by J. K Harper
But it was an obvious truth, and it hung between them.
Riley slowly took in another long breath through his nose, letting it fill him. He exhaled just as slowly, willing his heart to stop banging so hard. But when he spoke, it wasn’t anywhere as difficult as he’d thought it would be to say it out loud, which he hadn’t done in years since everyone here knew all about it. “Their mother died years ago. The twins were only two.”
Marisa’s face was impassive, but her eyes began to glow too. “What happened to her?”
The words flowed out quick and simple like they meant nothing, even though they meant everything that his life had become. “She was killed. Murdered.”
Marisa barely sucked in a quiet breath, but her hand clenched on his so hard it almost hurt. “I—was it outcasts? Did they do it? Is that why you were so suspicious of me? Why Quentin was too?”
He eased his hand back over hers, now the one stroking her. Her hand was so small in his. Small, but strong. It fit into his just right. He felt the crazy urge to protect her. To keep her from awful truths in the world. But he knew, without knowing the details, that Marisa was already aware just how awful this world could be.
“No.” He said the words fast, not breaking eye contact. Holding her in this small but enormous space as he told her the reason behind his out-of-control bear. His reason for needing to fight every day to stay sane and focused. His reason for being cold and cruel whenever anyone new, even a shifter like herself, appeared in his home.
“It was shifter hunters. Humans who know about us and hunt us for fun. They somehow found out about her. They stalked her and the cubs one day when they were all out playing in the mountains in their animal forms. She managed to hide the cubs and led the hunters away from them.”
His voice was calm as he spoke. So calm it felt like it wasn’t even him talking. “They shot her dead and left her body for me to find hours later. The cubs don’t have nightmares about it anymore. But I do, and I wasn’t even there when they murdered my mate. Shifter hunters took her from us like she was only an animal, some dumb creature they could use for sport. But they knew full well she was human, and a mother, and they shot her dead anyway.”
Whiteness dropped so fast over Marisa’s face it was like seeing a color screen suddenly turn to black and white. She began breathing in gasps, like she was about to hyperventilate or pass out. Alarmed, Riley stopped talking, but she suddenly shoved at him, yanking her hand out of his.
“Let me out. Please,” she whispered in a ragged, panic-stricken tone. The sound of it was so desperate he somehow leapt backward out of the booth, almost landing on his ass in the aisle.
She moved out of the booth fast and bolted down the hallway toward the bathrooms, looking like a terrified rabbit fleeing imminent death—not like a mountain lion shifter as strong as he knew she was deep down.
“Riley!” Abby’s voice was a few octaves higher than usual. The entire table went quiet. Luckily no one else in Whatchu Want had noticed, since it now was packed with diners and the volume was significantly up. “What happened? Is she going to be sick? I knew that shift was a bad one.” She fretted, looking like she was about to get up and follow. Then, she suddenly lowered her brow and cast a fierce look at him. “Or was it you again? What did you say to her now?”
Quentin, Slade, and Shane all suddenly glared at Riley. Despite what any of them might have thought about an outcast plopped into their midst, none of them saw any reason to disrespect a woman.
“Nothing like that!” Riley looked wild-eyed at them, then back down the hall where Marisa had disappeared into the ladies’ room. He wanted to follow, but something told him she needed a second to herself. Maybe a lot of seconds. There was nowhere else to go down the hallway except the bathrooms, so she was safely tucked away back there for a few minutes.
“I just—never mind.” He swung his head back around to plant an equally fierce glare on his family. “You know what? She and I were having a private conversation, and it’s none of your business.”
Shane snorted, pulling Jessie close to him. “Nothing in this family is private.”
“Yeah, well, this is,” Riley snapped back. “I’m going to go hang out with my kids for a minute. They know better than to pry into shit that isn’t their concern,” he added with a pointed look in turn at the five of his damned nosy adult kin sitting at the booth.
Then he stalked over to where his kids played with their friends, casting only one glance toward the hallway Marisa had fled down. Not following her made his entire body shudder with the effort, but he forced himself to leave her alone for just a few minutes.
Whatever demons haunted the sexy lion girl, telling her about his own family’s brutal history had just triggered them into overdrive. If she was like him, she needed some time to pull her shit together and not let her cat get the better of her.
Much as it half destroyed him to do it, right now he had to let her face whatever hellacious demons tormented her on her own.
But if she didn’t come back in five minutes or less, he was going to head straight to her and help her fight them.
She wouldn’t need to fight alone ever again.
10
Marisa burst into the thankfully empty bathroom. She raced to a stall, yanked the door back, and hovered over the porcelain bowl, ready for the dry heaves she could feel building inside her to turn into actual puking.
After a few minutes of waiting in dread for what turned out to be nothing, she realized the only reason she wasn’t going to hurl was because there was nothing in her to come up. Whatever bad kitty had eaten yesterday had already been absorbed into her system, and the only thing she’d eaten since then were the few fries the waitress had brought. Apparently, they weren’t ready to leave.
Small victories.
Wiping a hand across her mouth anyway, she backed out of the stall and turned to the sink to splash water on her face. The sight of herself in the mirror shocked her to a stop. She was whiter than a ghost. Whiter than the polar bear shifter who’d been a reluctant member of the outcasts, the only one Marisa could even vaguely call a greatly watered-down version of a friend.
Her face looked like hell, but it was her eyes that startled her the most. Her cat was blazing inside them. Raging, glowing out so fiercely any human who looked at her right now would either scream and run or fall to the ground in a flat out faint.
Good thing no one else was in here with her. She needed to calm down. She needed to get hold of herself. Of her inner animal.
“Hush, you,” she croaked to the mirror, gazing back at the wild, angry eyes. “Simmer down,” she whispered at the shadow of her bad kitty she could see sliding around in them.
Closing her eyes to block out the sight of her own pasty expression, the inner wildness that seeped out, threatening to cause her to lose control, she turned on the taps to splash icy cold water all over her face and throat. Gasping as the water rolled down under the front of her shirt and ran into her bra, she made herself be relentless. She tossed water onto her face, scrubbed at it with her hands, pressed her shaking fingers against her eyes to push away the wild glow.
The panic, the sorrow, the rage in them.
Shifter hunters.
The words curdled her blood. Shifter hunters were sick, awful humans who hunted shifters, but not just for fun, as Riley thought.
They hunted shifters for cold hard cash.
Some people, random humans, maybe even the government, had somehow found out shifters existed. They tracked them down to capture or kill. Killing them wasn’t usual. Capturing them to turn them over to secret agencies that put them into cages in horrific labs and studied them was much more common. Shifter hunters got way bigger bounties for bringing living shifters to the labs. They still got paid for dead ones, but live shifters were the real prize.
Funnily enough, living shifters had been the reason her parents had finally met their ends.
Thinking about her parents curdled Marisa’s blood
even more. Secrets, so many secrets. Secrets she hadn’t yet told anyone here. She hadn’t been lying to Riley when she said she didn’t know anything about the outcasts. That she kept no outcast secrets from him or his clan. That was true. The outcasts had wanted her for one reason, and that was to breed. They told her very little about any of their plans, dumb and poorly thought out as those usually were. Clever, the outcasts were not.
No, she wasn’t keeping outcast secrets from Riley and the wonderful, kind, fun and funny Silvertip shifters.
But the secrets she did keep would get her shoved out from them anyway, now that Riley had told her about his mate. Now she knew the reason behind his haunted expression, the reason for his angry vigilance. He despised outcasts as much as he did shifter hunters, as did the entire Silvertip clan, and they would make an outcast of her again if they found out the truth.
Which was yet another reason she needed to be put down. She had to be put down.
Didn’t matter that Riley was sexy and said she smelled good and held her hand and thought she was worthy of respect. That she was worthy of apologies.
Didn’t matter that his kids, his cubs, were darling angels who made the bitter knots all tangled up inside her loosen just a smidgen more each time they smiled at her or wanted to tell her all about their day.
Didn’t matter that Abby might be thinking of her as a friend, that they all took her to this goofy restaurant in the little shifter town that was their home and made her smile for the first time in forever.
None of that would matter at all once they discovered her real secrets. Her horrible, ugly, dark secrets that she’d thought had nothing to do with anything here but now had everything to do with all of it.
Pulling harsh paper towels out of the clunky old-school dispenser on the wall, she rubbed them over her face, savagely wiping away the water with their appropriately rough texture. Wadding them into a crude ball, she slammed them into the waste bin as she left the bathroom, steeling herself for the next thing.
The thing where she said thank you to the Silvertip clan, but now it was time for her to go. The thing where she stepped into the growing dark outside and tried to figure out where to run next.
The thing where she said goodbye to Riley and to his beautiful children and left them behind.
Taking a deep breath, she pulled open the door—and almost smacked right into someone. Marisa gulped and stepped back, despite bad kitty trying to send a hiss up her throat.
Haley. Mate of Cortez, Riley’s brother. Ex of Justin, who had deliberately ruined Haley’s life, in part because Marisa had turned him into a shifter. Haley, whose marriage had been destroyed because of Marisa.
Haley stared at Marisa like she was an alien who made no sense at all. “Hi,” she said, looking at her very carefully. Like she wasn’t sure if Marisa might not try to bite her. Or, more likely, because Marisa looked like crap right now. “Can we talk?”
Marisa didn’t answer. She was trying to not let bad kitty come snarling out. The mountain lion in her felt tense and defensive. Ready to tear through Marisa’s fragile hold on her and bust out with claws extended.
Breathe, damn it. Just freaking breathe and stay present.
She jerked her head in a nod and stepped out into the hallway. Glancing quickly out at the dining area, she looked for Riley but couldn’t see him. That he hadn’t followed her to the bathroom, hadn’t stood outside waiting to hear if she was okay, should have hurt a bit, but it didn’t. Riley had known she needed a moment. He might not have known why, but he’d recognized her need for space the same way she was sure his fearsome grizzly bear needed space a lot of the time too.
She was going to have to leave him, run somewhere else, find another shifter group that had someone strong and ruthless enough to put her down, and that truth hurt. Knowing she had to leave him and his cubs, when just a few days ago it wouldn’t have mattered, hurt.
Bad kitty liked Riley. Marisa liked Riley. Riley seemed to like her. She understood none of it, but it was all true.
The hiss still willfully caught in her throat threatened to turn into a choked cry of crazy pain.
Being a shifter fucking sucked. Especially being a truly fucked-up shifter.
She took a breath, fortifying herself. Squaring herself by planting her feet firmly on the floor, Marisa raised her head to look at Haley, who was taller. “Okay.” Her voice wavered but held steady. “Lay it on me.”
Haley blinked. “Uh, lay what on you?” She sounded genuinely puzzled.
Crinkling up her brow, Marisa kept pushing bad kitty back to where she could just let Marisa be for a moment. “Everything. We haven’t talked since—that day,” she awkwardly stumbled over the memory of the terrible bridge battle. “But now’s a good time.” She glanced again down the hallway, calculating whether she could reach the front door before Riley or his kids saw her leave.
No. She couldn’t leave without seeing them again. Or without having this conversation with Haley.
“So,” she returned her attention to the confused blonde woman, “go ahead and let me have it. How much you hate me because of Justin. Because of what I did to him. And because of what that did to you,” she finished in a low voice.
Haley’s expression abruptly cleared. “Oh. Marisa,” she cocked her head to the side, a small frown creeping on her face now, “do you think I’m angry at you?”
Marisa looked cautiously at the other woman. Funny, because she was the one who’d really been the other woman in the situation between her and Haley, although naturally she hadn’t known, since as it turned out Justin was a lying sack of lying liar. “Aren’t you?”
Haley leaned back against the wall of the hallway, crossed her arms over her chest, and studied Marisa for a long moment. It was seriously uncomfortable. Marisa managed not to squirm. Still somewhat struggling to keep in bad kitty’s hisses helped with that.
Finally, Haley murmured, “I had a feeling he did it to you too. What he did to me. The games, the manipulation. Being a total psychopath, especially at the end. I never hated you, Marisa. Well,” she corrected herself, rolling her eyes skyward for a second, “in the very beginning, I did. When he told me about your existence, that he was leaving me for you, yeah, I hated you. But I had no idea who you were back then. I didn’t know about any of this.”
Haley waved a hand between the two of them. Now it was Marisa’s turn to stare at her, confused. “This…what?”
“Being shifters. I knew they existed because of my friend Pix, but I had no idea that’s what happened to Justin. I just thought you were human, like me. I had no idea you were a shifter and that you had turned him.”
That ugly truth thumped into the air between them, heavy and raw. Marisa didn’t answer at first. Clattering sounds, sizzling noises, and busy voices from the kitchen floated out, mingling with the swell of conversation from the dining room with the thumping new song on the jukebox that finally wasn’t country. She found herself wondering if the table she’d fled would be singing to this one too. Finally, she said in a low voice, “I didn’t do it by choice. I was forced to.”
To her surprise, a faint smile turned up Haley’s lips as she shrugged. “I know. That didn’t bother me. Well, it did because I really started to think about what that would’ve meant for you.”
“For me?”
Golden strands of Haley’s hair bounced on her shoulders as she nodded. “Yeah. Cortez told me a lot about being a shifter after he turned me that day.” A sudden smile burst over her face, lighting her up with a palpable joy.
What would that feel like? Joy at being turned? There had been no joy when Marisa was forced to turn Justin.
“Just being a shifter myself now, knowing what it was like when I asked Cortez to turn me, made me understand a little bit about how awful it must have been for you, turning Justin and losing him in the battle. Oh,” Haley swiftly changed topics. “I wanted to apologize to you for not talking to you sooner. I do have a deadline for my book”—Haley was an
author, which was amazing to Marisa, who could barely read, let alone fathom writing a book all by herself—“but that wasn’t the only reason.” She heaved a sigh. “I’m just a big chickenshit. True story. But I really am sorry. I should have come and talked to you sooner.”
Apologies. Actual, genuine apologies, to her. First Riley, now Haley. Marisa felt rocked by the amazingness of these things. Two people apologizing to her the same day when no one ever had apologized to her in her entire life. Was this some sort of record or what?
She turned back to what Haley had said. Suddenly, she needed to correct it. “That’s not all true, by the way. It wasn’t awful for me when Justin died. Well, it was,” she amended. But she couldn’t tell Haley exactly why. That was one of the dark secrets she still needed to keep close. “I didn’t love him, Haley. Not once, not ever. You’re right, he was a psychopath. A monster. And he became an even worse one after I turned him.” Something hot bubbled in her throat now. Not a hiss. “I have to apologize to you.” The words pushed out, thick with the heat of tears that fought against bad kitty’s subsiding hisses. “When I turned him, it made him worse. Because we weren’t mates. There was no bond between us. Not even attraction, not really. And apparently if you turn someone without it being because you love them, it makes your animal go crazy.”
She whispered those last words. Partially because the tears were clinging to her throat, partially because it was a horrible admission. A terrible, terrible truth.
“I’m the reason he went totally insane and tried to turn you so you’d be forced to join the outcasts too, Haley. I’m sorry.”
Haley’s mouth had opened somewhere during Marisa’s rapid speech, but not like she was shocked. More like she was trying to say something. But instead of speaking, she suddenly moved forward and pulled Marisa in for a hug. A tight, clutch-y, girlfriend-y type of hug.
Marisa did hiss this time, shock ricocheting through her. She struggled for half a second then stopped. Haley had already let go, stepped back. Back against the wall, watching Marisa with a solemn face.
