For a moment he was breathless. When had that happened? When he'd accepted his role as 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 had managed 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, be able 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..." A careful look down, a faint blush. "It was like a deer or elk going into rut. My uncle tried beating it out of him, tried drugs, but nothing worked. So the old man called in a famous witch. She showed us what he was, what he must have instinctively hidden. He looked like a normal boy - I guess the fae can do that, can look like everyone else - but he was a monster. He had these horns, like a deer, and cloven hooves. And he was a lot bigger than any boy his age should be, six feet then, near enough.

"My aunt had been raped by a stranger when she was sixteen. That was the first time we realized that she'd been raped by a monster."

His lawyer let the noise rise in the courtroom and start to fall down before he asked another question. "What did your uncle do?"

"He paid the witch a boatload of money and she provided him with the means to keep Benedict's ruts under control. She gave him a charm to wear. She told him if he carved these symbols on an animal or two a month or so before the rut came to Benedict, it would stop them. She'd intended for us to sacrifice animals, but" - here a grimace of distaste - "the old man discovered that people worked better. But now the witch knew about us, and we had to get rid of her. My uncle killed her and left her on the front lawn of one of her relatives."

It was a masterful performance, and Heuter managed to keep the same persona under a fierce cross-examination, managed to keep the monster that had helped to rape, torture, and kill people for nearly two decades completely out of sight.

His father was nearly as brilliant. When his wife had died, he'd abandoned his son to be raised by his older brother because he was too busy with public office, too consumed by grief. He'd thought that the boy would be better off in the hands of family than being raised by someone who was paid to do it. He had, he informed the jury, decided to resign from his position in the US Senate.

"It is too little, too late," he told them with remorse that was effective because it was obviously genuine. "But I cannot continue in the job that cost my son so dearly."

And throughout the defense's case, the Heuters' slick team of lawyers subtly reminded the jury and the people in the courtroom that they had been killing fae and werewolves. That Les Heuter thought that he was protecting people.