Free Out of Chances (Taken by the Panther, #2) by V. M. Black

first thought or even his third. But there had been many other people, many other women who had needed and gotten his help. And none of them had affected him like this.
    Liam turned away, raising one shoulder in a half-shrug. “If you go down this road, when she has to have a bullet put in her brain, you should the be one to do it. She deserves that much from you.”
    Those words hit Chay like a blow to the gut, and his brain rebelled against them even though he knew they were nothing but the truth. But he smoothed his face to cover his reaction and changed the subject to something he could tolerate thinking about.
    “She told me something that might be useful,” Chay said, taking his chair. It was next to a brand new one, brought up from supply. Tara’s chair, for now.
    “Since you just rolled a minus five to intelligence, are you sure you can understand it?” Luke said, needling him.
    Chay ignored the teasing. “She said she’s felt different for as long as she can remember, and that’s why she went to Sudan and did her world tour and the rest.”
    “Okay,” Luke said. “So? I read Torrhanin’s report. She’s definitely a medically induced shifter.”
    “Definitely,” Chay said. “No question, according to Torrhanin.”
    The elf was very unlikely to be wrong. He could, though, be lying. For some reason, Chay never could fully trust an elf. All their generosity seemed to come with some kind of fatal catch. He knew it was sheer prejudice to paint Torrhanin with the same brush just because of things that his kind had done in the past. But the fact was that he wasn’t human. Dogs were loyal. Cats often aloof. And it was a trait of elves for their help to always have strings attached.
    But why would he lie about this? And anyway, Tara herself had said that she didn’t think it was possible that anyone in her family had shifter blood. Sure, it could hide for generations sometimes, but when Torrhanin simply corroborated her experience ....
    He cut that thought short. There was no point in doubting his people without good evidence. Even if one of them was an elf.
    “So you’re thinking that she got exposed to shifter factor when she was younger?” Luke asked. “Maybe even as a kid?”
    “Exactly,” Chay agreed as he began to type, delving through the files that Annie had found. With her usual thoroughness, she’d pulled records from before the time window that he had requested from her.
    The first flag was from her passport records. Before her work abroad, she’d lived in Germany for eighteen months as a kid.
    Interesting. There were dozens of reasons she might be there, of course, but it most often meant ....
    His hands flew across the keyboard. Yes, there it was. Her father was—had been—Army. Rangers, actually. She’d grown up all over the States, bumped from one base to another every few years. She was lucky that he’d only ever been stationed overseas once...or unlucky, seeing that jumping abroad was the first thing she’d done when she’d graduated from high school.
    He searched for her father. Wallace Morland, Jr. Made it to lieutenant colonel before retiring with full honors after twenty years. Had a slightly above average number of awards and commendations to his name.
    Now he was a swim coach at a public university, looking for another twenty years and a second pension, most likely. Good work, if you could get it.
    She’d been a military brat, and she’d been dosed with military shifter factor. It couldn’t be coincidence. Could it? But how did a program that was reserved for the most secret, most elite groups in the armed forces end up exposing a kid to an experimental drug?
    He quickly explained what he’d found to Luke. “I want a list of every place that her father was stationed from the time she was born,” Chay said. “And I want to know if there’s any evidence of any other unexpected panther shifters who might have been connected to them around the same time that she was