Chapter 16
Chapter sixteen
Lucy
At some point, I stopped crying and started being hungry.
I wasn’t okay. I wasn’t sure I’d be okay for a while. But my body had apparently decided that existential crisis or not, it wanted carbs, and it was going to make its position known until I complied.
My stomach growled. Loud enough that Felony’s ears rotated toward the sound like satellite dishes.
Warrick looked down at me.
“I’ll make you something to eat,” he said.
“You don’t have to—”
“Yeah, I do.”
He lifted me off his lap and set me on the couch carefully. Felony immediately claimed the warm spot he’d left behind, turned twice, and settled against my thigh.
Warrick walked into the kitchen. He was still shirtless.
The cut across his ribs had already stopped bleeding, the edges pulling together in a way that my vet tech brain filed under “accelerated wound closure, consistent with enhanced regenerative capacity,” while the rest of my brain filed it under “that is not how skin works and I am choosing not to think about it right now.” Every muscle in his torso was visible, shifting under his skin as he moved.
I tracked the line of his shoulders as he reached for a cabinet, the way his back narrowed to his waist.
Really? Now? He killed people tonight, and you’re checking out his back muscles?
I needed to snap out of this.
He opened a cabinet and pulled out a box of rigatoni.
“I can help,” I said.
“You can sit there.”
“I’m not an invalid.”
“No, but I want to cook for you.”
A half-naked Warrick cooking for me. Was I asleep? Had I hit my head? This felt like one of those dreams where everything was perfect right up until the part where you realized you were also somehow at work and not wearing pants.
“Fine,” I said. “But I’m judging your technique from here.”
“Noted.”
I sat on the couch with Felony purring against my thigh and watched him cook.
He moved through the kitchen the way I’d seen big cats move through enrichment spaces, economical, aware of every surface, never wasting a motion.
Each action fed into the next like he’d mapped the whole sequence before he started.
He sliced an onion, the knife moving in that loose-wristed way that said he’d done this ten thousand times, then swept the pieces off the board with the blade.
Peppers next. Garlic crushed with the flat of the knife, not a press.
He added pasta to water and built red sauce from canned tomatoes and things I couldn’t see from the couch but could smell: basil, something smoky, a kick of heat.
It felt so ordinary that for a few minutes I could almost pretend this was a normal evening.
A normal woman in a normal man’s cabin while he made her dinner.
My phone was on the arm of the couch. I picked it up without thinking about it, the way you do when your hands know what they want to reach for before the rest of you catches up.
Dani’s name was right there. I opened the thread. Her check-in from yesterday morning was still there, Felony’s breakfast demands, “eat something!!!” with three exclamation marks because Dani had never met a piece of punctuation she couldn’t overuse.
I started typing.
Me: So remember the hot PI?
Deleted it.
Me: Dani, I need to tell you something.
Deleted that too.
Me: You know how you said my gut wasn’t the same gut anymore? Well, my gut has some news, and you’re going to want to sit down.
Delete.
What was I supposed to say? “Hey, quick update, turns out Warrick is a tiger. Like, an actual tiger. Four hundred pounds, white fur, kills people with his teeth. Also, apparently, I’m his fated mate, which is a whole thing I haven’t unpacked yet, and oh, by the way, there’s a portal to another dimension that doesn’t work anymore and a secret community of tiger Shifters in central Illinois. How’s the shelter?”
She’d think I was having a breakdown. I closed the thread. Put the phone face-down on the cushion.
It was the first time since Andrew that I’d had something I couldn’t tell her. The thought sat in my chest like a stone, small and heavy, and I didn’t know what to do with it.
I looked up to see Warrick standing in front of me with a plate of rigatoni with fresh parmesan grated on top. The smell hit me so hard my mouth watered instantly.
“Eat,” he said.
“Did you just command me to eat?”
“When I command you to do something, you’ll know. That was a polite ask.”
Something low in my belly tightened that had nothing to do with the pasta. I picked up my fork before he could see it on my face. “Fine. But only because it smells good.”
It tasted good too. He was a damn fine cook.
After the first few mouthfuls, I stopped pretending I wasn’t watching him.
He’d put a shirt on to eat—apparently even interdimensional tiger Shifters observed basic dinner etiquette—but I couldn’t stop looking at his hands.
They were big; everything about him was big, but there was a precision to the way he used them.
Long fingers, sure grip, the fork held loosely.
He reached for his glass, and I watched the tendons shift under his skin, the width of his knuckles, the way his wrist turned, and my brain, completely unhelpful, supplied the image of those hands on me.
Running along my ribs. Curving around my hip.
Spread flat against the small of my back.
I shoved rigatoni into my mouth.
He looked up. Caught me staring. I didn’t look away fast enough, and something heated moved through his expression, there and gone, a flash of amber behind his usual gray.
I should have been afraid. I’d seen those hands become something else tonight. I’d watched him become something else. I knew, sitting across from him in the firelight, exactly what he was capable of.
But he’d carried me out of the car. He’d held me on the couch while I sobbed into his neck.
He’d made me dinner without being asked, and he hadn’t once made me feel like the shaking was something to be ashamed of.
I felt like I wasn’t alone in this. Apart from Dani, no one had ever been that for me.
Just being there, solid and steady and not asking for anything back.
Not keeping score. Not waiting for me to pull myself together so I could be useful again. Just … there.
We ate in a silence that should have been uncomfortable but wasn’t. He cleared the plates. I heard water running in the kitchen, the quiet sounds of him washing up. I sat on the couch with Felony, stared at the fire, and tried to make my brain work in a straight line.
Here’s what I knew: Warrick Kassar was a tiger Shifter from another world.
He had killed twelve people tonight to keep me alive.
I was, according to the terminology of his species, his fated mate.
He was currently doing the dishes in a cabin in the woods, and I was sitting on his couch with a cat on my lap and scrapes on my palms and absolutely no interest in sleeping alone.
That last part was the one I kept circling back to.
Not because I didn’t understand it; I understood it fine.
I wanted him. I’d wanted him since he’d appeared in the doorway of the shelter.
But wanting someone before you’ve seen them tear out a man’s throat with their teeth and wanting them after are two different things.
I needed to be sure that what I was feeling right now was a choice and not just adrenaline looking for somewhere to land.
I closed my eyes. Checked.
Not adrenaline. Not gratitude. Not the trauma response that made you cling to whoever was closest because your nervous system couldn’t tell the difference between safety and dependency.
Warrick had shown me the worst thing about himself, the blood, the violence, the animal, and I was still here.
Not despite what he was. Because he’d been all of those things for me.
The part of my brain that should have been screaming had looked at the evidence, run the assessment, and come back with a single, clear verdict.
Safe. He’s safe.
Not harmless. God, no. But he made me feel safe.
The water stopped. I heard him drying his hands. I got up off the couch before I could talk myself out of it, dislodging Felony, who gave me a look of supreme betrayal, and walked into the kitchen.
He was leaning against the counter with a towel over his shoulder. He looked up when I came in, and whatever he saw on my face made him go very still.
“I don’t want you to sleep on the couch tonight,” I said.
He didn’t move. His eyes searched mine. When he spoke, his voice was low and stripped of everything but honesty.
“If we start this, I don’t know how much control I’ll have. The tiger—”
“I know what your tiger is.” I crossed the kitchen. Stopped in front of him. Put my hand flat on his chest. “I’m not afraid of him. And I’m not afraid of you.”
His hand came up and covered mine. He held it there against his chest, and I could feel the tension in his fingers, the restraint it was costing him not to pull me in.
So I made the decision for both of us. I grabbed the front of his shirt with my other hand, went up on my toes, and kissed him.
Not like the first time in this kitchen—tentative, testing, holding back. This was a statement: “I know what you are. I’m choosing this. I’m choosing you.”
The growl came from deep in his chest, vibrating through my hand where it was still pressed against him.
Then his arms were around me, lifting me off my feet entirely.
I wrapped my legs around his waist and kissed him like the world outside this cabin didn’t exist, because right now, for me, it didn’t.
“Bedroom,” I said. “Now. Unless you really do want to do this on the counter, which I’m not opposed to, but Felony is watching, and I have boundaries.”
He laughed, carrying me to the bedroom like I weighed nothing, which, given what I’d seen him do tonight, I supposed I didn’t.
He set me on the bed and followed me down.