Bear Caves Complete Series: A Bear Shifter Box Set

by Mia Wolf

  “Has anyone ever told you how unreal you are?” I ask him without filtering my thoughts. He wanted me so badly, he needs to see my undiluted side.

  “No,” he replies resting his elbows on the table and his chin on his hands. “Not once.”

  “Strange,” I say teasingly.

  “Has anyone told you how unreal you are?”

  “I’m not really that unreal,” I say.

  “Have you seen yourself in a mirror?” he asks raising his eyebrows, but his expression is otherwise blank. “Half of the men here want to be in your pants.”

  “That’s not true,” I scoff, completely dismissing Andrew’s point. It’s simply not true. “People think I don’t belong in their world,” I add. “They don’t want any part of me.”

  “It’s unfortunate that you think that, Rose.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  That silences him, and I retreat to the thoughts in my head watching the New York skyline. It really is beautiful. When I notice that Andrew hasn’t looked away from me for a while, I turn my attention to him once again.

  “Mr. Brehm, staring is rude.”

  He laughs, looking like a baby when he does. The crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes make him look distinctly human.

  I feel a sudden bolt of panic at the word “human.” I’ve become so good at hiding the bear side of me that I’m starting to forget it even exists.

  I used to blame my brother for committing the same crime. “You’re lying to yourself by hiding your true self. You were born a bear shifter, and you will always be one”, I used to tell him. My temper was an ugly thing back when my parents had recently passed away. I would go into fits of rage where nothing could stop me from wreaking havoc. I barely had any memory of the events once it was over.

  That was a lifetime ago, I’m a different person now. I blink with a softness I hope Andrew can feel right now. He brings out the good in me, that’s a first.

  “So you tell me about your ex-girlfriends,” I say, feeling brave, feeling ready to hear the endless list of women he has surely been with because why wouldn’t he when he looks like that? But no response comes in return. Andrew only shakes his head weakly and presses his lips.

  “You don’t want to talk about them?” I ask. Given my experiences with Michael, I’ll, of course, understand if he doesn’t want to talk about his prior relationships if something bad happened, but at the same time, I feel a pang in my heart at his unwillingness to trust me a little more.

  “No.” He hesitates and gulps as if his throat is running dry. “I’ve never been in a relationship before. Well, I liked a girl a long time ago, but that wasn’t mutual. So there’s no one. Can we please move onto another topic?”

  I don’t push it or ask him any more uncomfortable questions, but my mind is burning with curiosity. Why would a man like him stay single his whole life? Perhaps, he was waiting for the right one? That thought gives me an ugly kind of rush; I’m surely not the special snowflake that changed Andrew somehow. We barely even know each other.

  I shove the thought aside and bury it somewhere deep where it can’t raise its head. I look around me; it’s a beautiful night and a beautiful place, and there’s a beautiful person sitting in front of me. I wouldn’t have believed it if someone told me I’d be sitting here a month ago.

  “So what’s the deal with your brother?”

  Andrew brings him up so suddenly and seemingly out of thin air that I startle slightly.

  “Why are you bringing him up?” I ask. I want to tell Andrew to not talk about that either, but I stop myself and ask why I wouldn’t? What am I really hiding?

  I don’t need to tell Andrew about us being bear shifters right now if that’s what’s making me scared.

  “He ran away from home about five years ago, not too long after my parents died,” I say. “It happened right after I had finished university. It was the darkest time in my life and then the only family I knew left me, too.” Andrew places a firm hand on mine. “That day was the first time I saw him in five years.”

  Our order of Aglio Olio spaghetti pasta and a sizzling chicken platter arrives, and the waiter asks us if we’d like to order wine with the meal. Since Andrew will have to drive us home, we decide to have a single glass of the finest wine they have in the house. I dare not look at the price of the drink or of our food for that matter. Andrew had made it clear before we left that it’s his treat and not to make a fuss about how lavish it might be.

  I understood his point of view and complied without a complaint. When it’s my turn to treat us, we’ll probably be eating street food from a food truck. We’ll see how Andrew reacts to that.

  “Do you know why he left?” Andrew asks.

  “Hm?” I say forcing my thoughts back to the present.

  “Did you ask your brother—”

  “Warren,” I add.

  “Did you ask Warren why he left?”

  “I never got a chance to, did I?” I respond. It occurs to me that I never really asked myself that question, never really wondered what it must have been like for Warren when our parents died to make him leave like he did. I was too caught up in my own feelings about the unfairness of it all.

  I shake my head as a pang of disappointment trickles down my throat mixed with the wine. I really wonder why he left; he wasn’t the kind of person to do such a thing after all. He might have denied his bear shifter side, but he would’ve done anything for his family.

  “How do you think Ashley Wang found out about me?” I say out loud.

  Andrew passes me a look of total confusion. “Where does that come from?”

  “That was the last thing my brother said to me before he left,” I explain to Andrew.

  We eat in silence for a while. I look at him while he eats and I can’t help but wonder what his story is, how he came to be where he is now. “Tell me about you, where you’re from,” I say.

  He sighs. “I left my home when I was twenty years old,” Andrew says and takes a bite of the chicken.

  My first thought is that Andrew must’ve been lonely, which makes me wonder if Warren was lonely, too. Is he still lonely, wandering somewhere alone without a family by his side?

  I redirect my thoughts back to Andrew because unlike my brother, he’s here with me.

  “So I was needlessly worrying about meeting your mother, huh?” I say jokingly, trying to diffuse the tension in the air.

  “You want to meet my mother, huh?” he smirks. “Have we progressed that far, Miss Maibach?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” I retort and let a childish scowl back me up. “I just meant, I would’ve eventually had to meet your family.”

  His smile disappears, gone to a place I know I don’t have access to yet. He seems to have aged in the blink of an eye; it hurts me deeply when he hurts.

  Somehow, we’re bonded by some invisible thread that tugs at us both at the same time. I’ve felt it from the moment I laid my eyes on him. Being a bear shifter, growing up in the village, I saw people find their mates, one after another. I saw them change completely within the span of twenty-four hours when they had found someone to spend their whole life with.

  I watched it happen year after year to everyone in the neighborhood. I did not believe that I would ever find a mate. But perhaps I had spent far too much time in New York by then. I thought I was different because I had lived among humans for so long.

  I rest unsuspecting eyes on the silver-haired man sitting in front of me; could he really be my mate? If that’s true, then I would have to tell him I’m a bear shifter at some point. If he truly is my mate, it shouldn’t be a problem because we’re meant to be together. Right? I take solace in the long-standing belief of my clan that I never put my own faith in.

  “You can meet Zack and Olivia,” Andrew adds when I’ve been quiet for a while.

  “I would love to,” I reply, but I know that his statement is a mere distraction from talking about his family. “So why did you leave?” I
ask not letting his change of topic deter me. Give me something, Andrew.

  He takes a deep breath and gulps down the entire glass of his wine in one go. I can tell he’s searching for something in his head that seems to displease him to linger on. “My father,” he begins and clears his throat, placing the wine glass on the marble table. “My father had my whole life planned out for me. Plans in which he forgot to include my own wishes. The moment I realized that this catching up to a version of myself that my father had created was never going to end, I left.”

  I did not see that coming, and I don’t know why. For some reason, I believed that he had a perfect family waiting for him somewhere out there. Perhaps, it’s just the lightness of his being, the ease of his existence, the way he looks at life like it’s a gift, that made me believe that he could only come from a loving family. I was wrong. I take in the entirety of Andrew as though he’s the single most precious thing mankind has to offer. His background doesn’t matter to me, all I care about is him.

  “Do you miss them?’ I ask. As soon as the question leaves my lips I know I asked it because I miss my brother every single day. That’s the cruel part of being a part of a family: even when it’s ripped apart, it has a way of stringing you along.

  The thought makes me realize that Andrew feels like I do. I feel a bond between us as if we’ll inevitably spend a lifetime together, no matter where we are.

  His eyes seem to scan the tall concrete buildings in the distance as if he’s searching for some higher meaning to his answer.

  “No, not really,” he says, and I assume he’s done, but he speaks again. “But I long for a family far too often.”

  My immediate thought is, “so do I.” Over and over.

  We’re both stuck in the same cycle it seems.

  “I know what that feels like,” I reply and join him in surveying the faraway high rise buildings where, as if, the real answer to all our problems lies.

  Luckily, we still want to be in each other’s company after the reminiscing of our difficult pasts is over. I insist that we go and eat ice-cream, to which Andrew unabashedly replies that he doesn’t like ice-cream. His unapologetic acceptance of that side of his personality makes me lose a little bit of faith in humanity.

  “You love ice-cream that much?” he asks me when he sees the look in my eyes.

  “Andrew, the entire universe loves ice-cream like their lives depend on it,” I tell him with a straight face. “There are aliens in the outer universe who dropped dead at your confession just now.”

  Andrew laughs at my silly attempts to cheer him up, but they work.

  Chapter 27 – Andrew

  I’m driving home to Rose from a meeting in a village in upstate New York when on the road ahead of me I notice a group of men blocking the way. There’s something familiar about them, and I slow down the car to get a better look. When I get closer, I recognize Ryan, the clan alpha. Slowly, the rest of the faces too come back to me one by one.

  When Ryan, the alpha of the clan, had sent me several threats these past months, I had brushed them off because I know the kind of person he is. I know it because I grew up with him and these other men.

  Everyone in the clan goes to the same school in the village. Even though we were the same age, I was never really accepted as a friend by anyone at school because I was being prepared to become the new alpha, which kind of put me into my own league, even when I didn’t want it to.

  Ryan used to have seizures as a kid. His father was the alpha before him, and everyone in the clan took it as a given that Ryan would not be succeeding his father because of his health. My father took that as an opportunity to sacrifice his own child for the cause and started training me to become the alpha. By the time we reached the age of sixteen, the whole village just assumed that I would become the next alpha. It made my father terribly happy.

  I didn’t say that the way Ryan was pushed aside was right. In my view, his seizures were the last thing that made him unfit to become the alpha. Nevertheless, the burden of his animosity has always been mine. I tried telling him a hundred times that I did not choose to become the next expected alpha nor did I have any wish to do so in the future.

  None of this mattered to Ryan apparently because he’s standing in front me with his pack of dogs to cover for him. If there’s one thing my father made sure of in all his training, it’s that I will never be defeated.

  I exit the car, and we stand facing each other off in the middle of the road with nothing but woods on either side of us.

  “Your manners are as bad as ever,” I say to light a fire under his ass, not that he ever lets it die himself.

  He scoffs, and his minions laugh with him. I’m assessing all four of them, they appear to be in good shape. Much better than when I left. They’ve been training for this.

  “I asked you politely a bunch of times, Andrew.” Ryan pauses and narrows his eyes. “You always did need a good beating before you could understand anything.”

  I expected he’d say something to try to enrage me, I just didn’t know he’d be so good at it. Actually, now that I think about it, he was always good at it; I might have just forgotten how vile he truly is.

  “Didn’t have the guts to come alone?” I ask gesturing at the buff guys on his either side. “How do you keep them loyal? Doggy treats?”

  They don’t find that funny.

  “Oh, you’re missing one,” I add when I notice that Isaac is not around.

  “I’m glad you’re still as observant as always.” Ryan smirks this time which can only be bad news. “He’s bringing your girlfriend along.”

  I could break his jaw with a single punch right now, but I save my rage for what I know he wants from me.

  “What do you want?” I spit the words out like a fireball. “And don’t dare to touch a single hair on her because if you do, I will make sure they don't find your bones to bury.”

  I even my breathing and prepare myself for the fight. Even though I’m always in top shape, I’ve only trained for flexibility these past couple of weeks, and in a bear fight, I definitely need more endurance and strength. In fact, none of my fitness training is going to come in handy if we fight in bear form. I’m sure Ryan thought about that, trained for this exact moment, and then showed up with his gang pretending like all of this is fair, and he’s the wisest alpha ever born.

  I haven’t even yet thought about how Rose will react when she finds out that her boyfriend is a bear. I realize what a big mistake I’ve made. I lied to her, told her she’s safe to trust me, and I’m going to break her trust within a week of earning it. Great timing, Andrew. There is no way she’s going to stick around once she realizes I’m a freaking bear shifter.

  Somewhere deep down I believe Rose would actually be safer without me complicating her life. I imagine her scared face as a stranger drags her here against her will. I grit my teeth in anger at the thought. If Isaac mistreats her one bit, I’m going to punch him until he can no longer breathe.

  Though, I’m not really afraid of that happening because Isaac is pretty good-natured, or at least he used to be when I still knew him. He just hangs out with the wrong crowd.

  “Don’t worry, they’re just here to verify the results of the duel,” says Ryan breaking my train of thought. “You know the rest,” he pauses then smiles. “You were trained for it for a long time.”

  There is a screech of another car behind mine, and I know it must be Isaac bringing Rose. I instinctively run towards it to make sure she’s safe. She’s calmly sitting in the passenger seat as if she’s on her way to visit a distant relative.

  “What’d you tell her?” I ask Isaac. He shrugs his shoulders in response.

  “She knew somehow,” he says.

  That can’t be. In any case, she’s going to witness the bear fight in front of her eyes. She sees me through the windshield, and our eyes meet for a brief second. All I can see in her eyes is trust. It gives me an odd sense of relief and the strength to face what I have
to face.

  Chapter 28 – Rose

  “Your boyfriend is a bear shifter. You know that right? —R”

  The text is from an unknown number which by the time I can reply has already gone out of service. My mind has a lot to unpack there, so I don’t even fret about whom the text is from.

  Andrew is a bear shifter.

  The knowledge doesn’t come as a surprise somehow. It’s like I have always known it deep within my heart. More than news, it comes as an inevitability; what else would Andrew be?

  It, in fact, makes me wonder if he truly is my mate and what he’ll say when he finds out that I’m a bear shifter, too. My thoughts are quiet and inert until a stranger shows up at the door to the apartment.

  He isn’t forceful, he doesn’t touch me, he simply asks me to follow him. I do because I know that if he’s a bear, there isn’t anything I can do and if he’s a human, I have nothing to worry about, anyway.

  “Does it have something to do with Andrew?” I ask him as he escorts me out of our apartment which I leave with a heavy heart. I don’t know what’s going on, but something about the situation makes me think that we might not come back here together.

  The stranger is a young guy, almost a boy; he looks to be twenty or twenty-one tops, and he has a bizarre sense of discomfort around him as if he’s doing this against his own will or questioning the morality of his actions.

  He simply nods in response and does not speak a word as he drives me to I don’t know where.

  “Do you know my name?” I ask him, still wondering who is running this covert mission and to what end.

  “Rose,” is his reply.

  The calm in me is quite misplaced. I don’t know why I find it so easy to keep my wits about myself in times of peril. Patience, presence of mind, and rationality come naturally to me. Perhaps I changed after my rage fits following my parents’ death. Or perhaps the change came about while I was in that toxic relationship with Michael.

  I set the useless thoughts aside and let the boy drive me. I don’t ask his name because I can tell he’s far too scared to tell me anything of importance.