A cold feeling sprouted in the pit of my stomach, telling me exactly how this would end. “And?”

Andrea squared her shoulders and opened her mouth.

Nothing came out. She clamped it shut.

I waited.

Her face paled. She sat rigid, the mouth of her line tense. A faint reddish glow tinted her eyes—the hint of hyena sneaking through under pressure.

Andrea unclenched her teeth. Her voice came out completely flat, sifted through the sieve of her will until every last hint of emotion had been scrubbed from it.

“They awarded me Master-at-Arms and retired me due to being mentally unfit for duty. The official diagnosis is posttraumatic stress disorder. The decision is final and I can’t dispute it. I can’t even accuse them of discrimination, because my final orders don’t address the fact that I’m beastkin. They simply refused to acknowledge it, as if it weren’t an issue.”

Those fuckers. They didn’t just throw her out like a piece of garbage, they sent a message with her. If you’re not human, it doesn’t matter how good you are. We don’t want your ass.

“So.” Andrea took a deep breath and pushed the words out. “I failed.”

For Andrea the Order was more than simply a job. It was her life. She’d spent her childhood in a pack of shapeshifters who reviled her because her father was an animal and her mother was too weak to protect her. Every bone in Andrea’s body had been broken before she was ten years old. Andrea rejected all things shapeshifter. She locked that part of herself deep inside and dedicated her existence to becoming completely human, to stepping between the weak and the strong, and she was damn good at it. Now the Order had made her into a pariah. It was a monumental betrayal.

“Everything is gone.” Andrea forced a smile. Her face looked like it would shatter any second. “My job, my identity. If the cops had looked closer at my ID, they’d see it said RETIRED on it. People I thought were my friends won’t talk to me, like I’m a leper. When I came back to Atlanta, I called down to the chapter looking for Shane. He’d taken over the armory when I left. A couple of those weapons are my personal property. I want them back.”