Surprised that she was gone? Hardly. "Why would I be?" he answered with a dark look. "You haven't been here more than a week altogether out of the past nine months." This may have been an exaggeration, but if so, it wasn't a large one. Of course, Tiberius himself had fled the country for several of those months, in order to focus on his Animagus studies privately (and a lot of good that had done), but he'd enlisted the help of his sister to come and check on Antigone periodically to ensure she was behaving herself. Tatianna had always reported that Antigone had been out when she'd stopped by — and that the servants knew neither where she was or when she was coming back. That uncertainty may have been one of the factors that had brought him home when he did, instead of waiting out a lightning storm abroad. He could have been abroad still if his wife hadn't taken to the wilderness.

He still wasn't sure if this was what Antigone wanted, or if she was just spending most of her days running around as an overgrown cat to spite him. Had she imagined this when she was studying to perform the transformation? Had this been what had driven her to succeed, the idea of becoming a feral, independent thing that disappeared for days on end?

Tiberius didn't regret letting the poacher on the property. The mental image of her in a cage pleased him. He only regretted that he hadn't been able to see it himself.