Chapter Thirty-Two
Maya
The huge dark brown wolf— Ryan—crawls toward me, his stomach flush with the ground and his ears flat as he lets out low whimpers. I can just about make him out through the haze of my tears. My heart pounds so hard in my chest that it feels like it could break free.
Ryan slowly moves into touching distance, and I throw myself at him, burying my face in his soft fur as loud sobs continue to rack my body. He carefully curls around me, and his warmth soaks into my skin, grounding me and wrapping me in a shroud of safety I thought I would never experience.
I don’t know how much time has elapsed when my tears finally stop and my breathing returns to normal, but I’m exhausted and my head pounds. The voice I have been ignoring since I first heard it rings out loud and clear.
Mate.
Claim.
Mine.
The words it has been telling me for weeks now, the ones I have been trying so hard to ignore. The words I don’t understand. But for the first time since they started, I can share them with someone else. I can ask questions and get answers.
A ripple runs through Ryan, and then crunching and cracking noises break the silence in the clearing.
I sit up and look down at him as his fur recedes and his body changes from being a wolf back to being a man again.
His eyes turn from gold to his usual warm brown.
There’s a crease between his eyebrows as he scans my blotchy, tear-stained face.
He cups my jaw, and I lean into his hand—into his strength.
“I thought I was the only one,” I whisper. My voice is a hoarse and broken thing I barely recognize. When was the last time I let my feelings out like that? When was the last time I felt safe enough to fall apart, knowing someone would catch me?
“You have an animal? You can shift?” Ryan asks, his voice careful and measured, as if he’s afraid to show his hand too soon.
His face is impassive, but his eyes gleam with anticipation.
I’ve spent years hiding this part of myself, and now he’s looking at me like I’m a beautiful, magical creature, not the monster I always believed I was.
I nod and Ryan’s face breaks into the most genuine smile I’ve ever witnessed. “I never saw you shift, so I thought maybe you weren’t a full shifter. Can I see her?”
Fear skitters down my spine, but Ryan’s hand is rubbing circles on my thigh, and the familiar fear of discovery I’ve been living with slowly ebbs away.
“I haven’t… I haven’t turned, or is it shifted?
” I ask, and he nods encouragement. “I haven’t shifted in years.
Not since the first time. I’m not even sure how to.
That time, I couldn’t stop it. I tried, but nothing worked.
I was so afraid of anyone finding out and what would happen to me if they did. ”
“Oh, Kitten,” he whispers, pulling me onto his lap and wrapping me in his warm arms. “I can’t imagine how awful it must have been to suppress her like that. She must have been itching to get out all the time. How did you keep yourself sane?”
I snuggle into his chest and breathe him in. “It was so hard,” I say as the memory floods back.
Fifteen years ago
“Maya, sweetie, you don’t look good,” Mom says, then gasps when she checks my temperature. Panic mars her features, and she wrings her hands before rushing to the door. “Oh, you’re burning up. We need to go to the hospital. Frank, come quick.”
“I’m fine,” I groan. I’m never sick. Never even had a cold before. Is this what being sick feels like? It’s awful. My joints ache, and my skin burns, but I feel like I need to move. Like I can’t stay in this house a second longer. “I’m going to go for a run.”
“You have a temperature of 106, Maya! You’re delirious.” She goes to the door and calls for my dad again. Then she steps into the ensuite and comes back with a damp cloth that she presses to my forehead while waiting for Dad. “She’s really sick. I think we need to call an ambul—”
“I said I’m fine!” I roar at her, and it’s so unlike me that Mom jumps back and clutches her chest. I need to get out of here. I need space. I need to run.
My head spins as I climb to my feet and stumble forward.
My dad grabs me by the shoulders and tries to talk to me.
He’s telling me to get back into bed, but I can’t.
I shake him off and push him away. He falls back against the wall, a look of shock on his face—as if I shoved him much harder than I intended to.
“Your eyes,” he gasps, and I turn to the mirror. My usually dark brown eyes are glowing yellow, like how an animal’s eyes glow in the dark. The aching pain that’s been there all day grows heavier and sharper.
I suck in a breath, but I can’t get enough oxygen.
Sharp pain shoots through me and I let out a scream, loud and visceral.
My legs snap, and I fall forward onto my hands and knees.
Mom is screaming, and it's so loud, so goddamn loud.
I turn to ask her to stop, but my voice comes out in a snarl, and when I glance down, claws are pushing out of my nails.
Fear threatens to drown me, but the pain keeps me rooted in the moment, unable to focus on anything else. What’s happening to me?
Stop fighting it, a voice in my head tells me, and I choke out a sob. I need to wake up. This isn’t happening. It’s a fever dream. It’s—
A scream that turns into a roar rips out of me, deep and powerful. My spine cracks, then feels like it’s growing, tearing, stretching into something new and terrifying. My clothing rips.
Pain. Everywhere. All at once. There’s so much pain. Time has no meaning anymore. I can’t think. I can only feel as my body rips itself apart.
I lie on the floor, unable to move, wishing for it to be over. I squeeze my eyes shut, and after what feels like forever, the pain fades away, and the world comes back into focus. Except when I open my eyes, I see so much more.
Without the pain to block out everything else, sounds are sharper, and my vision picks up tiny details I never noticed before. And my sense of smell… there’s something acidic that I somehow know in my soul to be fear emanating from my parents.
They sit on the floor, frozen and clutching each other. Dad’s mouth hangs open, and Mom is shaking as tears stream down her face. Their salty tang settles in my nose. I move to reach for them, but my hand is not a hand anymore.
A strangled roar tears from somewhere deep in my throat. My parents flinch and cower as I push to a stand, wobbling on four legs as I gaze into the mirror on the back of my wardrobe.
Yellow eyes framed in black stare back at me. Orange fur striped in white and black replaces my skin. I cock my head to the side, and my reflection does the same. I open my mouth and take in the razor-sharp teeth. The tiger in the mirror repeats every action.
I’m a monster.
You are majestic, comes that voice inside me. Louder now. It is more difficult to ignore than it has been since I started hearing it a couple of years ago.
“Maya?” Dad asks, and I turn to him. Pain contorts his kind face. What will they do with me? This isn’t what they signed up for when they adopted me. They wanted a baby. Not a freakshow. Not a fucking tiger. “Can you… Can you come back to us?”
But how? My room is so small now. I can barely move my much larger form.
How is this possible? I need to get out of here.
I need to keep them safe. I walk toward my door, step into the hallway, and awkwardly amble down the stairs.
Pippa is sitting at the table, headphones in, as she works on her laptop.
Oblivious to her sister turning into a freaking tiger.
Mom and Dad follow behind, shuffling around the table to Pippa.
Dad shakes her shoulder, and she throws him an aggravated look before her face falls as she takes in their serious expressions.
She takes off her headphones and then follows their gaze until she sees me.
She screams and scrambles out of her chair.
Dad wraps his arms around her, and I’m hit with an almost unbearable longing. Is this my future now? Will I always be a tiger? Or will I turn back? And what will I do either way?
I need to get out of here.
I cock my head toward the back door, but no one moves a muscle. My family stays as still as statues on the other side of the kitchen table. The table where we have eaten dinner together every night.
I can’t stay here now. They’ll throw me away like my birth parents did. Or call the cops and lock me up. They won’t want me anymore. That’s for sure. A low whimper escapes me, and I drop to my belly.
The jarring sensation of everything shrinking begins as my orange fur recedes to reveal pale, clammy skin underneath.
The weight of my large paws lessens, and I feel my bones crack and reduce in size with each agonizing pulse.
It's a sickening and exhausting process, a relentless pressure squeezing me inward like I’m in a compactor.
My vision blurs as the world seems to tilt when I can no longer hold my head up.
Panic claws at my throat, but my mews and whimpers dissolve as I shrink back to my familiar human form.
It doesn’t feel familiar anymore. It feels like I’m a bomb waiting to detonate with no idea of who will get caught up in the blast.
I want to run away. I want to hide from the impending rejection of the only family I’ve ever known. But I can’t. Everything hurts, and I’m so tired. So instead, I curl up on the cold tiled floor as shivers rack my body.
I can’t begin to process what just happened. One minute I felt hot and achy, and the next, I transformed into a beast. Then my mom is covering me with a blanket and smoothing my hair back from my sweaty forehead. Dad comes over and drops down in front of me.
“I didn’t do it on purpose… I don’t know how… What’s wrong with me?” I ask before dissolving into panicked breathing and gasps as I try to hold back the tears just under the surface. Silence stretches around us, my whimpering the only noise in the quiet kitchen.
“You didn’t want to eat anyone, did you?” Pippa asks, and I don’t know how to answer her. I didn’t. I didn’t even want to be in the same room as them.
“No, I… I was still me. But not me. I’m a monster.”
“Shhhh, it’ll be okay, baby,” Dad soothes. “We’ll get you help. It’ll all be okay.”
“You… you won’t make me leave?”
“You’re our daughter,” Mom says, her voice shaking yet certain. “You’re not going anywhere. We’ll figure this out. Together.”
A sob of relief nearly chokes me. I’ve never needed anything more than I needed to hear that. Curling into my mom, I let the tears break free. Surrounded by my family on the kitchen floor, I cry and cry until there are nothing left, and my dad carries me back to my bedroom.
“I only changed that one time,” I say after telling him the story of what happened all those years ago.
“It was agony. Afterward, my parents put me in therapy so I could learn to regulate myself and keep my feelings in check. Learn how to stop myself from letting my emotions get the best of me. I figured out how to stop listening to the voice and push it down. Before you came along, it was barely a whisper.”
“And after I came along?” he asks.
“It got louder. Telling me things I didn’t understand. It wanted… It told me to claim you, to… It wanted me to bite you.”
Ryan grins at me, and his eyes glow golden. He sweeps my hair back and presses his lips to my skin at the juncture where my neck curves to meet my shoulder.
“Here?” he asks.
I whimper and nod as electricity radiates from the connection. The fact that he is still naked becomes patently obvious when his cock twitches below me and my pussy throbs in response.
“Have you ever felt like that before?” he asks, and I can’t deny that I’ve never experienced anything remotely like the pull I felt toward him. Both as my patient and as the masked man.
“Our kind—shifters—we mate for life,” he explains, cupping my face in his hand and staring into my eyes.
“We get one fated mate. Our perfect other half, made for us by the Moon Goddess, if you believe in that kind of thing. Or maybe it’s just biology.
No one really knows. Some never find their fated mate.
They take a chosen one and hope for the best. That’s what my parents did, but it didn’t work out for them.
I never wanted that. I waited for Fate.” He pauses, then adds, “I waited for you.”
His words sink into me like a blanket of warmth and belonging, and I know in my bones that they are true. This is what I’ve been trying to ignore. Because I already knew.
It doesn’t change the fact that he lied to me. He misled me.
But he wasn’t the only one who was lying. Maybe if I had been honest with myself, I would have been able to skip past so much of the last few weeks. And as the thought crosses my mind, I realize I don’t want to change it.
Ryan holds all my answers. Every answer to every question that has been going around in my head for years. My head spins. And underneath all the confusion and pain, one thought remains: I’m not alone anymore.