rumble by and knew she was close to the road. Mel was far enough west now that she no longer risked running into Luke's guards, but a leopard running alongside the road would be a strange sight in Colorado, and so she kept to the cover of the trees to hide herself.

She crossed the road to loop north and head back east. She added an extra dozen miles onto her run just to ensure that she stayed completely out of reach of whatever problems Luke was dealing with.

The first shaft of sunlight was breaking through the horizon when she met Krista and Luke at the rendezvous point, a little park in the city. It was risky, but they had needed to setup a place close enough to ensure that Mel could actually get to them before whoever was pursuing got to her first.

She skidded into the park where Bob was laying peacefully on top of a wooden picnic table, his hands clasped lightly over his stomach and his head hanging off the edge, lolling back. Krista had been sitting in their car, but when she saw Mel she got out and threw a pair of sweatpants and a tank top on the ground. Bob wasn't looking at her and Krista averted her gaze before she shifted.

Shifting didn't hurt, but it required concentration, and it sure as hell wasn't pretty when it couldn't be done quickly. But Mel came out all right and put her clothes on. It felt like a hundred pound weight had been lifted off her chest when she saw her team and she couldn't stop from smiling.

"Thanks for showing up," she said.

Krista's gaze hardened and Mel realized she had said the exact wrong thing. "Of course, we do the damned job." The shorter woman looked over at Bob and yelled, "We're ready," then got into the driver's seat.

Bob sat up without the assistance of his hands and moved across the park in a blink of an eye. Mel wished she could ask him what the hell he was, but his grin told her he wouldn't answer. And anyone would be offended by the question. She slid in the back seat while her other partner rode shotgun.

She could sleep for a week and had to fight to keep her eyes open, but there was still work to be done. "When's the meet?"

Krista blew out a breath and didn't answer, so Bob spoke for her. "Tonight."