TO CATCH A WOLF By Susan Krinard

He lifted her chin. Tears hung like stars on her cheeks. He bent and kissed them, one side and then the other, tasting the salt and Athena. Then he crouched, took her face between his hands, and kissed her lips.

She responded as she had in her room, passionately, with a new edge of violence that excited and almost frightened him. It was the she-wolf in her, coming alive at his touch, waiting for a final word to burst forth and make her all she was meant to be. Her fingers caught in his hair, pulled and wound about, crushing him against her.

Then she pushed him away and let her arms fall limp. “I cannot come with you.”

He heard her this time, but he refused to believe. “Athena—”

“I can’t, Morgan. I can’t live in the way you want, in the wild, apart from people and society.” There were no tears now, no passion. “I am not like you. I have become… used to my life. I have responsibilities. I try to help people, and if I were to vanish… who would help them in my place?”

He stepped back, searching her eyes. The she-wolf had disappeared. This was the haughty, closed-in woman he had first met on the circus lot, the one who had been so scrupulously fair and polite to her inferiors. To him.

“You think they need you,” he said, cruel in his anger. “They need your money. How many others in your city have money to give?”

“You don’t understand. Not everyone is generous—”

“As fine and generous as you?”

“No.” She warded him away, turning her face. “But I have the time and the inclination to work. I have… a place, a role that others accept. Others who might not give if I were not there to ask.”

“Even though you are no longer a cripple?”

“I am the same, inside. The things that mattered to me… before… they still matter now. My friends are still my friends.”

“And Caitlin? Harry, Ulysses? They are not?”

She stared fixedly at the far wall. “I care for them. For… But they are part of a different world, as I am a part of mine. And yours is different from both. Too different, Morgan. Can’t you see that… we are simply… too different?”

“That is not the reason,” he said. He grasped the top of the chair and pulled it around, forcing her to look at him. “It’s still your fear. You do not want to give up the fancy house and the fine clothes and the people who lick your jaw like hungry pups, because that is all you know how to be. You like the power of giving people what they need when they have nothing. Making them beg—”

“No. I have never made anyone beg, for anything.”

“Haven’t you? What do those poor folk see when they look at you with your fine ways, and know that you can give or take what they need? Do they hate you while they pretend to offer their throats? All those fine ladies who follow you—what do you give them, Athena? A reason to think they are fine and noble people because they help the poor crippled girl help the ones they never see?”

The stark pain in her eyes stopped him cold. He knew he had hurt her, that he had come very close to a truth he hardly fathomed himself.

“Athena,” he groaned. “I do not want to… Damn you, listen to me. You have a chance to be strong, not to need anyone.” He fumbled to put his confused feelings into words. “When you don’t need, you can give freely. When you don’t care what those others think of you, you can make your own place. Your real place. Don’t you understand?”

She stared at him, and he thought he saw the beginnings of comprehension before she shut him out again.

“Do you know your own place, Morgan?” she said. “Do you know what you want out of life? Have you ever thought beyond the next hour?” She smiled with weary resignation. “You can cast off all your ties. I can’t. I can’t. But—” She closed her eyes. “You… you could come with me.”

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