The Gentle Beast’s Beauty (Feral Sons MC #3)

Chapter 1

Nina

The printout on my passenger seat tells me to turn left at the general store, and I haven't seen a building in twelve miles.

My hands grip the steering wheel while I squint through rain so heavy the wipers can't keep up.

December on the Oregon coast. The headlights carve a narrow tunnel through forest that crowds both sides of the road, Douglas firs so dense their branches knit together overhead, blocking the sky.

The rental car smells like stale coffee and the pine air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror, the heater blows lukewarm at best.

My phone died forty minutes ago. The GPS lost signal twenty minutes before that.

All I have is this printout, Jess Cooper's handwritten directions scanned into an email attachment, cheerful and specific in the way only someone who's lived in a place long enough to forget it's confusing can be.

Take the coast highway past the lighthouse.

Turn left at the general store. Follow the gravel road until it forks. Bear right. You'll see the clinic sign.

I passed a lighthouse an hour ago. I think.

Mami would be on the phone right now if the phone worked.

Ay, Mija, you and your contracts. You couldn't find a clinic in San Antonio?

And Tomás would text me a screenshot of a horror movie poster, girl alone on a dark road, trees closing in, a skull emoji and no other comment, because my brother communicates exclusively in threats and memes.

The last thing I did before the phone died was check the agency portal. Seattle, February start, Level 2 trauma center, fourteen-week contract. I saved the listing. I always save the next listing before I've finished the current one.

I miss them. My chest tightens the way it always does when I let myself think about home too long, I press my thumb into the steering wheel until the ache moves somewhere I can manage it.

Two years of contracts in cities I never planned to stay in taught me how to pack that feeling into a box and slide it under the bed.

Phoenix. Galveston. Albuquerque. Sacramento for six weeks before the ER director called me sweetheart one too many times and I requested reassignment.

Phoenix gutted me. Eight weeks at a Level 1 trauma center, chronic understaffing, twelve-hour shifts that bled into fourteen.

And Mr. King. Room 4B. A sixty-eight-year-old man with hands like my Abuelos’s, soil under his nails from the garden he wouldn't shut up about. I visited him on my days off, brought him café de olla from the Mexican bakery on 7th, sat in the vinyl chair beside his bed while he described his tomato plants like they were his grandchildren. Then the cardiac arrest at three, and I worked the code for forty-two minutes knowing it ended at twelve. His face when the monitor flatlined looked like my Abuelos’s face when he slept.

I left Phoenix the next week. Haven't stayed anywhere longer than a contract since.

Nightfall Cove is supposed to be the same.

Small-town clinic, three months on contract, stack some cash, get out.

Four more contracts after this one and I'll have the startup capital.

My own aesthetics clinic: injectables, skin treatments, the cosmetic care that gets gatekept behind Beverly Hills price tags while women in communities like mine pay for knock-off fillers in someone's kitchen.

I have a business plan in a folder on my dead laptop.

Spreadsheets broken down by quarter. The lease narrowed down to two neighborhoods in Houston.

Three months. In and out. Don't get attached.

The road curves and my headlights sweep across a wall of trees, and I catch a massive shape in the righthand beam.

The buck stands in the middle of the lane. Not crossing, not bolting. Standing. Its rack stretches wide enough to scrape both shoulders of the road, and its eyes flash white-green in the high beams, I'm already yanking the wheel left before my brain finishes processing what I'm looking at.

The rental clips the animal's hindquarter.

The back end swings out, tires screaming on wet asphalt, and for one long, airless second the car slides sideways and I can't do a damn thing about it.

My hands lock on the wheel. The drainage ditch swallows the passenger side, the world tilts, and the airbag punches me in the face so hard my teeth click together and my vision whites out.

The engine dies.

Steam hisses from under the crumpled hood, thick and chemical. Water hammers the roof. I sit in the canted seat, the seatbelt cutting into my collarbone, tasting copper.

Blood on my fingers when I touch my nose.

Not broken. I've broken it before, in a rec league soccer game in college, and I know what the grinding crunch feels like.

I prod the bridge on my nose, check alignment, rotate my head to test my neck.

Cervical spine intact. No radiating pain, no numbness in my extremities.

My left wrist throbs when I flex it. Tender along the outer side, but I can make a fist without the sharp, grinding pain that signals a fracture. Sprained, maybe.

I kick the driver's door open.

Cold wind and rain slam into me the second the door opens.

December in Oregon hits different than December in Phoenix, a soaking cold that seeps through denim in seconds and turns your breath into fog.

I haul myself out of the tilted car and stand on the edge of the gully, blinking water out of my eyes.

The deer is gone. Limped off into the trees, I hope.

The rental lists at an angle, one headlight still working, pointing into the forest at a slant that makes the shadows shift and stretch between the trunks.

The other light is dead. The hood crumples in a V-shape, steam still pouring from underneath.

I stand there bleeding from my nose, holding my wrist against my stomach, and I have the brief, hysterical urge to laugh, because this is so exactly my luck that it feels scripted.

Every contract starts with a complication.

Galveston, I showed up to find the apartment the agency booked had flooded.

Albuquerque, my rental broke down in a Walmart parking lot.

And now this. A deer the size of a compact car, a drainage ditch, and no cell signal in any direction.

My abuela used to say, Dios aprieta pero no ahorca. God squeezes but doesn't strangle.

Abuela never stood alone on a dark road in Oregon at eleven o'clock at night with blood on her face.

Then I hear him before I see him.

A branch cracks somewhere in the tree line. Not a twig snapping underfoot, a deep, woody crack, the sound of real weight pressing through undergrowth. Footsteps follow. Heavy, spaced apart, and moving on two legs.

The working headlight catches movement.

A shape separates from the trees. Massive enough that my first thought is bear. Then it straightens to full height, and the light catches horns curving back from a broad skull.

A minotaur.

I've worked with monster patients. Not many, but enough.

Most ERs still route them to specialty clinics, which is a whole separate conversation about healthcare access that makes my blood pressure spike.

I sutured an orc dockworker's split knuckles in Galveston while he told me about his daughter's piano recital.

I held an IV line for a centaur in Albuquerque and talked him through his panic attack while the attending pretended to read charts on the other side of the room because he didn't want to get close.

I've seen seven-foot orcs cry over broken bones and five-foot-nothing human men throw punches at nurses for asking them to rate their pain.

Size has never been a variable that scares me.

He stops at the edge of the light. Dark fur covers his forearms, dense and close to the skin, built for cold I can already feel eating through my jeans.

His horns curve back and up, filed to blunt points.

His chest fills the space between the trees and the road, broad enough that my hands wouldn't span half of it, and his fingers could wrap around my entire rib cage.

Amber eyes fix on me with an expression I can't read through the downpour.

I wipe blood off my upper lip with the back of my hand.

"Oh, thank God," I say. "Can you call a tow truck?"

He stares at me.

Water drums the wrecked car and drips from his horns but he doesn't move.

I don't move. I'm standing in a ditch with blood on my face, and a seven-foot minotaur is looking at me like I've glitched in his operating system, and I realize what's happening.

I'm not reacting the way he expects. No scream, no stumble backward, no fumbling for a phone to call 911.

He crosses the distance between us in a few strides.

Each one covers more ground than I could in two, and the earth gives under his weight with a soft compression I feel through the soles of my sneakers.

He crouches beside the car, and the rental groans as his shadow falls over it.

His hands move over the crumpled hood, checking the frame, testing the axle, pressing a palm flat against the engine block.

He pulls back and wipes his hand on his thigh.

Then he straightens and holds out his hand.

His palm is twice the size of mine. Scarred across the knuckles, calloused in patterns, and I take it without thinking, because I've been standing in this ditch for five minutes and my options are trust this stranger or wait here until morning.

He pulls me out with one arm. Lifts me, really. My feet leave the mud and for a second I'm weightless, and then he sets me on the road. I stumble on the wet asphalt and his hand steadies my elbow, a brief grip that disappears the instant I'm balanced.

He turns toward the forest.

"Wait." I take a step after him. "Where are you going?"

He doesn't answer. He walks. His silhouette moves between the trees with a sureness that means he knows this ground, every root and rock and dip.

The wrecked rental sits behind me, its lone light bleeding into the dark, water pooling on the crushed hood. The road stretches empty in both directions, no sound except wind. The minotaur's back is already dimming between the trunks.

I run after him.

He hears me stumbling behind him, of course he does, I'm crashing through underbrush like a drunk toddler while he moves through the forest like he grew from it, and after twenty seconds, his stride shortens.

He doesn't look back. Doesn't slow his pace, exactly.

He takes smaller steps so my legs can keep up, and if I weren't paying attention I'd never catch it.

But my Abuelo used to do the same thing, shorten his stride when he walked me to school, pretend it was because his knee bothered him.

Never admitting he slowed down for a kid with short legs.

The downpour lets up by degrees, and then the trees open.

A clearing. A cabin at its center, square and solid, built from logs dark with age and weather.

A porch wraps the front, and the porch light glows warm yellow against the wet wood.

Smoke rises from a chimney I can smell before I see it, cedar or fir, something resinous and clean that cuts through the cold.

Through a window left cracked open despite the temperature, I hear music.

Classical. Strings, something I half-recognize but can't name, spilling into the clearing with a sweetness that doesn't match anything about the man walking ahead of me.

Snow has started falling. I didn't notice the shift, the temperature dropping somewhere in the last five minutes, and the first flakes catch in the porch light, drifting against the yellow glow.

I stop walking.

The minotaur reaches the porch, climbs the two steps, the wood barely creaking under reinforced planks built to hold his weight, and opens the door.

He steps aside. Stands there, one hand on the frame, not looking at me, not speaking, the firelight from inside spilling across the fresh snow between us.

He's giving me the choice.

Come in or don't. He'll stand there either way, holding the door against the cold, waiting for a woman he doesn't know to decide whether his home is safer than the dark. I think about Mami's voice, Mija, you trust too easy, and Abuela's hands cupping my face, pero tu corazón sabe, mi vida.

Your heart knows.

I walk through the snow, up the porch steps, and past him into the warmth.