by S. M. Reine
Gage rubbed his hands over his face. “I’ve never been changed like that before. Against my will by someone else.”
Deirdre ran her tongue over her teeth, trying to think of something to say that would console him. Pointing out that the world was a terrible place wouldn’t help—but that was all she could think. The world is a terrible place and terrible things happen to all of us. Get over it.
“You didn’t tell me you’re a bear,” Deirdre said. “Or that you were a shifter before Genesis. I didn’t think that was possible. There were only werewolves before, weren’t there?”
“Mostly. Ursine shifters were rare—my dad used to tell me that we were the only ones. But we existed. It’s genetic. So my dad was ursine, my sister was ursine, and me…” Gage let out a low groan. “We change every new and full moon. Just like werewolves. The fact that it isn’t communicable is a gift, but we’re still cursed with changing on the moons.”
“What else?” Deirdre asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Rylie didn’t want to send you along with me. She thought it was a problem. I figured she was being protective of you, like you’re her son, but that’s not it. Something’s wrong with you.”
Gage gave a short laugh. “You know what bear shifters are called? Like how swan shifters are swanmays, or how seal shifters are selkies?”
“Werebears?” Deirdre guessed, only half-joking.
“Berserkers. Heard the term?”
“Never.”
“You’re lucky. All bear shifters are moon-sick. We snap.”
“I don’t see you as the snapping type,” Deirdre said.
“That’s why I ended up with Rylie. When I hit puberty, the hormones made me nuts. I got violent. Couldn’t stop snapping. Rylie and Abel took me in, taught me to be…not a monster.” He fixed Deirdre with a hard look, an intense look. “They’re good. They’re the best. Nothing they did was meant to hurt you, or anyone else.”
“I know.”
“All those angry things you said to Stark in the basement were convincing,” Gage said.
“That’s because I meant them. Every last bit.”
He turned back to the window. Glared out at the courtyard. “This was a mistake.”
“I’m inclined to agree.” Deirdre pushed on his shoulder, forced him to face her. “The killing thing isn’t right. That’s not how you change the world. Not for the better, anyway. But maybe Stark’s got a point about needing the change at all. Have you considered that?”
Gage started shaking his head as soon as she spoke and kept shaking. “No. No way.”
She didn’t stop. “I know Rylie didn’t do it on purpose, but that doesn’t change what she’s done to so many shifter children.”
“And it doesn’t change what she’s done for me,” Gage said. “For every shifter she’s hurt, there are more who have benefited from her kindness directly.”
“When’s the last time you polled for her approval ratings?”
“If you’re going to turn on Rylie, fine. I get it. I know I can’t change your mind. Defect if you want to. Go back to Jolene. But tell me you’re not going to help Stark.” Gage grabbed her arm roughly. “I need to hear it.”
Deirdre gave him a level look. “You don’t scare me. I’ve dealt with much bigger douchebags than you today.”
“You should be scared,” he said. “I’m one bad mood away from killing you.”
“Could you kill me before I draw my gun?”
Gage slammed his fist into the window frame. It cracked, and the whole room shook. “You don’t want to find out.”
Deirdre sighed, stroking a hand down his shoulder, over the rigid lines of his bicep, all the way to his clenched fist. “Chill out.” She petted him again, and again, and on the third stroke, tension eased out of his muscles.
“Rylie’s saved my life,” Gage said. “I’m not safe without her temperance.”
“Without her Alpha control, you mean. She holds your beast, doesn’t she?” Deirdre asked. He nodded stiffly. “So now you’re away from her, you can change at any moment?” Another nod.
No wonder Rylie had wanted to keep him at the sanctuary.
“Stark hit me twice,” Deirdre said. “His guard, Jacek, cornered me in the bathroom.” Gage looked alarmed, but she said, “I’m fine. It’s what I expected. These people are evil, Gage. You know where my beliefs align.”
He stared at her eyes, as though she were the one with powers of compulsion and she’d caught him in her net. “Do I?”
Someone knocked on the door twice then pushed it open.
Niamh stuck her head in. “Are you having sex?”
Deirdre stepped away from Gage. “No. Why? Should we be?”
“With the kind of thumping you two are making, I was kinda hoping,” Niamh said. “Keep the domestic violence to a minimum.”
“I’ll try,” Deirdre said.
“Great. Anyway, it’s getting to be sundown, which means time for lights out. We’ve got to keep it dark so that nobody realizes the building is occupied. No lights above the basement after sunset. Sorry.”
“No, I get it,” Deirdre said. She flipped the lights off. The moonlight was bright enough to shine through the windows, so she could see once her eyes adjusted.
Niamh pulled a deck of cards out of her back pocket. “We can hang out in the courtyard, if you want. We’ll get more moonlight out there. Play some blackjack like we used to.”
Deirdre glanced at Gage. He was slumped against the wall again, as if their argument exhausted him.
Playing cards sounded better than hanging out with Rylie’s finest, but she had other plans. “Actually, could we go back to No Capes? I want to read that Godslayer comic. I’ll wash my hands and do the white glove thing, I promise.” Deirdre crossed her heart.
In truth, she didn’t care what was happening in any comic book. She needed a phone, a way to tell Rylie about Stark’s location in New York, the numbers that were living in his house. Rylie might even know what to do with the information about the benefits office.
Niamh laughed. “I wish we could go read! You would not believe the direction the story’s taking. Unfortunately, you’re a new recruit. You’re housebound until Stark says it’s okay for you to wander off. Safety thing, you know.”
“How long does that usually last?” Deirdre asked.
“Couple weeks? He didn’t keep me for long, maybe three days. He thought people would notice if I wasn’t at my shop for too long.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s funny how he thinks that anyone comes to my shop, ever. So…blackjack?”
“I’m actually pretty tired,” Deirdre said. “I should probably go to sleep.”
“You just want an excuse to crawl into bed with Gage,” Niamh said.
She had been trying not to think about that. But she forced a smile. “You caught me.”
“Don’t run him too hard. He’s probably beat from the shifting.”
Something else Deirdre had been trying not to think about.
“You’ll be back tomorrow?” Deirdre asked.
Niamh gave her a one-armed hug. “Of course. We’ve got lots of catching up to do. Plus, you know, dismantling the ruthless system that ruined our lives, of course.”
“Of course,” she said with a weak laugh.
The swanmay cupped Deirdre’s cheek in one hand, running her thumb lightly over the redness on her cheekbone. Her sympathetic eyes said that she knew exactly what had happened. “Don’t lose your nerve,” Niamh said. “I get that it’s scary here sometimes, but we’re doing the right thing.”
Deirdre nodded her agreement.
Niamh headed down to the basement, and Deirdre followed her out to the hall, watching her friend’s retreating back. Her feathered hair swayed with every movement.
The swanmay was tough on the inside, yet still so fragile compared to the sociopaths in Stark’s pack.
Deirdre wanted to shout a warning at her. Tell her to run away.
But she let Niamh
go.
Deirdre slipped back into her bedroom. Gage was sitting on the floor in the corner. “Going to sleep there?” she asked. “Because I want to take the bed, and that makes my life a lot easier.”
“Yeah, fine,” Gage said.
“Great.” She grabbed her toothbrush. She dry-brushed and spat into the trashcan. Better than risking getting cornered by Jacek in the bathroom again.
“Pretty,” he said.
“What can I say? I’m a goddamn lady.” Deirdre grabbed a pair of sweat pants and a t-shirt. She changed into them with her back facing Gage. She’d lived in enough dorms that she’d never developed a sense of privacy, but she wasn’t quite so bold as to face him while stripping to her underwear.
“What happened to your back?” Gage asked.
“The patchy skin? It’s a birthmark.” A huge, white birthmark that covered her from the ridges of her shoulder blades down to her butt crack. She threaded her arms through the shirt. “A gentleman wouldn’t look.”
“Guess that says a few things about me, doesn’t it? Good thing you’re keeping such a monster out of bed.”
Deirdre laughed. “If you Hulk out while I’m sleeping, I’d have to keep out of the same city as you to be safe, I think.” Gage didn’t laugh back. She immediately felt guilty for bringing it up again. “Sorry,” she mumbled, wiggling into her sweats. She grabbed a pillow and comforter off the bed. “Here.”
Gage jammed the pillow behind his head and bundled up in the comforter. “Thanks.” He slumped on the floor, propping his feet up on the bookshelf. His head was already drooping. It looked horribly uncomfortable.
That wasn’t her problem. She wasn’t going to sleep with a berserker in her bed. What if he had a nightmare and shifted in his sleep? She’d never heard of such a thing happening before, but most shifters didn’t change when they were in a bad mood, either.
Deirdre shut her eyes, rolled over, hugged her pillow.
But even when she wasn’t looking at Gage, she couldn’t get his glassy-eyed stare out of her mind. He wasn’t a man on the brink of snapping. He was a man who’d dived into the deep end and was in way over his head.
There was no way she could let him sleep on the floor.
She sighed and rolled back over. Gage’s eyes were halfway open, staring at the wall.
“I changed my mind,” Deirdre said. “We’re both adults. I promise I won’t feel you up if you sleep in bed with me.”
“I make no such promises,” he said. He didn’t seem to have the energy to smile at his own joke.
“Yeah, right, whatever. Shut up and get in here. You look like you’re going to fall over dead if you don’t get real sleep.” Deirdre flipped the sheets off of Gage’s side of the bed. “Come on. Before I change my mind.”
Gage tossed the comforter away, dropped his feet from the bookshelf. “You sure?”
“Just keep your paws to yourself and we’ll be fine.” Literally, she thought.
He stripped his shirt off over his head, exposing his scars from the silver bullets. Once he was down to his underwear, he crawled into bed and rolled onto his side, facing away from Deirdre. He hugged the edge of the mattress.
She watched the lines of his back as he breathed, slow and deep. Two seconds horizontal, and he was already well on his way to unconsciousness.
“How’d that happen?” Deirdre asked. She didn’t have to say what she meant.
“I’ll tell you later,” Gage said sleepily. “It’s a long story.”
He trailed off at the end of the last word.
Gage was asleep.
Deirdre thought she wasn’t going to follow him. Not with a berserker in her bed, and especially not in a den of rebels who felt that friendship meant tossing one another into walls.
But Gage wasn’t the only one worn out by the day. The sleep debt and tension finally caught up with Deirdre.
The moment that her eyes shut, she was out.
Deirdre used to live in a house. An actual house in a normal neighborhood that wasn’t rent-controlled and owned by the government.
That house had a front yard with flowers and a back yard with a playground set with two swings and a bright yellow slide. Her father had often watched her swinging on it from the kitchen window, sipping sweetened iced tea and smiling.
He hadn’t been the kind of dad who’d play with her, and she’d been an only child, but she never felt lonely. Daddy was always there when she really needed him.
If she skinned her knee, he was outside with Band-Aids and her teddy bear before she could even start crying. And if she jumped off the slide and landed wrong, he always managed to be there in time to catch her. It was like his magic power.
“Any time you fall, I’ll catch you,” Daddy would say.
“I’m never going to fall,” Deirdre would tell him, even though she’d obviously just fallen. She’d always believed she was stronger than she really was. Stronger and faster and more sure-footed.
But when Genesis came, she fell. She fell hard.
Genesis had turned Daddy into a liar. He wasn’t there to catch her when she regenerated as an Omega. A shifter who didn’t shift.
He wasn’t there.
She tried to tell herself she wasn’t bitter about that, but she was. She still hated him for it. Deirdre’s body was missing its heart and she thought she’d never feel full again.
Deirdre woke up to a hand on her shoulder.
The haze of sleep blurred her vision, so she thought it was her father leaning over her for a moment. She forgot the last ten years, forgot dying from the Genesis void, forgot that she was Omega. She rolled over with a hum of satisfaction, smile blossoming on her lips.
But the hand was too hairy to be her father’s, and the arm attached to it was tattooed.
She blinked her eyes clear to find Everton Stark leaning over her bed.
The smile vanished instantly.
Deirdre sat up, sheets falling to her waist. “What is it?”
“It’s time,” Stark said.
She rubbed a fist over her eyes. Her cheeks were damp. Then she realized that there was a warm weight over her thighs, which curved around her body and cupped her hip.
Gage had rolled over at some point during the night and flung an arm over her body in his sleep.
Maybe all the crying she’d likely been doing in her sleep had woken him. It was humiliating to think he could have seen that and chosen to hug her in her sleep to make the crying stop. She barely knew the guy. He didn’t deserve to know her like that.
Deirdre carefully peeled Gage off of her, returning the arm to his side. “What time is it?”
“Three o’clock,” Stark said. “We’re leaving on the mission.”
The mission? Oh. The mission. The one where they were going to attack a benefits office and “make an example” of the people who worked there. Innocent employees who had nothing to do with Rylie’s agenda except executing it, which they had to do in order to pay the bills.
That mission.
Deirdre was tempted to go back to sleep, begging exhaustion or weakness or…whatever it would take to get the guy to go away. Lady problems. Lady problems always grossed men out. And Stark was one of the manliest of manly-men.
But then she worked her jaw around, trying to ease the remembered pain of getting slapped around by Stark.
The ache was a pretty solid reminder of what would happen if she mouthed off.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be right out.”
Stark left her to change. She donned a new outfit within seconds, and even the zippers and rustling cloth and rap of her gun bumping into the side table didn’t disturb Gage.
Deirdre pulled a black tank over her head and squeezed a leather bustier on top of it, lacing it loosely so she’d be able to move. It went well with the leather leggings and boots. She looked badass. Like the kind of rebel who was going to assault a benefits office in the middle of the night.
When she pulled her jacket off the table, she not
iced the box of silver ammunition that Rylie had given her underneath.
Deirdre traced her fingertips over the lid.
She didn’t want to kill anyone. Rylie had been pretty specific about the fact that she wasn’t there to assassinate Stark. But the guy had already hit her twice and cut her with a knife once. Their relationship slanted toward the violent.
And she didn’t like the way Jacek had been looking at her.
Glancing at the doorway—nobody had returned for her yet—she popped her gun’s magazine, wrapped her hand in an old shirt, and grabbed a silver bullet with the cloth as protection.
Her nose wrinkled at the stink of silver as she quickly greased the bullet and jammed it into the magazine. It was awkward to do with a t-shirt covering her hand. Took a few seconds too long.
Jacek stepped into the doorway. “Ready?”
Deirdre popped the magazine into her Ruger. “Ready,” she said. “Just loading my gun.”
“We’ve got weapons.”
“I like mine. I’m comfortable with it.”
“Well, come on, Princess,” Jacek said. “We can’t wait all night for you.”
She jammed the Ruger into the back of her belt, holding her head high as she followed him out. She resisted the urge to look back at Gage.
“How do your balls feel?” Deirdre asked. “I hope they still hurt.”
Jacek was on her in a flash, gripping her arm so tightly that the bone creaked. “I don’t know why Stark’s taken such an interest in you, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re nothing. Omega.”
He spat the word at her.
Deirdre couldn’t help but flinch. It was a reflex now—conditioning from all those years of having the word flung in her face by hateful children before they beat the living daylights out of her in the showers.
She wished she could have repressed that reaction. Jacek looked like he enjoyed her fear far too much.
There was murder in his eyes. It wasn’t the impersonal, casual kind of violence that lurked in the shadowy corners of Stark’s mind. This was a much more personal kind of murder waiting to happen. He’d relish his hands around her throat and the final squirms of her body under his booted feet.
