TO CATCH A WOLF By Susan Krinard

“What makes you think I was planning to leave?”

“It has never been a question of if you would go, but when. It is not loyalty to the troupe that keeps you here.”

“You shouldn’t listen to Caitlin’s wild fancies.”

“Are they so improbable?” Ulysses glanced toward the closed door. “Miss Munroe did not seem, at first glance, to match Caitlin’s strength of will. It has been brought to my attention that first impressions are deceiving.” He turned toward the room he shared with Harry. “Do not be too severe upon the girl. If you find yourself with a desire for rational conversation, you know where to find me.”

Unmollified, Morgan strode into Caitlin’s room. She looked unsurprised to see him. Her lids fell halfway over her eyes.

“Hello, Morgan,” she said weakly. “How was your run?”

“Are you in love with Munroe?”

“We’ve had this conversation before. I could ask the same—”

“I do not love Athena Munroe!”

His roar bounced about the room. The corners of Caitlin’s lips curled up in satisfaction.

“Then why don’t you leave?” she asked. “Athena may arrive any time.”

“She is not coming here.”

“Are you so sure?”

“What have you and Harry been doing?”

Caitlin examined her nails. “Oh, nothing. Athena has been worried about me, so we’ve been—”

“Lying. Telling her you’re worse than you are. Caitlin—”

“You had better not growl at Athena the way you do at me. She’s likely to growl back.”

Morgan froze. “What do you mean by that?”

“Women in love can be very fierce creatures.”

“She is not—”

“I know, I know. She is not in love with you.” She rolled her eyes. “And you haven’t been stomping about the place like a bilious bull because Athena is out of your reach.”

Morgan stepped back from the bed. “Do you think she binds me here, Firefly? Do you think I couldn’t leave now and never look back?”

“I think you could try. But I hope you will not, my friend.”

As she had done many times before—as only she and Athena, had the power to do—she left him silent. Caitlin was like the hare that he had neatly caught and released out of maudlin sentimentality. Like a lesser wolf in the pack whom he had failed to teach its place. She and Athena could twist him round and round their fingers, spinning him this way and that until he didn’t know east from west or sky from earth.

Athena. When she looked into his eyes with that slight lift of her chin and that warmth in her hazel eyes, he almost forgot why he wanted to run.

“After all these months,” Caitlin said softly, “I still don’t know where you come from, or why you were hiding as a wolf in the wilderness. I know you were hiding—we all are, one way or another.”

“You are wrong. I was free. The only kind of freedom worth having.”

“Free from ties to other people. That is it, isn’t it? It’s what you’ve always been most afraid of. Owing us for saving your life. Making friends even when you didn’t want to. Athena increases your dilemma a thousandfold.”

“I choose my own path.”

“I wonder if any of us do.” She frowned at the bare toes that protruded from the cast on her leg. “Something happened to you, Morgan. Something bad enough that you never wanted to risk it happening again. People you cared about—they got hurt, or they hurt you. Ulysses’s own family drove him out because he couldn’t possibly be a true Wakefield looking the way he does. But he still writes to them, hoping to be reconciled.” She looked up. “I know it’s difficult to keep hoping when you don’t want to. Love is the worst of all, because it’s like a lantern shining on everything you don’t want to see. Or remember.”

Morgan clenched his fist around the top of the bedpost. “I don’t like you as a philosopher, Firefly.”

“I don’t think I do, either.” She laughed. “That’s what happens when you are stuck in a bed listening to Ulysses read from musty old books written by dead Greeks and Romans.”

The room around Morgan changed, its cheerful yellow walls closing in to become a gray, crumbling cell. “The dead should be forgotten.”