by Dakota West
“Kade,” said Daniel.
“—And I’ll rip out your heart—”
“Don’t kill him!” Charlie shouted, her heart in her throat. Not another one, she thought.
“Kade!”
Kade stopped talking but didn’t put Buck down.
“What do you think is going to happen to her if you kill him?” Daniel’s voice had an edge to it, a slight waver, like he was also having trouble controlling himself. Kade was breathing hard, his chest expanding and contracting so forcefully he looked like a bellows.
“If you’ve hurt her,” he said, then swallowed.
“Put him down, he can’t talk,” Daniel said.
Slowly, Kade let Buck slide down the wall until his feet hit the floor. When he took his hand off the other man’s beck, it was bright red and bruising already.
His eyes looked like they were flashing, yellow one second and gray the next. Standing behind everyone in a bathrobe, Charlie shuddered, wishing that she could do anything besides stand there and hope for the best.
“I’m here to propose a trade,” the man said. His voice still had that twang, but the glib, folksy quality was gone, replaced by hard steel. “Olivia for Charlotte.”
Kade punched the wall right next to Buck’s head, sending his fist through the wood.
Buck didn’t flinch.
Who’s Olivia? Charlie thought. Her head spun as she tried to make sense of this information. She still had no idea what was in the bag and she didn’t quite understand what Buck was proposing.
“Fuck you,” Kade said. His voice had gone dangerously quiet, and his face was inches away from Buck’s.
“Is that a no?”
“Get out of my house.”
“I know you’ve been looking for her for years, Kade.”
Kade picked up the plastic bag from where it had fallen and threw it at Buck.
“She’s just some human,” Buck said, tilting his head toward Charlie.
Charlie flipped him off.
Kade bristled, and Charlie could practically see the bear about to burst out of his skin, but he reined himself in, putting his face inches away from Buck’s.
“I would rather die fighting a hundred of you mutts than give you the girl,” he said. “If you want her, you go through me, and I will die before I let you hurt her again. Is that clear?”
Me? Charlie wondered, bewildered. Is he talking about me?
Buck shrugged. He was trying to look nonchalant, but Charlie could tell that Kade’s intensity had finally thrown the other man off.
“Have it your way,” he said, taking a step toward the door. “Just remember I tried to make it easy.”
Then he was gone in a flash, and Charlie could see a huge gray wolf running away from the cabin.
Daniel slammed the door shut and started pacing back and forth as Kade stood almost still, rubbing one hand over his head.
Charlie stood behind them, staring, wide-eyed. Her mind raced a hundred miles an hour.
Who’s Olivia? She wondered.
Then her stomach sank. Daniel said they didn’t have a mate, she thought. Is it because she went missing and they’re looking for her?
Charlie was much, much more disappointed than she thought she should be.
Finally, Kade looked over at her, then at Daniel, and then back at her.
“We should talk,” he said. “Let’s go in the kitchen.”
He turned and stomped out.
Chapter Nine
Kade
Kade wanted to rip something apart with his bare hands. He wanted to shift and run down every single fucking wolf in Cascadia until he found Olivia. He wanted to uproot every tree and turn over every boulder and tear apart every building until she was safe again.
“Kade,” said Daniel’s voice behind him. “Pants.”
His mate held out the jeans he’d shed just a few moments ago, and Kade took them. He put them on.
Strange, how Daniel was the one who kept him human sometimes.
“I’ll kill them all,” he said. His voice was quieter now, but it still shook with fury. “I swear.”
Daniel took Kade’s face in his strong, warm hands, squeezing.
“I know,” he said.
Kade interlaced his finger’s with Daniels and squeezed his eyes shut, forcing his bear down.
“Sit,” Daniel commanded, firmly but gently.
As he did, Charlie finally shuffled into the kitchen, her jaw set in determination. As she sat at the table, Kade could tell that Daniel itched to simply pick her up and put her down in the chair so that she wouldn’t have to go through all those painful motions, but that wasn’t going to fly with the strong-willed, independent girl.
The side of Kade’s mouth twitched. Of course the girl for them was a tough-as-nails broad.
Charlie looked from Kade to Daniel and back, her eyes wide.
“Okay,” she said. “What was any of that?”
Kade looked down at his hands. He had no idea where to start.
Try the beginning, he told himself.
“Olivia is my little sister,” he said. “I haven’t seen her in over ten years. Since she was seventeen.”
Charlie adjusted the neck of her bathrobe. She watched Kade, frowning slightly, like she was trying to put some puzzle together, but she also looked the tiniest bit relieved.
“She’s missing?” she asked.
“Sort of,” Kade said.
He paused for a moment, locking eyes with Daniel.
“She’s feral,” he finally said.
He looked up at Charlie. Most humans didn’t know that much about shifters, but he could tell from the look on her face that she knew what that meant, and how serious it was.
“Oh,” Charlie said. She looked down at her hands for a moment. “I’m sorry.”
“It was a long, long time coming,” he said. “She was never really happy.” He felt something welling inside him, some emotion he couldn’t name. It wasn’t anger, though that was close; it wasn’t exactly sadness or desperation or longing, but some combination of all three.
“Even as a kid, she wasn’t happy,” he went on. “I mean, we had good times, but she always sort of... seemed worried, you know? I remember once when I was twelve and she was ten she told me she’d been up all night thinking about the heat death of the universe.”
He shook his head.
“Not normal, right?”
Charlie rubbed one nail along the table. “It’s not that unusual,” she said. “Kids get ideas.”
You’re not explaining her right, he thought. You’re not getting across how strange and somber and sad she could be.
Kade shrugged. “She was odd, but everything seemed okay, at least until middle school. Then Papa got a new job, and we moved close to the state border with Nevada, and out there it’s mostly wolves and humans. This was right after shifters came out, so things were... uncomfortable.”
He examined a hangnail very, very closely, trying to figure out what to say next.
“She had one friend. Just this one girl, Matilda, and Matilda was a lion shifter but they got along really well, even though all the other kids bullied them really, really bad.”
“Did you get bullied?”
Kade shook his head. “I was good at sports,” he said, half-shrugging. “That kept them off me.”
He rubbed his face in his hands.
“Anyway, it went on all throughout middle school, up until high school,” he said. “Until, finally, one day Matilda was killed in a hit-and-run accident while she was crossing a street. In human form.”
Charlie gasped.
“Did they catch whoever did it?” she said.
Kade shook his head. “Nothing. We never even found out who it was, whether it was an accident or they were targeting Matilda.”
He swallowed hard.
“It pretty much broke Olivia. A week later she went out for bear time and just... never came home.”
Silence.
“I di
dn’t help her then, so I’m trying to help her now. I want my little sister back.”
There were tears in Charlie’s eyes, and she reached one hand across the table, covering Kade’s hand with her own much smaller one.
“There’s nothing you could have done,” Charlie said gently.
Kade’s hand tensed into fist.
“You don’t know that,” he said gruffly. “You don’t know the first thing about being a shifter and going feral.”
I could have listened to Olivia more, he thought. I could have beat the hell out of anyone who teased her, I could have made my friends her friends. But no, instead, she was my weirdo sister who I pretended I wasn’t even related to.
Charlie’s eyes flashed in anger, and he could see the muscles working in her jaw.
“You don’t know the first thing about me either,” Charlie snapped back.
“Did you have a friend who was a shifter or something?” Kade said.
Stop it, he thought. She’s trying to make you feel better. You don’t have to be such as asshole.
“Most of my friends were shifters,” Charlie said. She pulled her hand back, away from his. “They didn’t go feral, but most of them climbed into a hole filled with oxy or meth and most haven’t come back out.”
Kade let his gaze flick to Charlie’s steady brown eyes with that single gold fleck.
Why do I have to be such an asshole sometimes?
“I’m sorry,” he said out loud.
Charlie shook her head.
“Me too,” she said. “I just meant that people are going to do what they’re going to do. You can’t save anyone who doesn’t want to be saved.”
He looked at Daniel.
“I guess I wanted to be saved,” Daniel said. The side of his mouth twitched up.
Kade knew exactly what Daniel was thinking when he made that face.
“At least you made the benefits of being human seem worthwhile,” he said.
“I don’t think I’ll get my sister back the same way I got you.”
“I hope not.”
Across the table, Charlie wrinkled her nose.
“Is ten years a long time?” she asked.
Both men nodded.
“The longest I’ve ever gotten someone back from was seven years,” he said. “And that was pretty hard.”
That had been a bear, too. Kade still had a scar on one thigh from that job. Even after the other bear had stopped trying to kill him, it had taken him three days to be able to shift back. Kade had almost thought that he wouldn’t be able to anymore.
“The longer you’re feral, the less human you are,” Daniel explained, his soft voice serious. “You’re more and more violent, quick tempered, all that. After a while you can’t understand mercy or nuance or moral gray areas any longer. Everything is kill or be killed.”
Suddenly, Charlie jerked her eyes from Daniel to Kade, looking surprised at something. For a long time, she didn’t speak, but she seemed to be thinking something through.
Finally, Kade couldn’t stand it.
“What?” he said.
“Olivia killed those wolves,” Charlie said.
Kade settled back into his chair, listening to the slight creak of the wood under his weight. Charlie didn’t move, but her gaze just kept boring into him until finally, he had to say something.
“I think so,” he admitted.
“Why?”
Kade shrugged, crossing his arms over his chest. He hoped it had been for a good reason, but it worried at him constantly. Feral shifters were violent, sometimes for no reason, just like regular grizzlies. Except regular grizzlies weren’t nearly as clever or sneaky as shifters.
Also, real bears were never interested in getting revenge on people they’d gone to high school with, or people who they might have thought killed their best friend.
“I don’t know,” he said, finally. “I’m pretty worried about it, though.”
Charlie still looked like she was working through something, her eyes thoughtful, her brow knitted together.
“What is it?” Kade finally asked.
She sighed, then rested her head on one hand, like she was trying to hide her embarrassment.
“I thought it was you,” she finally admitted. “Back at the FBI, they told me that all the evidence pointed to it being a feral shifter named Kade Lessing, since you lived on the edge of bear/wolf territory.”
“So that’s why you were going to tranq me,” Kade said.
Charlie’s mouth dropped open, and Kade couldn’t hold his smile back.
“You saw that?”
“Of course I saw it, you were fifty yards away with a rifle barrel pointed at my face,” Kade went on.
Charlie turned white, then bright pink, her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.
Finally, she managed to speak up.
“Why’d you save me if you knew I was going to shoot you?” she asked.
Because you were in the alone in the woods and you weren’t afraid of me, he thought. Because you thought you were doing the right thing, and because the second I saw you I knew I’d fight every wolf in Cascadia to keep you safe.
Kade shrugged.
“Instinct, I guess,” he said. “Once the wolves were gone I could tell it was a tranq rifle, not the real deal.”
He made the mistake of looking Daniel in the eyes. The other man was smirking, just a little, and Kade knew why: he was brave enough to face down any number of physical threats, but wasn’t about to tell Charlie how he really felt.
“Sorry,” she said. “God, this is such a mess. I can’t believe how wrong the team was about everything.”
“I can’t believe they sent you in there alone with such bad information,” said Kade. “You should probably be dead right now.”
“It’s pretty strange,” Daniel chimed in. “Usually, we deal with this stuff locally. I don’t know why the feds would get involved.”
“This didn’t even happen over state lines,” Kade mused. “Some of the wolf ranches are in Nevada, but none of the dead wolves were from there.”
Charlie looked like she was thinking of this for the first time.
Then, Kade felt a deep itch of suspicion begin, somewhere in the pit of his stomach. He resisted it for a second, then gave in.
Why send her alone? He wondered. Why send someone so inexperienced and fresh that she didn’t even think to check that she was being followed by wolves?
The thought that someone had been careless enough to kill Charlie — and even worse, put a shifter on the hook for her murder — made Kade’s blood boil, his bear pacing and itching to get out.
Don’t tell her, he thought. She’s dealt with enough.
Charlie was fiddling with the sleeve on her bathrobe, worrying at the stitches. Then she finally looked up at Kade, then Daniel.
“What makes you think she killed them?”
“I can tell she’s been here,” said Kade. “A couple of months ago, I was looking for this feral fox and I saw some grizzly scratches on a tree. They were hers.”
“We can always smell who’s marked a tree,” Daniel said.
Kade remembered those seconds with crystal clarity. He’d been human, tiptoeing around the forest, tracking the feral fox, when he’d noticed the scratches on the tree, and there had been something so oddly familiar about them that he’d completely forgotten about the fox.
He’d gone up and sniffed the scratches, and Olivia’s scent had felt almost like a punch in the face.
His little sister, still alive. Alive and back in Cascadia, something he’d never even dared to hope would happen.
For a few years, there had been reports of a feral female bear that matched her description further south, in the eastern Sierras, but those had faded after a bit. In the first few years after she left, Kade had searched hard, but nothing had turned up. Finally, Kade had accepted that his sister was either dead or close to it, and that she didn’t ever want to see him again.
; So he’d joined the Army. The officers had looked at him a little strangely, but “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was still in effect then, so they didn’t ask whether he was a shifter and he didn’t tell them that he was.
Then Afghanistan, the roadside bomb that killed his team. He’d survived, shifted, and been discharged promptly once the higher-ups found out he was a shifter.
“They must have done something to her,” Kade said. He cracked the knuckles of his left hand against the wooden table top. “That isn’t how Olivia is. Was. Whatever. Even if she were feral, I know she just wanted to turn her brain off and be alone for a while, and she just forgot to come back. She was never vicious.”
He ran one hand over his short hair, feeling his heart ache for his sister.
“She’s not a murderer,” he said. “I know this looks bad, but it wasn’t her. I know it wasn’t.”
“Okay,” Charlie said. “So let’s get her back.”
Chapter Ten
Charlie
I have got to be losing my mind, Charlie said. The words were barely out of her mouth — “Let’s get her back,” — before she started to regret them.
You can’t just go around Cascadia, helping people release their feral, murdering relatives, she thought. You still work for the FBI, sort of, you know.
In front of her, Kade smiled properly for the first time since they’d sat at the table.
“I’ll get a map,” he said, and stood, walking into another room.
Charlie looked over at Daniel, still feeling baffled. She felt like Kade was hot and cold with her. On one hand, she had a hazy half-memory of him talking to her as he’d run through the forest, carrying her while she bled onto him after the wolf attack. She remembered the gentle way he’d put her on the kitchen table, and how he’d told her that she was going to be okay.
Plus, he’d fought two wolves and then carried her to safety. Neither of those things were easy tasks.
That was the Kade that was starting to make Charlie feel a little gooey inside. She understood why Daniel loved that Kade.
But then, on the other hand, there was the Kade who stood, arms crossed over his chest, as Daniel changed her bandages and fed her, as she tried to move around their cabin. That Kade didn’t seem like he wanted anything to do with her.
