The Lion's Loyalty

by Emilia Hartley

  At some point, Carol slipped into a dreamless sleep. She was awoken by a thumping on her door. Snapping awake, she gasped for breath. The air was growing hot and heavy, weighing on her like a smothering blanket. She threw her feet to the edge of the bed and strained to listen for sound. Nothing came.

  There was no other knock.

  She chewed her lower lip, thinking of the buyer she knew would be coming for her. It was inevitable. She couldn’t escape the path the doctors had set her upon. Now, the buyer had found her. He would come inside and drag her away. He would chain her like the oddity she was and show her off to all his friends.

  Her wolf would never allow him to take her alive. She felt the surety of it in her chest like a stone. The wolf’s confidence grounded her. A tingling sensation rushed along her forearms and along the back of her hands. Her fingers curled, nails sharpening into claws. They made turning the doorknob difficult, but she was thankful for them.

  No one lurked at the base of the stairwell. It was dark, but the only scents she caught were familiar. Pack. That was only the stairwell, though. She could not smell past the lower door. As she descended, she listened for small sounds. Someone shuffling their feet, a creak in the walls. All she heard was a faintly familiar crinkle.

  Was that…it sounded like a bunch of plastic bags.

  Her brow furrowed. She brazenly flung the lower door open. There were, in fact, a half dozen plastic bags filled with groceries. A note stapled to one bag flapped in the wind.

  Just to be safe, she leaned her head out and searched the world around her. When she couldn’t find an ominous figure waiting to snatch her, she stepped out and crouched before the pile of bags. She yanked the note off the bag and opened it.

  At first, she seethed with rage. She’d specifically told Van that she didn’t want to be a charity case. Having everyone around her stop and give her what technically belonged to them grated on her nerves. She felt as though she would never be able to give anything back.

  Because she would fail, and her life would end.

  But, as she read, she realized this wasn’t quite what she thought. Sure, there were some snacks, but he’d also left ingredients and a promise to return so they could try making something together.

  The ways Van had inserted himself into her life constantly astounded her. The fact that she had yet to push him away was even more astounding. He was Dante’s spy. Of all the people who could hurt her, Van had the greatest potential.

  Absentmindedly, she touched the mark on her shoulder. A residual sensation shot through her at the small touch. It made her breath catch and her mind dizzy. Nothing made sense. Van should have been watching her, not seducing her. Not giving her a reason to live.

  For that was what he’d done for her. She felt like she could breathe easy when he was around. If she failed, he would be there to catch her. He would put her back on her feet and help her. But she couldn’t understand why he was so invested in her life.

  Carol was lifting the bags when a shadow fell over her. It didn’t startle her. She assumed it was Van, coming to see her reaction to the food. But when she stood and looked around, there was no one there.

  Her heart thumped nervously, slapping her breastbone. She looked around, but no one was around. The feeling of being watched slithered over her skin. She rolled her shoulders to try to expel the creeping feeling that had gathered there, but it never went away.

  Frightened now, she leapt up the stairs, taking them two at a time with the groceries awkwardly hanging from her arms. It wasn’t until she was back in the apartment, with the door locked behind her, that she allowed herself to fall to the floor. The groceries tumbled out around her, cans and tubs rolling away. Her beast writhed beneath her skin.

  She gritted her teeth and pushed it back, but the creature snapped at her. It fought to be free. They were not safe anymore. The buyer had found her. The only way they would survive was if Carol gave her wolf power. But she was so afraid of handing the reins over to the beast that she would rather suffer in pain on the floor than let her beast out. She didn’t trust the beast not to run wild.

  No, Carol didn’t trust herself. She had no idea how to balance the human and animal parts of herself. The things her beast thought of frightened her so much that she ran away from a whole part of herself. She wished she could silence the animal forever, be free of it once and for all, but had no idea if that was even possible.

  The beast grunted at her. It was ashamed of Carol, too, it seemed. They were weak so long as she kept fighting. They would never amount to anything if Carol constantly put a wall between them. The beast reminded her that if the wall never came down, then Dante would end her.

  The shadow from outside should have followed her, but no footsteps ever came. Carol lay on the floor and let her tears flow, pain coursing through her body. She was afraid of every small movement, every little sound. The shadow had probably been a bird overhead, and not a mystery abductor lurking over her shoulder.

  Her existence was exhausting. She didn’t know how much longer she could keep this up. She didn’t know if she could ever find the balance required to exist in a state that wasn’t near panic all the time. Even still, as she lay on the floor, the hum of it clung to her and tightened her skin. It made her beast’s hackles rise and a growl emanate from her chest.

  She would never be free.

  Chapter Eight

  Van didn’t want to look through the note on the doctors’ computer, but he had to. There was something still haunting Carol and he needed to figure it out. He wouldn’t bother her with questions and make her relive her time in capture. That would be torture for her, and he wouldn’t put his mate through that again.

  Yet, as he read through the notes, his stomach soured. The doctors had tested the healing rates of different shifters. They’d noted their shifting speeds and what happened when appendages were removed. Van didn’t know how many of these stats belonged to Carol. If he looked closely and studied the details applied to each experiment, he could find her in the numbers, but he didn’t want to know.

  It felt invasive, in a way.

  It wasn’t his right to rifle through her past and examine it at his leisure, but as long as he separated Carol from the numbers, he could find the clues he needed to move forward. He hoped, at least.

  But it had been hours, and Van still had not come up with anything that would point to why Carol was always looking over her shoulder. He knew that if he could just figure out what was bothering her, then he could help her find control over her beast, but the truth eluded him.

  Rodrigo slumped at Van’s table, a drink in his hand. He let his head fall back, and Van thought his friend was snoring for a moment. Then, Rodrigo roused himself and fixed Van with a dead-eyed stare.

  “I couldn’t find anything, man.” Rodrigo cracked his neck, in what was probably an effort to release tension. It didn’t look like it worked.

  Van sighed. He’d asked Rodrigo to stake out the cottage in case anyone appeared. He knew that if someone visited the place, then they had to have something to do with the doctors. Van had hoped that whoever was bothering Carol would show themselves. It would have made things easy.

  If someone was hunting her still, they had no use for the cottage and whatever clues it left behind. He should have known, because the person hunting her had called the bar once already. They knew that the bar was the hub of pack activity. Perhaps, they even know that Carol was living above it.

  The thought brought a growl to his lips. He gripped the laptop before him and the plastic groaned. He forced himself to let go before he did any permanent damage, but the screen was warped in two places now. He let out a sigh.

  “If only Dante would help us,” Rodrigo groaned.

  Van snorted. “He has a child and a teenager to deal with right now. I wouldn’t expect much from him until Alexis is in her thirties. She’s quite the handful and probably will be for the next decade or so.”

  While Dante inspired Alexis
to greater heights, she was still a daring teenager who wanted to do teenager things. She could no longer get away with sneaking cigarettes into the house because Dante sniffed them out every time. So, she’d taken to partying and drinking with school friends. It seemed the private-school crowd was no better than the public-school crowd.

  Between governing the pack and watching over his family, Dante’s hands were full.

  “Go home,” Van told his friend. “Lily and her ugly dog probably miss you. Buy her some donuts on the way, or something.”

  Van didn’t need to stretch his friends thin. They had their own lives. If Van couldn’t do this on his own, then he wasn’t worth his position in the pack. He was capable of so much more than he was doing. If only his beast wasn’t preoccupied with Carol. If only he wasn’t so strung out over her safety.

  The mission was too personal. It had him on edge all the time. There was nothing else he could think about.

  There was a thump upstairs, shaking the bar ceiling. Before anyone could react, Van was on his feet. He raced out the door and around the building, yanking the stairwell door open. The stairs were nothing; he flew over them not counting how many he leapt over to get to Carol.

  He burst through her door, ignoring the locks, and skidded to a halt in the living room. Carol stared at him, wide-eyed. In her hands was a can of coffee.

  “Is everything okay?” He was breathless, his heart lodged in his throat.

  Carol slowly looked around, like she would find the reason Van had broken into her apartment. Finally, she nodded. When her gaze shifted to the door past him, her brows furrowed.

  “You broke my locks.”

  His heart sank. While it was no longer in his throat, it slammed into the ground and splattered unceremoniously. He’d destroyed a small measure of safety that Carol had relied on.

  “I heard something fall. I thought there was trouble, so I came running…”

  She held up the cannister of coffee. “I was putting away the stuff you bought. Or, at least, putting away the last of it. In the process, I dropped a few things.”

  Had he overreacted? The tremble of the ceiling had seemed like so much more than just a few groceries falling to the floor. He wasn’t convinced. So, without asking, he prowled around the apartment in search of any threat that might be hiding. He opened the closet doors and swept through each room.

  He wanted to make sure no one was lurking behind a closed door, forcing Carol to pretend like everything was okay. When he was convinced the apartment was clear, he returned to the living room. Carol was still putting things in the cabinets.

  Still, something felt off. It was in the way her movements were stiff, as if she were performing. Van’s chest tightened. He looked away, wanting to give her privacy so that she could relax. If she was hiding something from him, he trusted her to tell him eventually.

  If no one lurked in the apartment, threatening her, then he suspected the fall had been her. Like the day at the park, something had triggered panic, and no one was there to help her through it. Carol’s control had slipped, and she was trying to hide it from him.

  Again.

  He wished she would open up and trust him, but it seemed that would not happen any time soon. She kept her distance from him. His beast pushed him to close it, to convince her that they were meant to be together, but Van dig in his heels. He couldn’t press her. If he did, he stood to lose her altogether.

  If she ran from him, he didn’t know what he would do. He thought himself level-headed, but his feelings for Carol were so strong they tipped him into violence. The shed where her scent had lingered crossed his mind. By the time he’d finished with it, the shed had been nothing but ruin.

  “Don’t you have a job to be doing?” Carol asked after she put the coffee cannister away.

  Van shrugged. He glanced back at the door he’d busted through. Carol was still falling apart, probably drowning in fear after what happened to her. He’d seen the list of experiments. He knew what she might have lived through.

  “Feed yourself,” he commanded. “I’m going to the hardware store.”

  He wanted to stay. The urge to remain at her side, knowing she’d recently struggled for control, but he couldn’t leave the door the way it was. It would linger on their minds for the rest of the day until he did something about it.

  “You’re going to need to buy a whole new door!” Carol called after him.

  He grunted something that could have been considered an agreement. An hour later, Van tugged a new door and set of locks up the stairwell. To his surprise, Carol was still there. She sat on the couch and ate cheddar popcorn out of a bag as she watched him work. He’d thought she would shift and run. That was what she’d been doing.

  Hiding from her fears by letting her wolf take the reins. The beast didn’t know how to process trauma, though. If she let it fester in her mind, she would never be free of those shadows. He didn’t say that. He didn’t want to chase her away. Van wanted her company like a man beneath the waves wanted air.

  She sat back and watched him install the new door. She only spoke to tell him he had installed the doorknob backwards. He began to argue, but then noticed that she was indeed right. All the while, her presence had been burned into his skin. She was all he could think about. His mind was addled by her. He wanted to ask how she felt about the mark he’d given her, but he didn’t know how to approach the situation when she seemed so happy.

  What if she resented his actions? If he brought it up and reminded her of what he’d done, she might grow cold and distant. Worse, she might become angry and throw him out of her apartment.

  ***

  Carol enjoyed the view, but she would never tell him. Van’s movements were liquid. It amused her that any time she made a movement or a small sound, those liquid movements faltered. He dropped his screwdriver. He installed the doorknob backwards. His eyes darted to her, as if to make sure she was still there.

  Every time he came around, she wondered if he could truly care for her. It was a thought that would have been ludicrous had she not spent the past few days with him. Van had swung into her world shortly after her return and carved a place for himself despite her rambling confusion. She had no idea where she was meant to be anymore, no idea of who she was, but with him so near she found that none of that mattered.

  With Van around, she had no questions about herself. Only about who they were to each other. She wanted to crawl to him and feel his arms wrap around her.

  Earlier, before he’d burst into the apartment, she’d fallen. The beast had risen so fast, in such a panic, that her head had spun. The magic had blackened her vision and stole her feet out from underneath her. Only when she hit the floor did she return to herself.

  She barely knew what had caused her beast to panic so quickly. There hadn’t been time to think it over because she could hear someone racing around the bar. Van’s footsteps had been urgent and a thundering sound in her ears. Once she fought her way to her feet, she stumbled to the kitchen and snatched the can of coffee.

  “Is that better?” Van sat back on his haunches.

  Her attention snapped to the door. It looked nicer, and there were several new locks. More locks than there had been previously. She offered a thankful smile and nodded. He didn’t need to do that, but she was grateful.

  Well, he had broken the door, so she guessed it was his job to replace it.

  Finished, he stood. Half of him was in the stairwell, while the other half stood in the apartment. He looked torn, like he wanted to stay, but couldn’t find a reason.

  So, Carol gave him one. “Didn’t you want to cook something? You left a bunch of groceries on my doorstep with a promise that you’d be back to cook something for me.”

  Van turned, now fully inside the apartment. Her skin heated as the door closed behind him. They were alone together. Sensation tingled around the bite on her shoulder, slowly dipping toward her core.

  Carol did her best to ignore it, but it grew unb
earably hot when she crossed her legs. To her relief, Van didn’t step any closer. He moved into the kitchenette area. There was a whole fridge and a half sink, but no stove or anything. Only an electric skillet that she could plug into the wall if she had any food to make herself.

  In the time she’d spent in the apartment, she’d never turned it on. There hadn’t been a point because she never had any food of her own. Until now. Even though Van had purchased the food, it didn’t feel like it belonged to him. She didn’t feel like she was stealing from someone.

  Carol was the kind of person who wanted to devote her life to helping others. Ever since the change, she’d been the one asking for help. It broke her heart. When she looked in the mirror, she wasn’t herself. She wasn’t the woman who studied to become a paramedic. She wasn’t the advocate who spent hours of her life helping others.

  She was a mess who could barely get out of bed in the morning.

  But, with Van around, she found moments where she could remember herself. He looked at her like she was a whole person and not someone failing to hold themselves together. When he touched her, she thought she could remember how it felt to be happy.

  “What was it you wanted to cook? I’m afraid there’s not a whole lot of space in here.”

  Van touched his chin as he regarded the situation. She stepped around him to see the gears moving in his eyes. They flicked from the skillet to the fridge to the little sink.

  “I think we can pull this off, but we’re going to need to take clean-up downstairs. We can use the bar’s kitchen to wash the dishes.”

  “And Dante isn’t going to be mad?” Carol didn’t want to intrude on Dante’s bar. Not any more than she already had.

  “If he has a problem, he can take it up with me. This is my idea, after all.”

  Carol wasn’t totally convinced, but Van was already pulling ingredients out of the fridge. He pulled out a tub of marinated mozzarella balls and a six pack of eggs. From the cupboard, he grabbed a package of breadcrumbs.