by Selena Scott
A Mate for Quill
Selena Scott
Copyright 2020 by Selena Scott - All rights reserved.
In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.
Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Other books by Selena Scott
A Mate for Quill
CHAPTER ONE
Dawn twisted in her sheets, heated and sweating and gasping after some unnameable feeling. She sat up, into the murky orange light of sunrise, and tried to cling to the dream that was already sifting away. An image flashed behind her eyelids, one from her dream. It was of a man’s shoulder under her hand. Her fingers biting into tan flesh, muscle, a shadowed collarbone shockingly masculine under her slender hand.
But then the image slipped away, forgotten even as she tried to remember it. She was left only with the feeling the dream had left behind. Achy-hot desire pooled between her legs.
Dawn puffed her hair out of her eyes and leaned her forehead down to her knees. All of the previous twenty-five years of her life had been spent blissfully sex-dream-free. The last few months, though? Not so much. Almost every night she gasped herself awake.
There was only one way to slice this cherry pie. She was a twenty-five-year-old super horny recluse who’d recently been sexually awakened by someone who wasn’t interested in her.
Ugh. What a way to wake up.
Dawn shook her head a little, trying to shake off the fog of sleep, and found it quite a bit slower to recede today than normal. Why were her thoughts moving like molasses? Why did her arms feel like they were filled with sand? Why was there a dull pounding in her temples?
“Oh, right,” she said out loud to her empty room.
She felt like shit because she’d literally been tranquilized yesterday. A man with a gun had aimed and shot and landed a dart into her back leg.
Now, considering she’d been in her wolf form at the time, she might have understood the man doing this if she’d startled him in the woods or something like that. But no. That had not been the situation.
As far as her heavy brain could figure, she and her two older brothers had nearly been abducted yesterday. They’d thought they were headed to an audition of sorts for a government-run program that would study their freaky shifter genes in exchange for a complete forgiveness of their medical debt. It had seemed too good to be true.
And then it had been too good to be true as a helicopter filled with soldiers with guns had chased them down the highway. That was about all that Dawn remembered before she had been shot with the tranquilizer.
She could hear her brothers and their girlfriends moving around the house, convening in the kitchen. The scent of coffee worked its way up the stairs. Surprisingly, though, her first instinct wasn’t to make her way down to them, to her family. Her first instinct was to pick up her phone. Her thumb was already hovering over his contact information when she stopped herself.
“Wait a second,” she mumbled. A memory surfaced, slowly and painfully.
She was about to call Quill to tell him about what had happened yesterday. But… he’d been there, hadn’t he? After the tranquilizer dart had hit her in the leg, but before she’d passed out, there’d been a bear shifter there. He’d stood between her and the helicopter. His body had been the only thing between her and oblivion.
How had he known to find them? How had he known that she would need his protection?
She pressed his name and held the phone to her ear, waiting until it went to voicemail.
Well, that wasn’t a total surprise; it was barely five o’clock in the morning. He probably wouldn’t wake up for hours. In the meantime, she needed answers and she needed them now.
***
Quill shifted from his bear form into his human form next to an ice-cold creek ten miles outside of Portland. He walked directly into the icy, pitch-dark water. Huffing against the frigid cold, he slapped his face with water, hoping to use the shock to jolt himself into clear thinking.
Because he’d just lost his mind.
He couldn’t believe that he’d just flushed years of allegiance to the Director down the drain. He’d actually protected Dawn. When the whole point of his last year had been to lure her into the Director’s reach. The entire year of work down the drain, all because of him. They’d already tranquilized her. If not for Quill’s actions, the Director’s henchmen would’ve certainly had her in their custody by now.
But no. He’d just had to grow himself a conscience and protect her. And now? Now he had a target on his back so big it could be seen from space.
He hauled his shivering ass out of the creek and sat on the edge, his skin silver in the moonlight. He’d be warmer when he shifted back into his bear form, but he thought better in his human form and he needed to think clearly right now.
It didn’t matter how valuable Quill had been in the past. Now that he’d screwed up so badly, the Director would almost certainly want him dead.
He had two choices. The first one was disappearing into the wilderness right now. Living as long as he could in his bear form and staying off the grid. He could float from place to place and live anonymously.
For a moment, he considered this life. But no. He’d worked in a shifter rehabilitation and integration center for years; in fact, that was where he’d met Dawn. He knew all too well what happened to shifters who didn’t have stability in their lives. Too many of the people who’d come through the doors of the center had succumbed to addiction, violence, disease. It was a fate worse than death, he thought. A prolonged scrubbing of his soul off the face of the earth. At least the Director would likely grant him a swift death. He wouldn’t have to decay for years, nothing remaining of his dignity but faint memories.
So that left only the second choice. He would need to try to find the Director before the Director found him. If he turned himself in, confessed to his sins, maybe even explained what had happened, there was the chance for mercy. Either the Director would take pity on him and send him out on some other mission, or he’d kill him. Either way, Quill wouldn’t have to live in fear, succumbing to paranoia, jumping at shadows.
Yeah. It was really the only option he could foresee. Unfortunately, if he knew anything about the Director, he’d already sent at least three of his men to find and kill Quill quickly. Retribution was swift and clean in the Director’s world.
“I have to get to him before he gets to me,” Quill muttered to himself, still shivering in the cold.
He needed to get into his apartment for just a few minutes so that he could pack some essentials, grab his stash of cash, and get his car keys. From there, he’d set out on the cross-country drive to Florida.
As a shifter, he was always acutely aware of the moon’s path in the sky and he knew now that the hour was getting late. If he waited much longer, it would be dawn and he’d very likely have unwelcome visitors at his apartment.
Ones with
syringes filled with poison designed to make him look like he’d had a heart attack.
It was time to get a move on.
His last thought before he shifted back into his bear form, as stupid as it was, was that he’d have liked to say goodbye to Dawn before he went.
***
Dawn, freshly showered, stepped into the kitchen and blinked at four sets of eyes that all turned to look at her.
Even though she knew, with her finely tuned shifter’s senses, that there was no one behind her, she still turned to look. Because these morose, angry, aggravated, grief-stricken expressions couldn’t be for her, could they?
“What’s wrong?” she asked automatically, taking a seat at the kitchen table and accepting the cup of hot coffee that Ida was pressing into her hands.
Surprisingly, Orion scoffed and looked away, like he was so angry he could barely look at her. Phoenix, on the other hand, was leaning toward her in intense concern. Their typical roles were unexpectedly reversed.
“Are you all right?” Phoenix asked, his voice low and urgent, his eyes boring into hers.
Dawn looked back and forth between her two brothers and their girlfriends, all of whom were now staring at her, waiting for her answer. Words jammed up in her throat. “Seriously,” she said after a second. “What’s going on? I mean, I know that something crazy happened yesterday, but what don’t I know? You’re all freaking me out.”
“Dawn,” Orion said, ignoring her question, “how are you feeling? You look terrible.”
She might have ignored his question in turn, but there was something in his expression that she’d never seen before. He looked like he wanted to tear something’s throat out. And he never looked like that. He was the most kind, gentle person she’d ever met.
“I’m all right. I have a headache. But it’s not worse than a hangover.”
Her words seemed to let out some of the tension in the room. Everyone’s expressions eased just a bit.
“That’s good,” Diana said after a second, laying a firm hand on Orion’s shoulder, as if she were reminding him to be civilized. “Dawn, I’ve got some hard news to give you.”
Dawn’s stomach tightened reflexively. Her eyes automatically sought out her brothers’. How bad could it be if they were sitting here alive and well? She could withstand anything as long as the people she loved were all right. But then her math caught up to her. Because there was one less person sitting at this table than she might have wanted.
Instantly, she knew who the bad news was about.
“What happened to Quill?” she whispered, her throat tightening and her palms starting to sweat. “Where is he? Is he all right?”
The group seemed to collectively wince and Orion was suddenly up and out of his chair, pacing angrily.
“I knew I didn’t like that guy. I knew I should have warned him away from you. I knew he was no good. I knew that you were getting too involved.”
Quill had come into her life the same way that Ida and Diana had come into her brothers’ lives, through the shifter rehabilitation center that Diana ran. For almost their entire lives, the three siblings lived in their wolf forms in the mountains outside of Portland. They rarely took their human forms. And they’d been happy that way; they might have stayed that way their entire lives, a wolf pack of three.
The world was not kind to shifters. Up until a few years ago, it had been illegal to be an unregistered shifter. And if you registered yourself, you were immediately interned into government-run camps where the conditions were so abysmal as to almost be deadly. Needless to say, shifters mostly chose to stay hidden for as long as they possibly could. And what better way to stay hidden than to never, ever shift into their human forms? They were happy as wolves, so in many ways, the three siblings had beaten the system.
But a little over a year ago, Phoenix had been trapped in a wildfire in his wolf form. Dawn and Orion had had no choice but to shift into their human forms and take him to a hospital. It was there that they were immediately tallied by the government. The internment camps were illegal now, but shifters were still registered by the state. Having never lived in human society before, they didn’t have health insurance and were suddenly saddled with all of Phoenix’s medical bills. They were shuffled through a few different government programs, all designed to help shifters assimilate into the human world, when they finally landed at the center. There they were each given a mentor to help them learn about the human world. Phoenix’s mentor was Ida. Orion refused a mentor until he finally finagled Diana (the director of the center) to help him out. And Dawn’s mentor was Quill.
It was an extremely… intense sort of relationship. At first, she’d been deeply wary of him. It had taken her weeks to speak even a few words to him. But little by little he’d wheedled his way into her heart. Even if he hadn’t been interesting and smart and kind in a rough sort of way, she still would have had a soft spot for him because he’d been the one to introduce her to books. Growing up as a wolf, she’d never had access to books, and she certainly hadn’t known how to read. Any stories in her life were ones that she’d made up herself. But he’d shown her the world of literature, even taught her how to read. It was probably then that her feelings for him had started to change. He went from being her center-appointed mentor to being someone she couldn’t wait to wake up and see. Suddenly, he wasn’t just the person she called when she couldn’t figure out how to pay her parking tickets online, he was the person she called because she wanted to know how his day was.
And it had been the same for him… or so she’d thought. Maybe her feelings trended a little bit more toward crush-land than his did. In fact, she knew that was true. Things had actually been a little awkward over the last month or so because she’d kinda sorta crossed an imaginary line in the sand. She’d come over to his house to cheer him up one night. It had been so clear that he’d wanted her there and so clear that he felt like he had to get her to leave. She hadn’t been able to figure out why.
But now Orion was here saying that he never liked Quill? Had he always felt that way? What the hell was going on? Dawn’s heart was racing as she gripped her cup of coffee.
“I never trusted him.” Orion tore his hands through his hair and looked desperately angry again, like he had when she’d first come into the room. But it was clear now that that anger was not at her, it was at himself.
“Okay,” Dawn said, finally fed up with the situation, “somebody tell me what’s going on and tell me now.”
“Sweetie,” Ida said as softly as possible, reaching across the table for Dawn’s hand. “This is hard to say, because you two have a… connection. But you should know.” She took a deep breath. “Quill betrayed us.”
“What?”
Dawn’s eyes automatically sought out Diana. Diana was the kind of person who knew everything. She was competent and in charge and always one step ahead of everyone. Phoenix’s intensity, Orion’s anger at himself, Ida’s softness, all of it was too much for Dawn. She needed Diana’s calm intelligence. She needed information.
“While you were at the hospital, recovering from the tranquilizer dart, I was with the police. I was telling them everything I know and I learned some things in return. In a nutshell, Quill has been hiding in plain sight. He’s been working at the center as a way of picking out talented shifters that he could then funnel into some sort of secret program that weaponizes their skills. It’s headed by someone who refers to himself as the Director. The police aren’t sure exactly what kind of organization it is present day, but they think that it used to be government funded, back when unethical shifter research wasn’t the sort of thing the public would get up in arms about.”
“Back when the internment camps were still legal,” Phoenix said, his fists curled so hard his knuckles were white. “And they had a direct pipeline to all sorts of vulnerable shifters. Anyone they wanted to cherry pick, in fact. Not so easy anymore, now that it’s illegal to imprison and torture shifters.”
“Wait,
” Dawn said, her mind racing fuzzily. “But Quill is a shifter himself. Why would he want to imprison other shifters? It doesn’t make any sense.” She clung to this piece of information. Because what they said couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t. Quill couldn’t have betrayed her like that. Government testing? The set-up? It couldn’t have been him.
“Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean much,” Diana said matter-of-factly. “I’ve been working in shifter rehabilitation since the day the internment camps became illegal, since the day after shifters were liberated, and I can tell you that shifter loyalty doesn’t always run that deep. I mean, how could they have learned to trust other shifters when a huge part of shifter culture was secrecy and deception? You never knew who was going to give you up.”
“But his family…” Dawn said weakly. She wouldn’t automatically trust other shifters either, but she’d lay down in the road for her brothers. That was just fact.
“His family were all killed when he was just a kid. All we know is that when he left the camps six years later, he had an allegiance to this Director guy,” Diana said. “And he’s been working for him ever since. It’s his job to try and recruit shifters for the Director’s experimentation programs.”
“Recruit?” Dawn said weakly.
“Also known as abduct and imprison,” Phoenix said. “Like he tried to do to us last night.”
“You’re telling me that this entire time, Quill has just been trying to abduct me?” Dawn could not wrap her mind around this idea. All the late-night conversations, the early-morning donuts, the laughter, the reading, the shared looks. And more recently, all the heated looks. His hands on her hips when they went dancing that one night, the way he watched her mouth.
She’d thought he was her friend. More than her friend.
But they were saying that he was her enemy.
