Another flurry of gestures to say she’d handle it and I could settle into backup mode. Then, mid-motion, she stopped. A slow smile, teeth glinting in the darkness. Seeing that smile, I knew what she was thinking before she glanced over, lips forming the word.

“Play?”

My grin answered.

No game is fair-or much fun-when one of the parties doesn’t realize he’s playing. So Elena took care of that first. She started by drumming her fingers against her leg, her head twisting his way, a subtle hint that she knew Cain was there and was growing impatient waiting for his next move.

While I couldn’t see the mutt, I could picture him, poised at the end of the alley, rocking on the balls of his feet, seeing Elena’s signals but afraid to misinterpret.

She glanced over her right shoulder, hair sweeping back as her face tilted his way, and I didn’t need to see her expression to imagine that, too. I’d seen it often enough. Lips parted, eyes glittering beneath arched brows, a look that translated, in human or wolf, into, “Well, are you going to come get me, or not?”

Cain slingshot from the alley so fast he stumbled. Elena laughed, a husky growl that made me lock my knees to keep from answering it myself. As Cain recovered, she turned my way with a grin. Then she took off, breaking into a sprint, hair flashing behind her.

Cain teetered on the curb and stared after her in confusion and disappointment, the human telling him that a woman running in the other direction wasn’t a good sign. She stopped at the next corner and turned to face him.

He stepped off the curb. She took a slow stride back. Another forward, another back, and it wasn’t until the dance had gone on for ten paces that the wolf instinct finally clicked on and he realized that to her, running away didn’t mean “I’m trying to escape” but “Catch me if you can.”