by T. S. Joyce
“I don’t understand,” Alison murmured, tugging the hem of her shirt into place.
Kirk strangled his sandy T-shirt and straightened his spine, then leveled her with that blazing gaze of his. “I should’ve waited to mark you. I should’ve waited until you knew everything.”
Her heart stuttered and ached in her chest cavity. “You regret claiming me?”
“No.” He huffed and shook his head. “But you will.”
Feeling like someone had just socked her in the stomach, she gritted out, “I’m pretty sure I won’t.”
“I’m not a good person—”
“Neither am I, Kirk!” Stupid tears burned her eyes, but she blinked them away.
Lightning flashed in the distance behind him as he watched her with an utterly baffled expression on his face, but hang it all, he was ruining this. And hang her if she let him see her cry. “I can’t even believe you’re doing this.” Alison strode for the woods, dashing her knuckles under her eyes just to make sure those fuckin’ tears stayed in place as anger, hurt, and sorrow pulsed through her veins.
“What am I doing wrong now?”
“Shutting down on me. Again! It’s what you do, right?” Alison tripped on a root and went down hard, but an instant before she hit the ground, Kirk was there, his arm wrapped around her waist. He set her upright. She shoved off him and screamed a furious sound. She didn’t want to be saved right now. “You push and pull and push again. And you tease me with these beautiful moments, and then retract them an instant later.”
“I’m trying to tell you I don’t talk easy, but I want to with you!”
She crossed her arms and winced at the pain on her shoulder.
He was to her in a flash, pulling at her shirt, exposing the puncture wounds he’d made. “You hurt different than me.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means I’m used to pain, and I hate seeing you hurt. I did that to you.”
Her shoulders sagged, and she sucked air through her tightening vocal cords. “Kirk, can’t you see? This,” she struggled to say as she gestured to her claiming mark, “felt like the best thing that ever happened to me. You telling me I’ll regret being bound to you hurts worse than any torn skin ever could. I wanted you to let me keep that feeling.”
Kirk shifted his weight from side to side, backing away from her slowly. “What feeling?”
“Happy. Safe. Loved. Chosen despite my faults. All of it. You are ice, Kirk.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can hold you in my hand and I think I’m keeping you. I feel you. But all the while you are melting and slipping through my fingers.”
He swallowed hard and looked sick. Eyes on the woods, he hooked his hands on his hips and shook his head for a long time. His nostrils flared slightly in the moment before he spoke. “I don’t want to be ice. Not anymore. Not with you. Bash told me once I need to pick a person to let in.” Kirk dragged his gaze to hers. “I always thought if I did that—if I let someone see all of me—they would run.”
“I’m not running.”
“But what if—”
“Kirk.” Alison stepped over the pine needle covered forest floor and pulled his hands from his hips, gripped them hard. “I’m. Not. Running.”
“I panicked a little,” he admitted low.
“Yeah, it sucked.”
Kirk ran his hands through his damp hair and linked his fingers behind his head. Chin held high, he looked down at her with a calculating look. “You want to see me?”
“Yes,” she said, void of hesitation. “No more hot and cold.” She twitched her head toward her right shoulder where her seeping claiming mark burned on. “I’m yours now. You picked me as your person when you bit me. Now let me the fuck in.”
His inhumanly bright eyes crinkled at the corners with his smile. “Okay,” he said, as if he’d just accepted a dare. Kirk shocked her when he threw her over his shoulder like a sack of mulch. “You asked for it.”
She yelped as he smacked her ass. “Kirk Slater, I’m not just some cavewoman you can drag anywhere you want. We’re having a fight. There are rules.”
“Don’t care much for rules. Admission one,” he said as he stomped onto the beach and toward the thin trail up the side of the falls. “When I was seven, I stole all of my half-brother, Aaron’s, baseball cards, because he was a huge douchebag, and I blamed it on my other half-brother, Byron, who was also a douchebag. And then they got in this huge, bloody fight on the front lawn of my house, and my dad got involved, and I still don’t feel guilty.”
“On account of them being douchebags?”
“Yep. Age ten I met a human girl in town while my mom was shopping, and when she asked where I was from, I told her Lowland Gap. She told me it was a commune for a cult, and I called her a titty-witch. I didn’t know what a commune or a cult was, so I snuck into my dad’s office when we got back to the house and researched it on the computer. It sounded pretty damn familiar, so I ran away from home.”
“How far did you make it?”
“Well, since I only packed three pair of underwear and five beef jerky sticks, not far, and my dad tanned my hide when he found me.”
“None of this makes me want to leave.”
“Give it time. Age eleven, the blackback in me started wanting to fight. So I did. I fought everyone, all the damned time. I even went after my dad, a fully mature silverback, a time or two.”
Alison let her arms go limp as they bumped and bounced across Kirk’s bare, flexing, sexy as hell back. “What’s a blackback?”
“A young male gorilla. I started fighting early and pissed off everyone in my cult.”
“Don’t call it that.”
“A cult is what it was, Ally. You should know that. Accept it. I wasn’t raised like you, or the Boarlanders, or even Kong. His mom took him away from their family group. She raised him in regular schools with humans. I only knew my family for the first half of my life.”
They were really high up now, so Alison closed her eyes against the dizzying height. “My mom used to get high before we went grocery shopping. She would be leaning against buildings as we walked there, and I’d have to hold her upright and make sure she kept up with her purse. I was in charge of getting groceries while she would be sagging against the shopping cart.”
“How old when it started?”
“I don’t know. I remember being really young when I started being embarrassed of her in public. Six maybe?”
“Jesus.” Kirk crested the top of the steep incline and settled her on her feet.
“My point is your unconventional upbringing isn’t a deal-breaker for me. Now tell me more confessions. I like this.”
Squaring up to her, he tucked her short hair behind her ear. “You like what?”
“Knowing you. It makes you feel more like home.”
Kirk huffed a disbelieving laugh and searched her eyes. He gritted his teeth, then said, “That’s because I haven’t told you the bad stuff yet.”
Alison slid her arms around his waist and hugged him tight. “You won’t scare me off.”
“No,” he rumbled. Kirk kissed the top of her head and murmured, “I can’t imagine much scares you anymore.” He turned her slowly in his hands and gripped her uninjured shoulder as he faced her toward the storm.
For miles Alison could see rolling mountains covered in a blur of green and brown, and in the distance, the storm clouds created a wall of dark gray. The deep rumble of thunder echoed across Damon’s mountains, and she leaned her back against Kirk’s chest as she took in the beauty of the place.
“This is part of me,” he murmured low, his cheek resting against her temple.
Her shoulder hurt with him pressed against her, but she maintained a straight face and didn’t grimace away from his touch because this was an important moment.
“I come up here when my head gets messed up. And when Clinton is pissin’ me off and I want to murder him. This is where I come when the guilt gets
too bad and I can’t control my Changes.”
“Why guilt?” she whispered, her heart breaking with his admission.
“I signed a contract. One that said I wouldn’t have sex with women, just in case Fiona called me up to head a family group. I didn’t want to sign it, not because I wanted to have sex, but because she was a new leader and had been killing off her opposition. I’d already slept with a couple women and didn’t like signing away something that belonged to me. I wanted to choose my family group and have them choose me, too. I denied her, and at the time, I was working in town, away from my family group because I was getting too dominant to stay in the same place as my dad. She had me taken and beaten until I signed it.”
“Oh, my gosh. How long did it take?”
“Three days.” He sighed. “I was to guard Kong with another silverback named Rhett. He didn’t have to be broken. He signed it willingly. I don’t know why. Maybe he thought he would be assigned a family group later or something, but I could see what was happening for what it was. We were being broken, like she’d done to her personal guards. I was there when they brought Kong in. She made me watch because he was going to be mine to keep in line. He was tortured for three weeks, and I was chained in the corner because I tried to stop it. Fiona thought it would be good for me to watch. She thought it would desensitize me. Rhett helped them break him, and then he helped bring in Kong’s mom, Josephine, and Kong finally gave in.” Kirk swallowed hard. “In those three weeks, something went hollow in my middle. All I smelled was blood, sweat, and pain. Something died inside of me, or got erased, I don’t know. I stopped feeling. I was telling Kong to just sign the contract so we could both escape that place, but he had been raised outside of our people, and he wanted a single mate. He wanted to keep his old life. And by the end, I was hoping he would stop breathing because…shit.” Kirk slipped away from her and stood five feet back, out of reach, like he didn’t want her touching him when he told her what he’d been through. “I was hoping he would stop breathing because I could see both of our futures, and they were empty. He would be saved for a massive family group. He would fuck them mindlessly when they went into heat, give all of himself to provide for them, and he would never connect with another living creature. Not really. And I would help keep his life dark. He’d known freedom. He’d been away from our people, and his mom had raised him in a loving environment. I only knew a half-life, and to get him back to accepting our fucked-up peoples’ ways, he would have to be dead inside, just like me. And I thought maybe if he just stopped living, it would be the easy way out. But he didn’t, and for the next several years, I limped along beside him, watching him wither, watching him pine for Layla, watching Rhett make his life a living hell. I was part of the torture, Ally.”
A soft, heartbroken sound eked from her throat. He looked wary of touch still, and his eyes were a light gold color now, so she sat and faced the storm clouds and waited. After a couple of minutes, Kirk sat beside her.
“When did you stop working for Fiona?”
Kirk drew his knees up and draped his arms over them as he stared at the lightning in the distance. “The day she told me and Rhett we needed to kill Layla’s guardian, Mac. He was old. In hospice care. And Fiona was pissed over the information Rhett had been feeding her about Kong sneaking off to be with Layla. Fiona wanted to hurt Kong by hurting his mate. And nothing could’ve hurt Layla more than the death of Mac. I couldn’t do it, though. I’d had enough. My survival instinct had been strong until then, but when we got to that point, I couldn’t hurt Kong. I couldn’t hurt Layla. When I told Fiona I was going rogue, she said she was going to kill me, and I believed her. With every cell in my body, I knew my days were numbered.”
“What happened to Layla’s guardian?”
Kirk’s lips pressed into a thin line, and he leveled her a vacant look.
“Rhett killed him, didn’t he?” she asked in a horrified whisper.
Kirk’s Adam’s apple dipped low as his gaze dropped to the ground. “I went to his funeral. Layla and Kong forgive me for it all. They’re good like that, but I still go put flowers on Mac’s grave. He was a good man, and my people ended his life just to hurt someone else. Gorilla shifters, they don’t care about human life like they should. Fiona trained them not to. She convinced them they’re a superior species who should just take what they want.”
“Do you talk to your family anymore?”
“Fuck no. I’m a traitor in their eyes, and that’s fine by me. I don’t regret leaving them behind.”
She was quiet for a long time, mulling that over. Kirk said it so flippantly, like his family group meant nothing to him now, but she knew better. “I used to beg my mom to stay straight for me. Beg and beg and beg. And she would change for a few days. A week. Maybe two, and I would get in this endless cycle where I believed her because I wanted so badly to feel like I was important enough for her to change and be better. And each time she failed me, I was cut deeper.” Alison scooted closer to Kirk and rested her head on his shoulder. “She was no good, but it didn’t change me wishing that she was. It hurts, tearing your heart away from the people who you are supposed to love the most, Kirk. It hurts for always.”
Eyes on the storm, Kirk heaved a sigh and nodded. “Yeah.”
“It makes it hard to let people in.”
Another nod. Kirk picked up a rock and chucked it into the river that was tumbling over the cliff ledge in front of them. “I was doing a bang up job until I came to work for the Boarlanders.” He chuckled darkly. “And then you came along and filled my hollow parts and now I can’t stop feeling. It’s annoying.”
She giggled and clamped her teeth over his arm, then rested her chin on it and looked up at him. “Ugh, feelings. So gross.”
“So gross,” he agreed, but he was smiling now.
“I still don’t regret it, just so you know.”
Kirk’s gaze drifted to her shoulder. “Does it still hurt?”
“Like hellfire.”
“You heal ridiculously slowly.”
“Yeah,” she said, shoving him back until he lay on the ground. “Being human is such a drag.” She straddled his stomach and grinned down at him.
He slid his hands up her thighs and narrowed his eyes. “This is the part where you’re supposed to be scrambling back down the trail to escape me.”
“Yeah, I chopped up bricks of coke in a dank room completely naked for two years. Sorry, babe. I don’t scare easily.”
“Mm. So you know, I’m going to have to fight more now.”
“Why?”
The smile dipped from his face, and then returned slowly. “Because you’re my family group now.”
“And your instincts tell you to keep in tip-top shape to protect me?”
He dipped his chin to his chest. “That’s right.”
“You know I can protect myself, right?”
“I do. My gorilla doesn’t care about that stuff, though. It’s ingrained in me.”
“Why are you smiling like that?”
“Because A—fucking you under the falls was awesome. B—you asked me to claim you, and C—I thought maybe this part of me would’ve been broken after what happened with Fiona. I was afraid watching Kong get tortured had killed my protective instincts. And maybe it did for a while but now everything is different. I would do anything to keep you safe and happy, because I feel normal around you. And for me, that’s a really big deal.”
“You feel like a normal silverback gorilla man.”
“Yep.”
She snickered and splayed her hands against his taut chest, locking her arms against him. “You’ve turned me into a criminal, you know.”
“Breaking the law,” he drawled, though he didn’t look guilty at all. “We can keep your mark to ourselves if you want.”
She fingered the healing skin of her bite on his chest. “I think we have to. They can arrest you if they know you’ve claimed me. And they won’t put you in some solitary confinement cell, Kirk. Th
ey’ll put you somewhere they can make an example of you. Somewhere you’ll be targeted by other inmates. I can’t be the reason you get hurt. I need you here with me.”
He drew her palm to his lips and kissed her gently. “Say that last part again.”
“Kirk, I’m serious. We could get in huge trouble—”
“Woman, I knew the risks going into this. I was forced to sign a damned abstinence contract and work a job I hated, and now I’m being forced to give up on claiming you? At some point I have to do what I want and say fuck everyone trying to run my life. It’s me and you now. We’ll keep our marks hidden and share the secret, just me and you. And when yours heals… probably in ten years, because look at that,” he said, brushing his fingertips near her shoulder and holding up his red-stained hand. “You’re still bleeding.”
She swatted his hand away.
“When your mark heals,” he continued, “it’ll be hidden by your tattoos. Someone will have to look pretty damn hard to catch us.”
“You got a claiming mark!” Bash yelled.
“Aw, shit,” Kirk muttered, sitting up quick and shielding her from the grinning titan who had just poked his head up from the cliff trail.
“Guys, I found them, and Clinton, you were wrong. They aren’t fucking gorilla-style! They’re cuddling, and she has a claiming mark!” Bash’s voice echoed across the mountains.
No, no, no!
Alison scrambled to pull the thin strap of her tank top over her puncture wounds as Bash climbed up the trail and turned to give Emerson a hand up.
“Bash,” Kirk rushed out in a hiss. “Keep your voice down. She isn’t supposed to have one.”
“Oh, yeah,” Bash said, slamming a big blue cooler down next to them. “The cops told us no claiming. But you’re the cop,” Bash said, eyebrows arched high. “That’s funny. Boarlanders got a cop mate now.” The dark-headed bear shifter frowned. “Or the Lowlanders. Does this mean I get to play with your gun?”
“Uuuh,” Alison said, “no.”
“Damn.”
Emerson was holding a small video camera pointed at Alison and Kirk as she sank into her mate’s lap and said, “I’m doing videos of our crew for when our baby gets older. I’m documenting everything so Bash and I can do a video documentary for memories. We suck at scrapbooking.” Emerson panned to the tumbling river in front of them. “Nice place. You ever jumped off the falls?”
