Blackjack Bears

by Amelia Jade

  Blackjack Bears: Pierce

  Koche Brothers #1

  By Amelia Jade

  Blackjack Bears: Pierce

  Copyright @ 2017 by Amelia Jade

  First Electronic Publication: April 2017

  Amelia Jade

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the author’s permission.

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental. The author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

  All sexual activities depicted occur between consenting characters 18 years or older who are not blood related.

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  Blackjack Bears: Pierce

  Chapter One

  Pierce

  Something had changed.

  “You guys feel that?” he asked, pitching his voice slightly louder than normal to ensure it carried to the other participants.

  “Yeah,” came the distracted reply from one of them. “And heard it too.”

  He listened, noting the sounds of shouts and other noises filtering through the floor to them.

  “What’s going on?” he wondered, not really expecting an answer.

  “Whatever it is, sounds serious,” a third voice said, chiming in.

  They fell silent again, listening to booted feet pound by over their heads. The words were too distorted for them to make out, but whoever was shouting and calling out orders sounded stressed, as if they were in a hurry.

  “Hey guard, what’s going on?” he called through the half-foot thick steel bars arrayed vertically in front of him.

  “Seriously?” came the exasperated reply. “I’ve been right here the entire time. You haven’t seen me leave, or anyone come down to talk to me. So how the hell should I know?” he snapped.

  Well, that rules out some sort of scheduled drill. So whatever it is, it’s a surprise to everyone, both those upstairs and the guard.

  It certainly wasn’t a surprise inspection. The guard would have been promptly notified about that, so that he could get himself and the area down here presentable.

  “Unless I’m mistaken,” came a softer, yet somehow more powerful gravelly voice, “it sounds like they’re leaving.”

  Closing his eyes, he listened carefully once more. It did sound like all the booted feet were headed in the same direction, but fewer and fewer of them were sounding as they listened. They all pounded toward the west side of the building above them, and then, unless they were coming to an abrupt halt and filling the hallway, they were headed outside.

  “Are we under attack?” he asked out loud, speaking to nobody in particular.

  “Maybe.”

  “Let us out then!” he said, slamming an open palm against one of the bars. It vibrated under the impact, but did not give way. “We can help!”

  The guard snorted. “And then disappear in the chaos? Yeah right, I’m not that stupid, boys. Give me at least a little bit of respect, okay? Not much—I know better than to ask for miracles—but don’t treat me like I’m too stupid to live, m’kay?”

  Laughter echoed around, as much in agreement that they would have done just that, as in contempt at the idea of treating their guard with respect. Perhaps if a little was shown their way first…

  “Can you at least go find out what’s happening?” another voice piped up.

  “Yeah,” he said, agreeing. “It’s not like we’re going anywhere. Besides,” he added. “You’re just as curious as we are, and you know it.”

  The guard shrugged his shoulders and stood up. “Yeah, you got me there. All right boys, you five stay put while I go ask the grownups what’s going on.” He laughed to himself as he headed up the stairs.

  “Asshole,” Pierce Koche muttered as he settled back against the cool earthen wall, his right shoulder still pressed against the bars.

  “He’s not that bad.”

  “I suppose you’re right, Kean,” he said grudgingly to his older brother.

  “I’m always right!” came the reply.

  Pierce’s head turned as he arched an unseen eyebrow, looking out through the bars at the hallway beyond. It was a dead end. The guard had disappeared up the stairs to the left. To his right was an identical room like his, eight feet wide, fourteen feet deep. Across the hall, they were mirrored by another pair of rooms.

  Cells, really. They’re cells, not rooms.

  Another cell anchored the end of the hallway, forming a horseshoe shape. There were two more cells on each side of the hallway to the left of him. Long neon lights ran down the hallway itself, while inside his cell there was a single dangling lightbulb with a drawstring.

  It was rather dim, but that didn’t affect his vision. Pierce could see just fine in bright light, low light, and even no light. But he still preferred to be out in the open, and not caged up underground.

  That’s your fault, though.

  From the stairs came what sounded like a cough, then a bang followed by a hiss. Pierce used his shoulders to push him upright off the earth wall and peered down the hallway as best he could.

  Something came tumbling back down the stairway. To his practiced ear it almost sounded like a body…

  Two black objects a little bit smaller than his fist went sailing by his cell and landed on the floor, rolling around.

  Pierce craned his head the other way, and watched the canisters began to hiss. A gray mist began to seep from them, slowly expanding out to fill the confined space.

  “Gas!” Kassian shouted, one of the other five occupants of the cells at the end of the hallway, and also another one of Pierce’s brothers.

  Stepping to the farthest point of his cell, Pierce waited for the gas to come closer. Then he took several quick, short breaths, helping purge his system of carbon dioxide, before he took a lung, deep inhalation of air, his chest bulging up and outward as his lungs swelled with the effort.

  He could hold his breath for quite some time if he wasn’t required to fight. Considering he was trapped in a cell that he most assuredly could not break free of, he didn’t anticipate a fight. Pierce was fully aware that as the gas began to sting his eyes and his nostrils, he was going to pass out and be killed. Or kidnapped. Whatever was going on. His only concern just then was to witness the goings-on, so that if he awoke, he would know what he was looking for.

  Figures clad in all black with rebreather masks fitted over their faces came down the hallway, and started lining up facing them. There were two to a cell, and they raised odd-looking guns at the occupants. Pierce only had a moment to realize that they weren’t typical slugthrowers before the men started to fire.

  Jerking back out of the way, he grabbed the mattress from his bed and put it in front of him. No sooner had he done so than it began to quiver. A needle-like point pierced far enough through that it emerged right at head height, quivering less than an inch away from his face. Pierce’s eyes went wide. He fell to the floor heavily, feigning having passed out.

  By now the gas was
making it hard to see, so he discarded the mattress. His vision was slowly going red as he ran out of oxygen. It wouldn’t be long now before he was forced to breathe, and then passed out for real. In the meantime, he wanted to see what was going on.

  “Polansky, Sparks, get your targets out of here,” came a muffled voice that had the unmistakable iron of command within it.

  He couldn’t tell much about the voice; the rebreather disguised too much of it. But he could hear where it was coming from. Pierce slipped to the side as his cell door slid open quietly and the two men assigned to him came charging in, moving right by him in the gray mist.

  Tears streamed down Pierce’s face as his vision swam in and out of focus, the gas burning as he tried to stay conscious for just a few moments longer. He contemplated grabbing a rebreather off one of the men, but knew it would only delay the inevitable. Instead he wanted to try and view the leader.

  “Roman, Nero, are you locked up yet?”

  “Roger that, Leader; target secured and on the way out!”

  Target secured. That was a very blunt way of talking about his brothers. All five of the cells had been occupied by one of Pierce’s brothers. The five of them had been caught gambling, and had tried to bribe their way out of it. As a result, they’d landed themselves in the base prison.

  Stupid military for shifters. Never wanted to come here anyway. Stupid war. Stupid people. WHY IS EVERYONE STUPID?

  He staggered through the mist, trying desperately to find the leader. Two figures went by, struggling to haul one of his brothers toward the stairs.

  Pierce saw a shock of long hair.

  Maximus.

  He was the only other Koche brother with longer hair. He was also the oldest, and the one that Pierce had always looked to for guidance.

  Not this time, though.

  Staggering as his lungs screamed at him to breathe, that he needed to open his mouth to just suck in a lungful of lovely, sweet air, Pierce finally found what he was looking for.

  Up ahead, the back of a more diminutive form. The one that had been barking orders.

  “Taggert, Lonestar, is your target secure?”

  “He’s not here!” came the surprised call.

  “I swear to the nine hells of Hades, if you two lost your target…” came the reply, muffled still by the rebreather.

  “They didn’t,” Pierce snarled from behind, opening his mouth at last. “I’m right here.”

  Faster than he could have believed possible for a human—and the men after them were without a doubt human—the leader spun, drew, and pumped three darts into a near-perfect triangle in Pierce’s chest.

  “Oh,” he said weakly, and then collapsed to the ground as the gas and the tranquilizer darts rushed through his system.

  One last thought echoed through his mind before blackness claimed him.

  Stay alive. Your brothers will need you.

  Chapter Two

  Pierce

  I swear to the nine Hells of Hades.

  The words swirled around him, over and over again.

  They wrapped around his left wrist and pressed against it slightly, before pulling away. He tried to fight as they went for his neck, but he couldn’t move. To his surprise they didn’t strangle him though. The words just pressed against the side of it for a count of ten, then disappeared.

  He thought they were gone, and he sighed in relief.

  Then they slapped him on the cheek. Hard.

  Pierce’s eyes flew open, his left hand blurring toward his face as he intercepted the hand aiming to strike at him. Planting his right hand on the ground, he used the insanely powerful strength of his shifter heritage to push up, his left arm simultaneously pushing down.

  In a heartbeat he had flipped positions with the person attacking him, pinning them to the dirt. As his knees hit the ground he brought his right hand up and around the throat of his attacker.

  “Who are you?” he snarled, his face inches away from his attacker.

  An attacker who was slowly turning purple and whose eyes were filled with terror. A scent of lilac and lavender wafted into his nostrils. An attacker who was female. A human female at that.

  Hastily Pierce yanked his hands away from her and rolled off of her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said gruffly as he watched her hands fly to her throat. He didn’t think he’d been squeezing long enough to leave bruises—no more than a second or two before his senses had kicked back in. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked, this time a little more tender.

  The woman’s eyes were darting back and forth, but she didn’t try to run. Instead she pulled her hands back from her throat and, to his relief, sucked down a lungful of air.

  “I didn’t mean to attack you,” he said. Then frowned. “Well, I guess I did, but I didn’t realize what you were doing at first. I thought you were attacking me, you see. So my instincts took over, and, umm, yeah.” He looked away awkwardly. “Sorry.”

  Her fear rolled off her body, overwhelming the pleasant scent he’d noticed first.

  “I promise, you’re okay now,” he insisted, though she didn’t seem to completely believe him. “I’m not going to harm you. It was just a mix-up.”

  She narrowed her eyes, breathing heavily, but smoothly now. “Really? Do you always attack people who wake you up?”

  Pierce opened his mouth to respond, then closed it. What was he going to tell her? That he’d been in a jail, and that some humans had gassed him and shot him full of tranqs? That wouldn’t make her feel any more calm and comfortable around him. Strangely, that actually mattered to Pierce, though he wasn’t sure why. Normally he would have said he didn’t give a fuck what a human thought.

  Must be a full moon, he thought, irritated.

  “Where am I? What happened” he asked instead, avoiding answering her question for the time being.

  He had no idea who she was. Her clothing, a lime green long-sleeve top over a colorful skintight pair of pants, screamed jogger. The footwear pretty much confirmed it to him.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I was out for my normal jog, and came across you just lying in the middle of the path.” She shrugged. “I wasn’t going to just leave you, so I checked your pulse on your wrist and your neck. When it was present, and I could feel you breathing, I tried slapping you gently to wake you up. Didn’t work, so I was going to try again.” She stopped, rubbing her neck gently. “You know the rest.”

  “I see,” he replied. That explained the crazy dream where he was being attacked by words. Damn drugs will make you see some shit. He vowed not to let himself get gassed and then tranqed again at any point in the near future. Pierce would stick with booze from then on.

  “There’s nobody else around?” he asked as his wits continued to return to him. He stood up, looking around.

  “Maximus?” he called. “Kassian?”

  There was no answer as he shouted his brothers’ names.

  “Kean! Gavin! Come on guys, this isn’t funny!”

  But all he heard was his own voice echoing through the forest.

  “Where am I?” he asked again.

  “Fingal Woods,” she said promptly.

  The name meant nothing to him.

  “What’s near here? I need to know where I am.”

  “Uh, they’re a big set of woods and cabins and such to the west of Longhorne City,” she replied.

  Longhorne. He knew that name. Pierce closed his eyes and pulled up a map of the area surrounding the shifter-only territory of Cadia, his homeland. He thought hard, then opened his eyes. “Longhorne, you guys have the huge set of waterfalls here, right?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, big tourist city, that whole shebang.”

  “Right.”

  Okay, step one complete. Pierce knew where he was. Well to the east of Cadia, but still within five to seven days comfortable travel of his bear depending on weather, food, etcetera. So obviously his attackers had fled this way.
But how had he ended up here? And where were his brothers?

  He called up the image of the leader of the humans who had taken him. Shorter than average, and an indistinguishable voice.

  I swear to the nine Hells of Hades.

  The thought echoed through his head once more. Pierce pictured his hands wrapped around the man’s throat, strangling him as he tried to repeat that line, over and over again. Satisfaction flowed through his body even as his heart raced.

  Pierce was going to kill him, whoever he was.

  Now I just need to find out who the fuck it was.

  His bear roared its agreement at the idea. It had been a long time since it had been let loose. Nearly a month had passed since he and his brothers had been stuck in those stupid jail cells, all for no good reason. Just because the Green Bearets had deemed gambling to be a bad idea.

  Sneering internally, Pierce realized there was one good thing about being where he was. The Cadian bear shifter warrior elite couldn’t touch him out here. The Green Bearets wouldn’t even know where to look! That brought a smile to his face.

  “What’s so funny?” the woman asked.

  Pierce shook off the question. “Just the situation as a whole,” he muttered.

  “I looked for a wallet on you,” she said, volunteering the information. “Anything, just in case you had a medical condition or something I should be aware of. But I couldn’t’ find anything, no ID, nothing.” She paused. “What are you doing out here?”

  He shook his head. “I wish I knew.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Pierce,” he said, sticking out his hand politely. There was nothing to be afraid of with the woman.

  “Mila,” she returned.

  “Mila,” he repeated, letting the name flow off his lips. “Exotic, I like it. Good name.”

  Keeping a hold on her hand, he gently lifted her to her feet from where she’d still been sitting as she recovered from his initial attack.

  She smiled demurely. “Thank you.”

  Even as her head dipped low, he felt his attention forced into focus on her, as he truly looked at her for the first time.