"And you are so sure you know what my greater good is?" Yafya asked the ligeress. It took everything in him to keep his body language relaxed, to not tip his fear over into anger and lean over the table, press his aura against her to make her cower in the bare plastic chair in which she sat.

"Your greater good is peace," she replied. "Peace is not necessarily on Sabine's agenda. You, though...you will nurture peace. Peace through tyranny if need be. Keep the carnivores down if you must, just to keep the peace. Suppress any instincts that do not keep the peace." Her voice was almost hypnotic in its cadence. "And you have done a wonderful job, Beastar. Look out at the City, and see how she adores you." She gestured, albeit very a small one, with her hand, the fingers blunted with her claws removed, toward the window. "Does she satisfy you when she holds you in her arms at night?"

"Do the arms of the dead female caribou you sexually assaulted and then ate satisfy you behind your cold steel bars, Lyssa?" he asked in return, the anger finally breaking through the fear and the imposed calm. He leaned forward, his ears pinned almost to his neck, his eyes slits.

The ligress did not seem phased by his anger at all, when his aura would have hit another beast like a brick wall. "I didn't assault a single one of those females," she said calmly. "Every one of them was consensual."

"I'm sure each of them asked to be eaten," he said sarcastically through clenched teeth, pressing his hands against the table. If he didn't he was afraid of what he might do with them. He thought he was over this, when the trial ended, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment, he thought he could get over the betrayal he felt at the justice system.

At the very least, Lyssa had been convicted of predating eight female caribou over the course of several years, after sexually assaulting each one, the line starting after her close association with Sabine the caribou-red wolf. It was during the trial that the elderly Thalia the Tigress, one of the first females on the Beastar counsel, of whom Lyssa and she had been long time lovers and life-partners, had died of a heart attack. While Yafya might not have agreed with many of Thalia's stances in her private life, the tigress had been one of his staunchest supporters, especially in his younger years when he had first had the position of Sublime Beastar. She almost always had his back, even when he wasn't sure she should have. Contrarily, she had been Sabine's prime political supporter, backing her equality initiatives wholeheartedly. Thalia the tigress has brought more reforms to the law books in the past 50 years than any other counselor of her era, whether she got official credit for it or not. The tigress's death was a hard blow to the counsel, despite that she was already in her 70s. But, as many suspected, Thalia's heart couldn't take finding out that love of her life had been a serial predator over her pet political project for more than a decade.

But he wasn't over it. His desire to leap over the table to kick the life out of the ligress who sat across from him made his legs tingle. She didn't deserve life imprisonment. She deserved to be carrot fertilizer. If he had gotten to her before the police department had, that is exactly what she would be.

"You've never loved anyone, have you Yafya?" she asked, her clear voice, such a stark contrast to her ragged appearance echoed in the empty room. "Have you ever desired something so much that your arms ache to hold it? That your mouth aches to kiss it? That your tongue longs to lick it? For a carnivore, they smell blood, and they long to taste it. Not the fur, not the sweat, but the iron of the blood under the skin that beats." Again her voice took on that hypnotic cadence, almost sing-songy, and pressed his fingertips into the tabletop to keep from reaching for her throat. "The heartbeat is like a song, singing out to you. You feel it in your jaw, in your teeth. Herbivore blood has the sweetest sound, and when it's mixed with affection...When she would come close I could-" The ligress's voice hitched and she actually smiled, not the calculating ones from before, a sweet one.

Then, it was replaced with a scowl, a look probably well practiced from a decade in this place. "You know nothing," she hissed.

"I know what you did," Yafya seethed back.

The calculating smile was back on Lyssa's face, her pupils round as she leaned forward, the muzzle on her snout making a slight jingling sound as she moved. "You know nothing. You come to me wanting to know if Sabine the caribou-red wolf can be trusted? Yes. She can be trusted. She's kept all of my secrets all of these years."

"How do you know?" Yafya asked, forcing his fingers to relax against the table and making his ears raise from his head.

"Because they haven't executed me," Lyssa said with a deranged laugh.

Yafya backed up in his chair, putting has much distance between himself and the ligress as he could without standing up. He felt his eyes go wide, the fear forcing itself into the forefront of his chest once again, the desire to kick, to run, almost overwhelming. What had she done that he didn't know?

"But I would tell you, Black Devil," Lyssa continued, "that Thalia loved Sabine for the same reason she loved you. You might want to keep that in mind before you make her one of your comrades in arms."

Disgust made its way through the fear that clenched at his heart, making it easier for him to keep his ears forward and sneer. She dared talk about love, about how Thalia loved, about whom the tigress compared him to? "Oh? And what would that be?" He made sure that he stared at her head on, not turning his head to the side.

"Both of you desire balance and justice in society," Lyssa answered without pausing. "And both of you are willing to die and kill for it. Both of you understand what society is and what society isn't, and what your role in it is." She leaned forward, a smug smile back on her mouth, with looked slightly demonic behind the muzzle. "But do you know the difference between you and Sabine, what Thalia was never able to understand?"

"And what is that?" Yafya spat.

"She isn't given the privilege of being able to believe in sanctimoniousness," Lyssa said. "She can't grow a pretty field of carrots over a graveyard of carnivore bodies and call it justice. Because she is a hybrid, she is forced to accept what she actually sees in the mirror."