Chapter 15
Chapter fifteen
Warrick
The cut across my ribs was leaking through my fingers.
I drove with one hand on the wheel and the other pressed against it, watching the road and watching Lucy in my peripheral vision.
She had her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped around them.
Blood on her shoe—not hers. Scrapes across both palms. She was staring through the windshield with an expression I couldn’t read, and her scent had gone flat.
That bothered me more than the wound. Fear had a scent, anger had a scent, shock had a scent.
Flat meant she’d locked everything down so tight nothing was getting out.
I was shirtless and barefoot and driving fifteen over the speed limit, and if a cop pulled us over right now, I was going to have a very creative conversation about my evening.
“I need to make a call,” I said.
Lucy didn’t look at me. “Go ahead.”
I found my phone in the center console. Davan picked up on the first ring.
“Boy.”
“Davan. We have a situation.”
“Which kind of situation?”
“Two bodies at the Millbrook Animal Shelter. And another ten within a four-block radius. Our people should be able to scent where they are.”
I could hear him breathing. Slow. Measured. It was the breathing of a man who had been cleaning up after younger, stupider tigers for thirty years.
“Is this related to the case you’re working?”
I hesitated. “Yes.”
“Is this about that human girl? Scott keeps saying she’s got you distracted as all hell.”
I glanced at Lucy. No reaction. “It might.”
Davan sighed. “I hope she’s worth it, boy. Were you compromised?”
The question I’d been waiting for. The one that mattered more than the bodies. They couldn’t give us away.
“Yes, but it won’t be a problem.”
“Until you agree to take over, I’m still the Alpha here. I decide if it’s going to be a problem or not. Who saw?”
“My mate.”
Lucy’s head turned so fast I heard her neck crack.
Davan didn’t speak for a moment. When he did, his voice was different. Slower. “Your mate?”
“Yes.”
“She’s the human?”
“Yes.”
Another long pause. “So, our God has a sense of humor after all.”
“It’s not funny, Davan.”
“It’s a little funny, boy.” Then the warmth dropped out. “We’ll take care of the situation. The bodies will be gone within the hour. But we need to talk. Soon.”
“I know.”
He hung up.
Lucy was staring at me. “You said that before. That I’m your mate. What does that mean?”
My hands tightened on the wheel. I’d been waiting for this question since the parking lot.
Dreading it. Because there was no version of this answer that didn’t sound insane.
No version I could give her that was less than the truth.
If I lied now, if I gave her the watered-down version, when she found out the truth, she’d never trust me again.
“For my kind, some of us are sent a mate by our God, Rethaar. It’s not common.
Most tigers live their whole lives and never find a fated mate.
” The words came out clipped. I wasn’t good at this.
I was good at case reports and witness interviews, and the kind of silence that made people fill the space.
I was not good at explaining the thing that had rearranged every priority I’d had in fifteen years.
“When you do find them, it’s not a feeling.
It’s a fact. Your body knows. The tiger knows.
Everything in you resets to one job: keep them safe, keep them close, keep them. ”
“And you think that’s me?”
“I don’t think it. I’ve known it since the first time I caught your scent at the shelter.”
She stared at me. “My scent?”
I shrugged. “I’m a tiger Shifter. We’re very scent-oriented.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “I—You—I have no idea where to start, Warrick. Actually, no, let’s start with: you’ve known for days, and you didn’t think to mention it?”
“What was I supposed to say? ‘Hi, I’m investigating your ex-boyfriend, also I turn into a tiger, and you’re my destined mate, want to grab a coffee?’”
“Is it a choice?” she asked. “The mate thing. Did you choose me, or is this like … programmed? Like you can’t help it?”
“The bond isn’t a choice. I didn’t choose for my tiger to lose his mind the second we scented you.
That part just happens.” I paused. “But everything after that was a choice. Every time I showed up at the shelter. Every time I kept my hands to myself when my tiger was screaming at me to—” I cut myself off. “Those were choices. Mine.”
“Your tiger was screaming at you?”
“He’s very opinionated.”
“He’s in your head? Like … right now?”
“Right now, he’s telling me that your scent says you’re not scared of me, and that I should relax because everything is fine.” I glanced at her. “He’s an optimist. It’s annoying.”
“My scent.” She said it flatly. “You can smell what I’m feeling?”
“Fear has a scent. Anger. Stress.” I hesitated. “Attraction.”
“Oh, God.”
“I tried not to—”
“You could smell that I was attracted to you? This whole time?”
“I tried very hard to ignore it.”
“Oh. My. God.”
Mate is embarrassed, my tiger said, delighted. Her cheeks are getting warm. This is excellent.
Please stop.
“So this morning,” Lucy said. “In the kitchen. When I asked you to kiss me. You already knew?”
“I knew you weren’t indifferent, yes.”
“Indifferent.” She pressed her hands over her face. “I asked a tiger shapeshifter to kiss me while he could literally smell how badly I wanted it. That is a level of humiliation I was not prepared for today.”
“You have nothing to be humiliated about.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one who’s been walking around broadcasting her feelings like a radio tower.”
“One, I found it fucking awesome that you wanted me. Two, you could have broadcast it from orbit, and you still wouldn’t have anything to be embarrassed about.
I’ve wanted you just as badly for days. When you asked me to kiss you, I had to use every ounce of control I have not to strip you naked and fuck you right there on the counter. ”
She was blushing again, but she went quiet.
I kept my eyes on the road and ran the route in my head.
Fourteen minutes to the cabin at this speed.
No vehicles behind us for the last six miles.
I’d been checking the mirrors every forty seconds; old habit, good habit, the kind of habit that kept people alive.
If Coleman had more men in the area, they’d have moved in by now. We were clear. For tonight.
The road unspooled ahead of us in dark trees and cold October sky.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. So. Mate. Tiger. Scent-based emotional surveillance. Anything else?”
“A few things.”
“Of course there are.” She dropped her hands from her face and looked out the window. Her breathing changed first. Shorter. Shallower. Then her hands started shaking. She pressed them flat against her thighs, hard, like she could hold them still through force alone.
“Lucy.”
“I’m fine.”
She wasn’t fine. And I could smell it now—the adrenaline crash hitting, cortisol flooding her system, her body finally registering what it had been too busy surviving to feel.
“Lucy. Talk to me.”
She shook her head. “You killed people. I watched you turn into … I watched your bones break and your face—” She stopped. Started again. “His throat, Warrick. You bit through his throat.”
I stayed silent. She needed to get this out.
“And the sound. When the first one’s neck—” She pressed her fist against her mouth.
Breathed through her nose, hard, three times.
“I counted them, you know. In the loading dock, while you were out there. I sat in the dark and counted the sounds. Like a fucking math problem. And I was fine with it. I was fine with it, and now I’m not, and I don’t know what that says about me. ”
That was Lucy. Not just the fear, the ruthless self-assessment underneath it. She’d held herself together through the whole thing, clinical and operational, and now that she was safe enough to fall apart, the first thing she did was interrogate her own reactions.
I turned onto the gravel track up to the cabin. Pulled in and killed the engine.
“I don’t know what to do with this,” she said.
“You saved my life. Those guys were going to take me, and I don’t know what would have happened if they’d turned me over to Andrew.
You saved my life, and I’m grateful, but I also can’t stop seeing it.
I can’t stop seeing your face change.” Her voice cracked.
“And the worst part is that I’m sitting here shaking and the only thing I want is for you to hold me, but you’re the reason I’m shaking. ”
I got out, walked around to her side, and opened the door. She looked up at me. Her eyes were red, her face blotchy, her hands still pressed flat against her legs, and all I could think was how fucking beautiful she was.
I reached over and unbuckled her seatbelt. Then I slid one arm under her knees and the other around her back, and I lifted her out of the seat. She pressed her face into my neck as her arms went around my shoulders.
The gravel was cold under my bare feet. I carried her up the steps, unlocked the front door one-handed, and walked through the dark cabin to the couch. I sat down with her on my lap. Her legs curled across mine. Her face stayed against my throat as I wrapped both arms around her and held on.
She cried. Quiet, steady, all of it coming out in hard breaths against my skin. I pressed my mouth against the top of her head and said the only things I had.
“I’ve got you. You’re safe.”
I held her, and the tiger purred inside me, and the cabin was dark and quiet around us.
Felony jumped up onto the couch, walked across my leg, and wedged herself between Lucy’s hip and my stomach. Lucy laughed. It was wet and broken, and it turned into another sob halfway through, and then she was laughing and crying at the same time.
“You do know you’re purring,” she said. Her voice was muffled against my skin.
“That’s the tiger.”
“It’s nice.” A pause. “You’re bleeding on me.”
“Shit, sorry.”
“We should clean your cuts.”
“Probably.”
She didn’t move. Her breathing was slowing, her body settling against mine. Her fingers found the edge of the scar on my forearm and traced it.
“I’m going to need a minute,” she said.
“Take as long as you need.”
“And you’ll need to put on a shirt.”
“If you insist.”
“I do insist. I can’t process interdimensional tiger courtship while you’re sitting there looking like that.”
Mate likes how we look, my tiger said.
I know.
Good. This is very good.
For once, he was right.