by Marla Monroe
“Locke. I need you to stay with Serenity while Creed and I work on some things in his office. We’ll probably be a couple of hours.” Shayne turned to her and smiled, but it looked forced to her. “Why don’t you work on your plans for the bathroom? Show Warren and Seth what you want so they will understand when they start working on the cabinetry. Creed and I need to take care of some business that we’ve let accumulate.”
Serenity nodded, forcing her own smile. She didn’t believe for an instant that there was some pressing need for them to address. Shayne was keeping something from her. Maybe he’d decided he no longer wanted her or to share a mate with his brother. Pain inched through her chest, alerting her lynx to there being a problem. She stretched and snarled at the scent of Serenity’s pain.
She stood up when they did and turned to walk to the hall where the stairs were that led down to the basement level. Serenity forced herself to walk slowly when all she wanted to do was run. She had no desire to work on the bathroom any longer. Something was wrong, not only with her mates but also with her lynx. Something inside of her was building and it worried her. She’d slept far more than she’d ever been able to stay in bed. She was also eating more. Already her body was craving something sweet to eat. She ignored it.
As she descended the stairs, a cramp hit her abdomen that nearly doubled her over. She stumbled, but Locke’s hand caught her shoulder before she started to fall.
“Careful, Ursa.” He released her shoulder once it was obvious she’d regained her balance.
“Thank you. Call me Serenity. I’m not your Ursa yet.”
Locke didn’t say anything, but she could feel his curiosity as they walked across the large room toward the hall where Creed and Shayne’s new suite would be. She no longer felt a part of things and her heart cracked a little more. The weak link she’d had with Creed and Shayne no longer felt as strong. She knew they were close, but couldn’t tell what they were feeling. Before, she’d had a sense of their general disposition. Now there was only a vague awareness that they were there.
“Is something wrong?” Locke asked, his brows furrowing.
“No. I guess I’m a little distracted,” she said.
She rubbed her arms, her skin beginning to itch some. Her clothes were irritating, but she couldn’t remove them. Sure, shifters were causal about nudity, but not like this. She needed to distract herself until her mates returned and explained what was going on. There was something that involved her, she was sure of it. If she hadn’t felt so odd and her lynx wasn’t rattled by her pain, she would have demanded they be honest with her and talk, but she was afraid of what her cat would do if faced with the news that they no longer wanted her.
Freaking fickle feline.
She wanted them as her mates but wasn’t willing to allow the mating to go forward because of the anal sex. And that was all it was, just anal sex, but the lynx saw it as humiliating and a darker form of domination. She was having no part of it.
Warren and Seth walked into the hallway behind her as she entered the large open space that was to be the spa of her dreams. She felt empty inside in that moment, realizing that because of her mistrust of both humans and shifters she never had been going to get her dream shower. She never would have allowed anyone into her home to remodel the bathroom because she was too suspicious of humans and leery of other shifters. The bears surrounding her didn’t seem to bother her like they should have, but then she’d started thinking of them as hers. Bitter tears burned the back of her eyes. She hadn’t even had time to get to know them and already she was losing them. It was the only conclusion she could come up with as to why Creed and Shayne would need to hide what they were doing from her. They were talking about how to dissolve their partial bonding.
Serenity knew in that moment that she had to leave. Once she was no longer around them, the partial bon would slowly dissolve and the males would be free to find a true mate. She was holding them back. The partial mating with no hope of completing it had to be tearing them up inside. She wasn’t affected as they were since her Lynx considered them theirs without it. She was satisfied.
While she went through the motions of designing the spa with Warren and Seth, Serenity worked out a plan to disappear. As long as she was in the basement, there was no hope of escape, but once they returned topside, she could slip away. She wouldn’t be able to take all of her computer equipment, but she could download everything on her external drive and send a back up copy to her personal cloud space.
Her laptop would have to do for now. There was no way she could run with the desktop. She was thankful the males had been slowly slipping some of her things over. They’d managed to pick out her most prized possessions which included a picture of her parents and the little jewelry box that held her grandmother’s ring and the intertwined locks of hair she and her best friend had tied together, each keeping one as a promise to always remain best friends. Serenity missed her so much and wished she’d been there to help her figure out what was wrong.
While she had no idea where she could go, she knew the general direction. All that remained was finding the opportunity to carry out her plans.
* * * *
Creed ended the call and had to resist throwing the phone across the room. Shayne had been right. Her old Rufus was the one hunting her and had sent the Rouge Hunters after her, not to kill her or take her in to be judged. No, he wanted her as his own. Well, for his son. Why had the old lynx suddenly started looking for Serenity after all that time?
“He verified it?” Shayne asked.
Creed nodded. He was still attempting to control his anger and fear for his mate. When he looked up, Shayne had settled his bulk on the corner of the desk and was watching him closely.
“It’s her old Rufus after her. He is behind the Rogue Hunters. They are acting as bounty hunters to drag her back to him. They aren’t going to kill her or take her in for some infraction. He said that no kill orders have been handed down in the last six months. Unless a shifter is caught red-handed so to speak, killing someone, they have put a hold on all Rogue Hunters going after shifters while there is legislature in congress concerning us.”
Shayne’s brows furrowed. “What legislature? Why hasn’t he notified us? Does Da know about it?”
Creed shook his head. “No one knows yet. They plan to notify all registered shifter leaders this week. There seems to be a move to appoint a shifter council to govern us. It will be made up of only our kind with two human advisors to help us make decisions. That was all he could tell me right now, but he said the hunters here were contracted by Serenity’s Rufus to capture and return her to his den.”
“Why? I mean it’s been years now. Why would he be set on her?”
“I’m not sure. Since our friend said it is specifically for the Rufus’s son, then there is more at stake than a future mating. Either Serenity knows more than she’s told us or he found out something important about her and regrets allowing her to get away.” Creed felt sure it was the latter. He didn’t think she’d held anything back.
“Then we need to talk to her again,” Shayne said and stood up.
“I want to make a few more phone calls first. The information you dug up alludes to some sort of special situation or position. We need more information before we approach her with this. It will scare her to know that her old den is still after her and it will upset her to know that we’ve been searching behind her back. We should have gone and gotten her before we made the call to my friend. Now it’s too late to smooth things over so we might as well finish this and deal with her anger later.” Creed worried that she would see this as too strong of a betrayal to ever fully forgive and trust them again. All he could do was hope and pray they could settle things so she had that right to be angry with them.
Shayne stomped across the room then returned and pulled over the chair from behind the desk that Serenity had been using so he could see what Creed was doing. He could tell his brother wasn’t happy. Well neither was he.
Creed had never expected there to be so much trouble with finding their mate. He remembered Papa Bear had told him once and almost laughed out loud.
“Son, nothing you receive free is as precious as something you worked hard to be worthy for. Remember that when you complain about your good fortune.”
Yeah, I suppose that’s true, old one, but the price may be too great this time.
He pulled up the yellow pages on the Internet and did a search, looking for Serenity’s parents’ phone number. He knew where they used to live according to her, but didn’t know what her father’s name was. Asking her now wasn’t an option. Instead he searched for every Jones in her home town with the same prefix as her Rufus’s number. She had said he made everyone live in the same community.
“Write these down, Shayne,” he told his brother as he called out names and phone numbers.
“You’re looking for her family?” The other bear asked.
“I want to talk to her parents to see if they know something. I wonder if they even know that their Rufus has Rogue Hunters looking for their daughter. She’s called in occasionally to let them know she is alive. Maybe he got information of her whereabouts by tapping their phone lines.” Creed didn’t put anything past the bastard. He didn’t deserve to be a leader of a shifter group.
“There are eight different numbers in that area. We don’t even know if they have a landline. They may only have cell phones and that means that none of these will be related at all,” Shayne pointed out.
“If this doesn’t work, we’ll get Locke in here to do some hacking to locate cell numbers if need be. I would rather not involve him if we don’t have to. The fewer of our den who knows about this until we have the answers, the better it will go.”
They spent the next hour making phone calls but came up empty handed. They had one number that no one ever picked up on, but Creed didn’t hold out much hope with it being the one they needed. It was time to ask Locke for his expertise. He knew the Ruka of their den would be able to find what they needed, but hated to involve him. It bothered him that he and Shayne couldn’t keep their mate safe and provide what she needed without help.
“Want me to go get Locke?” Shayne asked with a frown.
“No. He’ll want to use his own equipment. I’m sure he’s got it set up behind even more firewalls than what he provided for this computer. I refused to allow him to make it so that I couldn’t easily navigate without providing proof of who I was every five seconds.”
One side of his brother’s mouth curved up. “He’s a paranoid bear that’s for sure. You know he’s going to give us shit for not involving him in the first place.”
“I know. I’ll deal with him later. Right now, we need to talk to Serenity’s parents and find out what her old Rufus is up to.”
“I’ll go find Serenity and make sure she is okay. I’ll tell Locke you want to talk to him since he’s with her.” Shayne stood up and stretched, groaning when he did.
As his sibling closed the door to the office behind him, Creed felt like stretching as well. It had only been a couple of days since he’d run in his bear form, but it felt like weeks. All the stress and strain of the last two days was eating at him, keeping his body on alert to the point that he felt wound tighter than a coil. Much more and he would explode.
As he waited for his Ruka, Creed went over everything he knew once again. Their mate had run off from her old den because her Rufus wanted her to mate someone she hadn’t wanted to. Had it been his son even then? Or, had that come later? Forced matings in the bear shifters rarely produced offspring. A couple didn’t have to be true mates, but they had to want to be with each other before the female would breed cubs.
He sighed. Evidently it wasn’t like that for cats, or at least the lynxes. She said that kits were born in her den. Of course she hadn’t said how many survived to adulthood. What possible reason could they have to want Serenity? What was special about her other than the fact that she was their mate and a gorgeous female? Why had they waited all this time to come after her? Creed couldn’t believe that she’d managed to stay hidden from them all this time only to be discovered just when they moved there. How old was she, he wondered? What would age have to do with it anyway? He was thinking in circles and learning nothing new in the process.
A knock on the door interrupted his useless musings. “Come in.”
Locke walked in and closed the door behind him with a soft click. His expression as always appeared perfectly calm and slightly bored if anything. Creed wondered how he would change when he found his mate. Creed had been the same way up until the night he’d scented his mate’s presence, then most of his staunchness had begun to melt.
“I need your hacking skills, Locke,” Creed said by way of greeting.
A slow satisfied smile tugged on the big bear’s mouth. “FBI, CIA, Shifter Agency?”
“Cell phone records,” Creed said concealing his smile. “I need some phone numbers.”
Locke’s smile fell and he screened his expression once again. Not before Creed saw the bear’s disappointment.
“It could lead to some higher hacking, but let’s start with phone numbers first.”
To his friend’s credit, Locke didn’t pout. Instead he cracked his knuckles and stretched his fingers before accepting the sheet of paper Creed handed him.
“Here is what I need and it’s urgent that we get these numbers immediately.”
“These are relatives of your mate, aren’t they?”
“Yes. Her brothers and parents. The landlines we called were a bust. That means they only have cell phones. This plays into the reason behind the Rogue Hunters on her tail.” Creed hesitated before sighing and realizing Locke needed to know more in order to cover all the possible bases. “Her old Rufus of the den she’s from is the one who hired the hunters to capture her and take her back there. He wants her as a mate for his son. We don’t know why but we need to find out and put a stop to this immediately.”
Locke’s brows shot up. “I don’t understand why you don’t complete the mating bond. Once you do that, he can’t mate with her anyway. It would be stupid to continue to try and capture her.”
“There are issues that have to be resolved before we can go farther with the bonding. We have reason to believe that even if she is completely mated to us, he will still want her. There is something special surrounding her or being mated to her. We’ve got to figure it out.” Creed had stood and was watching the other bear closely.
“I take it you are doing this without involving your mate’s input,” Locke said with a sigh.
“She’s already upset about the hunters. If she finds out who is behind it, I’m afraid she’ll run. The only way I could prevent that would be to lock her in our suite, and I don’t want to hold her prisoner.”
Locke nodded. “I need my own computers for this. I’ll be upstairs if you need me. I’ll call you the second I have the information you need.”
“Thank you, Locke.”
The other bear just nodded and left without making a sound. For a huge bear, the shifter was light on his feet. Now that he’d put that into motion, Creed wasn’t sure what to do next. There wasn’t anything more he could look into and he didn’t have the patience to deal with business right then. He wanted to be near Serenity. No, he needed to be near her. She was in danger and despite knowing that every bear in the den would fight to protect her, Creed needed to touch her and know she was okay.
Just as he reached the door to his office a loud knock sounded. He smiled. It had to be Serenity since the knock had been louder than was necessary and lower on the door panel than any of his bears would have knocked.
“Come in,” he called out and leaned back against the front of his desk.
His mate hurried into the room and closed the door behind her. When she looked up at him, unease shot the hairs at the back of his neck straight into the air.
“Hi. I need to work on the computer some. Do you mind? I can’t get behind on my
contracts,” she said looking at his chin and not into his eyes.
He narrowed his eyes. “You’re keeping something from me, what is it?” he demanded.
The way her eyes jumped from his chin to stare into his before lowering once again confirmed his assessment. She was holding back. What was she hiding? Anger began to boil in his gut. With everything he and his den were trying to do to keep her safe, it was an insult to him that she’d try to conceal something. That thought jumped up and bit him right back. He was the one doing the concealing. It must be his own guilt eating at him.
“I don’t understand why you and Shayne still want me when we can’t complete the bond. Having only half a mate isn’t good for you or your den. I’m worried. That’s all,” she said.
Creed studied her face then nodded. Guilt had gotten a tooth into him and was holding on for dear life. Once it began gnawing in earnest it would be difficult to keep his silence around her. Already the need to tell her everything rode him hard. He resisted though. First he would try finding her family and finding out what they had to say, then he’d re-evaluate telling her what was going on. Until then…
“Go ahead and work some, Serenity. I’m sure you’re behind since you haven’t been able to do much. I’m just clearing off some things anyway. You won’t bother me.” Creed walked back around to his desk and sat down, watching from the corner of his eye as his mate did the same.
He could feel her nervousness as if it were his own, part of the mating bond at work. He could tell she didn’t want him in there with her and that made him worry that she was hiding something after all. Why else would she be uncomfortable around him? He’d given her no reason to be scared of him and had done everything in his power to make her feel safe. The more he thought about it, the angrier he got.
When she started squirming and a slight whine escaped her mouth, he realized she was feeling his emotions and worked to calm down, trying to tamp down on the tenuous link they shared. It seemed to work because she stopped fidgeting in the chair.
