by T. S. Joyce
She could hear cheering now over the engine noise. They had to be close.
Come on! Hold on, just a little bit longer.
Haydan let off the gas and let out a whoop.
“No!” Denison yelled.
Cassie cracked her eyes open and spat out a glob of dirt that had shot into her mouth at some point. “Did we win?”
“We won, baby!”
Haydan cut the engine and dismounted, then scooped her up just as the others got there. He hoisted her up on his shoulder like she weighed nothing at all and bounced to the sound of her name being chanted by the Ashe Crew.
Drew handed her a paper cup of whiskey, and other shots were lifted in the air.
The chanting morphed from, “Cassie, Cassie,” to, “Denison didn’t win! Denison didn’t win!”
She couldn’t stop laughing. Her abs hurt from it. She downed her winner’s shot between chortling and chanted along, “Denison didn’t win!”
Denison was below her, nodding and trying to hide a grin. “Next time, Goldi! I’m gunning for you next time!”
The raucous lessened, and Haydan settled her on the ground. A few of the crew gripped her shoulders and clapped her on the back in congrats. Brooke hugged her tightly.
Cassie looked around as her heart latched onto these people even more. She’d been sure she would only watch from the outskirts of the crew, but they’d let her inside. She was baffled, but grateful as the warmth of belonging spread from her middle all the way to her fingertips.
Brighton draped his arm across her shoulders and rasped out, “You did good. About time my brother got shown up on something. He’s been on a streak. It’s not good for his ego, you know.”
She could barely hear him over the others, and Cassie froze as something awful slithered in her gut. A memory she’d been scratching at since the first time she’d seen Denison and Brighton. He’d never talked to her before, but she’d just thought he was quiet. She hadn’t guessed he was a mute.
Horror dumped into her system as she rounded on him. “Brighton?” she whispered, throat clogging with the pounding of her heartbeat. “Why can’t you talk?”
His dark brows drew down in confusion. Searching her face, he lifted his chin and exposed a scar on his neck, half hidden by the short scruff on his face.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. She couldn’t breathe. She scrabbled with the hem of his shirt, lifting it.
He grabbed her hand. “What are you doing?” he whispered, the words sounding painful to get past his vocal chords.
“Please!”
Brighton took a step back and stared in panic between her and Denison, who’d gone quiet beside him.
Desperate, she pulled up her shirt to expose her own shame—her own scars.
“Oh, my God,” Denison muttered, his voice going thick.
The look of worry fell from Brighton’s face as he shut down completely. He lifted his shirt slowly, exposing the bottom rows of scars that looked like tiger stripes up one side of his torso.
A sob escaped her as she threw her arms around his neck. “Thank you. You let us out, and I never got to thank you.”
“What’s going on?” Haydan asked.
The others had all gathered around by now.
“The Menagerie,” she sobbed. “Brighton and Denison let us out of the Menagerie when they escaped.”
“What the fuck is the Menagerie?” Haydan asked, horror seeping into his voice.
“I can’t…” She let Brighton go and threw her arms around Denison.
“I don’t remember much about it,” Denison said low, his hands gentle on her back. “I’m sorry.”
She was ripping apart. Her insides were burning, shredding, as memories of that awful place crashed down on her in wave after wave, relentless and unbearable.
Brighton looked as tortured as she felt, and his eyes lightening by the second. “You’re the little girl I saw through the window.”
Unable to speak around the lump in her throat, she nodded.
Every muscle in Brighton’s body had gone rigid as his mate Everly rubbed his back and looked at Cassie with such worry. He flinched away from her and strode off toward the trees. Stopping a few yards off, he turned. “Reynolds is dead,” he said in that broken voice of his. “Denny and I killed him.” Then he turned and strode off into the shadows without looking back.
Justice. Retribution. Revenge.
She hoped Reynolds had suffered.
He deserved nothing less than a painful end.
She followed Brighton’s escape with her eyes until he disappeared into the night.
“Cas, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Haydan murmured. “Are you okay?”
Was she okay? She’d just met the two men who had released her and Matt and all the others from that awful facility. She remembered Brighton now. Sixteen, maybe seventeen, bleeding profusely from his throat, a look of madness in his eyes as he’d dragged his brother down a hallway strewn with the bodies of the torturers he’d ripped apart. She and Matt and Jake had been in the waiting room, marked for another round of tissue samples, when he and his brother had made their escape.
“Don’t,” Matt had said when she approached the bullet proof glass, but she had to try. If those berserkers left after killing everyone, who would let them out of their cages? Who would set them free? Watching them rip bodies apart had been terrifying, but risking their wrath was worth it if she and the others could see sunlight again.
“Hey!” she’d screamed in her squeaky kid voice as she banged on the window pane. “Let us out of here. Please!”
The boy, Brighton, bloody and wild-looking, had turned toward the window with a snarl on his lip.
“Please,” she’d repeated, hands and face pressed on the glass.
Brighton had shifted Denison’s weight to hold his brother’s arm over his shoulder. The boy had smashed the keypad over and over with his closed fist. And when the thing was nothing but shattered pieces, the mechanism in the door had clicked and the barrier that held them trapped had opened a crack.
Brighton hadn’t said a word. He’d just dragged his brother out of the Menagerie while she, Matt, and Jake had burst into the hallway and ran to release the others.
Ghost? Brighton and Denison had been ghosts. She’d often wondered if they’d existed at all, or if they were a figment of her desperate imagination while she’d been in the throes of pain.
Her whole body shook, and she backed away slowly from the confused faces of the Ashe Crew. She’d remember this moment for always. The moment when they realized how damaged she was and kicked her from the bosom of the crew to the outside where she belonged.
Her bear was shredding her, clawing her from the inside out, in an attempt to flee the pounding memories of the Menagerie.
She turned to run, but Haydan caught her arm. With a snarl, she jerked out of his grasp. “No touching,” she choked out, then ran as fast as her legs could carry her.
No touching because touch made her weak. Matt had taught her that being weak would get them killed.
No touching because she was broken up inside, like the shards of that keypad.
No touching because people like her were better off alone.
No touching because Haydan’s gentle affection had destroyed her and made her weak in two days’ time.
She’d known better, but she’d been stupid anyway, allowing him into her soul to scratch around at all the locked-up doors she’d erected. Poking and prodding until her old wounds were open again and seeping.
Jake had been a good mate for her. Unfeeling, like her. Fucking her when she needed to get out of her own head, instead of playing some mind game, trying to convince her she could be saved. Oh, she knew what Haydan had been trying to do, and she’d even wished for his success for a little while. He’d been wrong, though. IESA and their damned Menagerie of shifter experiments had turned her wild and irreparable—a pretty face with an ugly soul.
Anguish pushed another cry from her throat as she ran
farther away from the lantern light. And only when she was surrounded by silence did her legs give out. Throat tightening, she locked her arms against a pine and cried in earnest.
“Tell me,” Haydan said softly from behind her.
“I can’t,” she wailed. Holding her stomach, she leaned her forehead against the rough bark of the tree.
“You have to.”
“Help me,” she murmured as soft as the wind. Desperation clawed at her to feel…less.
“What can I do?”
Cassie spun around and faced him, then pulled her shirt over her head. “Just once. Just stop this one, and I’ll try harder tomorrow.”
Haydan shook his head slowly back and forth. “I can’t do that, Cas.”
She pulled the button of her jeans and kicked out of her shoes. Haydan took a step back. She shimmied out of her panties and jeans and threw her bra into the brush beside her. Fingers trembling, legs numb, heart breaking.
She hated herself for doing this to him. For involving him, but she hadn’t the tools to fix her mistakes now. “How do you want me?”
His response was immediate. “Happy.”
Another slash of pain through her chest nearly bowed her. Haydan was too good for her.
“I mean, how do you want me? Bear or girl.”
Haydan took another step back as she turned and fell forward on her hands and knees. “Bear or girl, Haydan?”
She looked back at him over her shoulder. The blue moonlight illuminated the horror in his dark eyes. With a scream, she arched her back as her bear exploded from her. Small with black fur. Her claws dug into the earth with the pain of the Change, but the animal was just as damaged as her human side. Shrinking back into her human skin, she gasped at the pain, then whispered, “Bear or girl, Haydan,” the words burning her tingling throat as her Change began again.
Bear.
Girl.
Bear.
Girl.
And every time she found her mind clear enough, she begged, “Please, Haydan, make the pain stop. Save me. Help me.” She hated herself. Hated everything.
Haydan was leaning back against a tree, staring at her with such sadness. Moisture rimmed his eyes, and spilled to his cheeks. He got it now. She could see it in his face. Now he understood she couldn’t be saved.
Her heart shattered, and she sobbed as she crumpled to the earth. “Please,” she squeaked out, just like she’d done when she’d begged Brighton to release her from that place. “Help me.” Haydan could make the memories go away if he’d only give in.
He squatted down against the tree, hands over his mouth as he shook his head. “I can’t do that to you, Cas. It won’t help you.”
“It will. You don’t know, but I do,” she sobbed. “It will.”
He stood so fast he blurred and reached her in four long strides. Yanking her upward, he kissed her. His lips crashed against hers, over and over. Yes, she’d won! This was it. But when she reached for the fly of his jeans, he grabbed her wrists and pushed her backward until her spine slammed against a tree. Arms pinned above her head, he angled his face and brushed his tongue against hers.
She melted a little.
The edges dulled.
This wasn’t right.
His lips softened against hers as his mouth moved, tasting, sipping, calming.
No, no, no. This wasn’t how this was supposed to work.
She was supposed to go numb, not feel more.
Perhaps he was compromising.
“I’m okay with missionary style.” A desperate move, but she could practically feel his resolve softening.
“We’re not having sex right now,” Haydan said, trailing kisses down her neck as he squared up to her. Wrapping his arms around her, he hugged her close. So close, she had trouble pushing him away.
“But you said missionary. I agree to that. I want that.”
“Not now, Cas. It won’t help, and I’m not enabling you to avoid dealing with your past. Tell me.”
“I told you I can’t! I can’t, Haydan!” She shoved him hard and glared at him. He’d betrayed her. Teased her with release.
She marched off in the direction of the trailer park. Tears burned her eyes and blurred her vision, but she wiped them with the backs of her hands as she stooped to pick up her clothes.
She was angry, confused, and trying desperately not to think about the Menagerie and Jake and all the others IESA had hunted down one by one.
“Brighton and Denison were hurt, too, Cas, and you know what helped them?” he called from behind her. “Talking about it to someone. One person. Pick one and share it. Get that shit out of you. Because this, what you’re doing now, will never fix you. It’ll never help. It’ll only mask the pain.”
“I’m going into town, and I’m taking your Jeep. Don’t you try to stop me. I need time alone, away from here where I’ve got so mixed up.”
Haydan was on her like a shot. He spun her around and hugged her painfully tight. “I know why you’re going into town, Cas. You’re going to find what I won’t give you, but know this. I love you.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I do,” he gritted out right next to her ear. “I fucking love you so much that I won’t hurt you with sex. When we’re intimate, I want it to mean something more than an escape. I love you, Cas, and if you do this, it’ll hurt me.”
Twin tears tracked down her cheeks as she pulled away from him. Miserably, she shrugged one shoulder up to her ear and dropped her gaze to his shoes, unable to look him in the eye when she whispered, “I’m sorry.”
As she turned away and left him there in the woods, her heart broke the rest of the way because, after tonight, there would be no redemption for a monster like her.
Chapter Eight
Cassie brushed her fingertips absently over her lips where Haydan had kissed her so thoroughly. She’d had time to settle on the drive to Sammy’s, and all of her big plans to ruin her life hadn’t seemed so worthwhile by the time she’d walked through the doors of the old bar.
Haydan loved her.
And what baffled her even more—she felt the same. She was capable of love. Capable of feeling emotions like other shifters. Capable of making him happy if only she could be brave enough to give him all of herself.
He hadn’t been using sex as a weapon like she’d thought. He just cared enough to not enable her as Jake had done. Haydan was taking the hard road. The one where he had to deny the woman he loved, even when she begged him to take the pain away. Not because he wanted to see her hurting, but because he wanted to see her get stronger.
Her emotions had been running high when he’d kissed her, but now his lips were hard to stop thinking about. That curious, fuzzy feeling filled her stomach every time she imagined how connected she’d felt to him when his lips had touched hers. With that kiss, he had shown her he loved her before he had told her he did.
And she’d threatened to throw it away.
Level-headed man that he was, Haydan had let her go. Whether she was foolish enough to find a bedmate to give her that fix she craved, or strong enough to deny the urge and come back to him, he was trusting her to make the decision on her own. Why? Because he couldn’t fix her if she didn’t want to be fixed.
Haydan had done this before, of that she was sure. With his father, perhaps. He’d looked tortured when she’d been begging him for release in the woods, but he’d stood his ground. And she was damn proud of him for it.
Haydan was too good for her by a lot, but maybe if she tried hard enough, for long enough, she could be okay for him. She could be okay for her.
“Hey there, pretty lady,” a man in a backward baseball cap with glossed over eyes said in a slur as he leaned onto her booth in the corner. “Can I buy you a drink?”
She looked him up and down. He was an easy mark, but the urge to be with anyone other than Haydan didn’t exist anymore. “I already have one,” she said, gesturing to the cranberry vodka she’d been nursing for half an hour.
“Well, is this seat taken?”
“Yeah.”
The man’s face fell into a frown as he looked at the empty bench across from her. “Well—”
“Get lost, dipshit.” A giant of a man yanked the guy back by his collar, then slid into the empty seat with a humorless grin.
“I’m not interested in whatever you’re selling,” she said, taking another sip of her watered down cocktail.
“Good. Makes my job easier. I’m Kong.”
She smelled it then. Fur. And when she looked up into his eyes, they were churning an eerie light green color. Shifter. “Kong?” she asked, cocking her head. “Gorilla?”
The corner of his mouth curved up in a smile as he leaned back against the wall and stretched his legs out across the seat. He plucked a pair of aviator sunglasses from where they rested on his dark hair and slid them over his eyes. There. Now he looked more human.
“I know Haydan,” he said in a gruff voice as he traced the woodgrain in the table.
“How? You aren’t Ashe Crew.”
“Ah, see, from what I hear, you came from one of those backwoods crews. The messed up ones where the alphas don’t play by the same rules as the rest of us. Pity, but that ain’t the way things have to be. Crews around here get along. Ashe Crew, Gray Backs, Boarlanders…” He placed his hand on his chest. “Lowlanders. We’re all registering to the public, and numbers keep us safer in case any of those IESA mother fuckers are still lingering about, rebuilding their little government agency. But you know all about that, don’t you?”
Kong knew an awful lot about an awful lot. Cassie narrowed her eyes. “Where are you getting all your information?”
“Outside of my crew, Matt’s one of my best friends.”
“And he’s talked about me?”
The smile drifted from his lips as he nodded once.
Fantastic. “Do all gorilla shifters gossip, or is it just you?”
“Ah,” he said, batting away the sting of her insult. “It ain’t gossiping if you’re listening to a friend.”
“So, Matt talks to you then?” She lowered her voice and leaned forward. “About what happened to us?”
