Chapter Thirty-Three #2
I blow out a huff of breath. She hasn’t a clue how right she is.
“I… I’m a tiger,” I say, and I swear I can feel the beast inside me puffing out its chest in pride with me finally claiming her.
“No shit,” Sofia exclaims, her eyes roving over me. “That is badass!”
She is so blunt and to the point that I can’t help the laugh that bubbles up in my chest. And much like with Ryan, I find myself drawn to her.
Not in the same way, but almost like I know I can trust her.
Like she’s family. She reminds me so much of Pippa with her take no shit attitude, and it has me instantly reassured.
“So tell me, badass tiger lady, what’s the deal with you and my brother? You are fated mates, right?”
“I think so, but I’m new to all this. My birth parents left me at a fire station when I was a baby, and then I was adopted and raised by humans.
When I first shifted, well, we all panicked.
We felt that if anyone learned what I was that they would want to experiment on me, or God knows what.
And maybe a wolf can get away with being seen, but a huge tiger is going to stand out a lot more.
So I have been suppressing it all for as long as I have known about it. ”
“Shit,” Sofia says, stopping in her tracks to stare at me. “That must have been awful. Was your tiger not screaming at you constantly?”
“Yeah, at first,” I reply as we resume our walk through the woods. “But I learned how to drown her out and ignore the voice.”
“Fuck. So you’ve been ignoring your intuition for years?”
“Yeah, some things are harder to ignore than others. Like I need to run, especially on a full moon. I eat a lot. And I guess since I met Ryan, that voice inside has been louder. It’s been using words I didn’t fully understand until now, pushing me to claim him, to bite him.”
My cheeks heat telling Sofia this. She’s his sister; I’m sure the last thing she wants to hear about is me biting her brother. “Sorry, you probably don’t want to hear about things like that.” But the gasp of disgust or quick change of subject one would expect never comes.
“It’s fine.” She shrugs, remaining unnervingly calm, dismissing any sign of awkwardness.
“The bite is part of accepting your fated mate, so it’s very normal.
And I grew up with Ryan as Alpha. I’ve been hearing pretty much every female wolf in the pack drooling over him since forever. I’m used to it.”
Her words were probably meant to put me at ease, but instead it feels like gasoline thrown on a fire I didn’t even realize was burning.
My inner animal pushes against me so hard that it knocks the wind from my lungs.
A hot flash of anger surges through me, primal and unbidden, culminating in a growl I can’t hold back.
I stop walking forward, standing stock-still instead, clutching my chest as I try to steady myself.
Breathe in for four seconds.
Hold for four seconds.
Out for four seconds.
Hold for four seconds.
And again. And again.
Sofia doesn’t rush me or try to talk me through it, which I appreciate. She waits for me to settle myself, and when I finally do, she doesn’t look the least bit concerned that I got so jealous I literally forgot how to breathe.
“So, I guess we have established that your tiger is done being ignored, huh?”
“Seems that way,” I respond, because what else can I say? That was pathetically obvious.
“Don’t worry,” she says, waving a hand in dismissal.
“It’s all totally normal for shifters. Accepting the mate bond was the first thing my wolf and I disagreed about.
I felt like I was losing my mind. Your tiger might have let you call the shots before, but she’s making herself heard now that it matters. ”
My head whips around to stare at her, “Hold up, you weren’t in agreement with your animal about the fated mate bond? How does that work? Do you get a choice?”
“Oh, that’s easy to explain. My mate, Luca, is an asshole who underestimated me and treated me like a kid.
I wasn’t exactly keen to accept him, but my wolf is a slut and didn’t care.
It’s cool; we’re back on the same page again now.
Luca is still an asshole, but he is an asshole obsessed with me.
Also, he fucks like a beast and learned the hard way to never underestimate me again. So here we are.”
“I think I might love you,” I say with a laugh.
“Course you do, we’re sisters now,” she says, bumping me with her shoulder. “Just don’t let Ryan hear you say that because he will freak out that I’m trying to steal his girl, even if I am already marked and mated.”
She rolls her eyes and laughs, and my heart warms. My family is wonderful.
I love them all dearly, and I don’t know where I would be if I hadn’t ended up with them.
But there’s a sense of home I didn’t even fully understand I was missing.
I knew it before, yet I didn’t at the same time.
It was abstract and theoretical. But now it’s a real, tangible thing: that sense of belonging and the belief that I could be myself.
I’ll be forever grateful to Ryan for bringing me here, even if I don’t know how I feel about him after all the lies that happened beforehand. My tiger lets out a little snarl of disagreement. She doesn’t care about everything he has done, she just wants to move forward. With him.