The Lion's Loyalty

by Emilia Hartley

  “Will you spend the night with me?” She wasn’t sure what he would say, but she wanted to try.

  She expected him to say no, to tell her that he had work to get to. His response was a smile, though. It was hope and happiness rolled into one expression.

  “I’d love to.” He kissed the tip of her nose.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Van knew he shouldn’t do this. What he really wanted to do was snuggle Carol while she slept in, but his mind had run rampant until he’d forced himself out of bed. She’d been so at ease that she didn’t notice when he left. It’d been close to eleven when he snuck out. Maybe she would sleep in to two or three in the afternoon. She deserved every hour of uninterrupted sleep.

  He’d stepped outside and made a few calls around town, to hotels and motels, until he found just the person he was looking for. It would probably be against all of Carol’s wishes, but he couldn’t help it. He knew the importance of family. Carol suffered every day because she denied herself, every part of herself. From her past to her present.

  Shutting herself off wasn’t helping.

  Seeing him now, Van knew without a doubt that this man had been the one trying to get inside Carol’s apartment. His stomach churned nervously. The young man looked so much like Carol. They were similar in height, had the same shade of blond hair, and held themselves like giants among men.

  There was no mistaking Carol’s brother for anyone else, but Van still wondered why the man had tried to break into Carol’s apartment. Why couldn’t her brother just walk up and knock on the door. He was being shifty, and Van didn’t like it.

  Not when it involved Carol.

  So, he pulled his spine straight and let his beast bleed into his eyes. The lion turned them gold, greedily devouring the world around him. He stood in the same food court as the day before. The beast noted a table of old men playing a card game, a mother trying to wrangle two toddlers, and a young man with acne reading a stack of comic books. The only potential threat was Carol’s brother.

  Van approached silently, startling the young man. He leapt to his feet, wiping his salty hands on his jeans before extending one. Already, Van’s apprehension was melting away. There was sincerity in the young man’s eyes, even if his hands were clammy.

  “I’m Harry. You must be one of Carol’s…friends?”

  Van coughed. Were they just friends? He didn’t want to think so, but they hadn’t talk about being anything more. Van knew what he and Carol were, but he hadn’t brought it up because everything else in her life was already so overwhelming.

  He settled with, “You could say that.”

  Harry nodded, casting wary glances at Van as they both sat. Van knew Harry was studying him. It made sense. He knew nothing about Van, this man in his sister’s life after she disappeared. Van could be some sort of human trafficker for all this man knew.

  “I promise you that your sister is well. She is struggling through something and wants to be better before she sees you.”

  “I find it hard to believe my sister got involved with drugs. That isn’t like her.”

  “No, I don’t think it is,” Van said with a smile on his lips. “She likes being in charge way too much to give it up to drugs.”

  To this, Harry’s brows furrowed. “Then why is she hiding from us? If you took her…”

  The threat lingered in the air. On Harry’s hip was a police badge that gleamed. He shook his head. Theirs was a family that had bred caretakers and do-gooders.

  “You have nothing to worry about. Carol is safe. She’s in good hands.” Van chose his next words carefully. “Start by telling me how you tracked your sister down. I’ll do my best to fill in the blanks to the extent of my abilities.”

  By abilities, Van meant pack law. The town they lived in might know about the shifters among them, but the rest of the world didn’t. Secrecy had been drilled into him from a young age. Van wasn’t comfortable telling a stranger, even if he was Carol’s brother.

  “When she disappeared, I did everything I could to figure out where she went. I’m not a detective, not yet, but I got to practice for my promotion. The internet is full of wild shit, but when I came across the sale of a young woman that sounded a lot like my sister, I posed as a buyer.” The young man scratched his chin. He looked exhausted and weary of the world. “Then things got much weirder than I ever thought.”

  Van fiddled with the straw wrapper in front of him. Carol had been put up for sale by the doctors. The thought grated on his mind and left behind nothing but rage. His beast rose with a wild thrash, but Van gripped it tight and held it under control.

  He knew where Carol was. She was safe in the apartment above the bar, where the pack would be able to protect her. Van had not left her unguarded. Besides, the doctors were dead. He hadn’t seen to it himself, having guided Carol home that night, but he trusted his pack to dole out justice.

  He trusted Dante. Their tiger shifter was a family man, after all.

  “You said it got weird. Tell me exactly how weird it became. I need to understand what you know.”

  Harry’s eyes narrowed at him. Van said nothing. He could barely form words, his beast still seething with unchecked rage. The violence inside him was building. It waited to be unleashed on something around him. Van needed to focus on the conversation and his own thoughts. It was the only way to hold on while he was so angry.

  Because this was a rage unlike any other. It was the same blinding rage he’d felt at the shed, where the doctors had hung a sweater that smelled of Carol, a decoy to distract the shifters. This rage tore through every shred of reasonable thought Van tried to summon. It destroyed the sensibility that he clung to. His logical thought was consumed, burned away by the flames.

  Meanwhile, Harry fumbled through his side of the story. “The description in the sale was a ringer for Carol. Amazon of a blonde woman, athletic and sturdy. From there, it added things that…that weren’t believable. The sellers were saying that this woman could change forms. Like her body could change from human to wolf. I didn’t want to believe it, but I reached out through the email.

  “Guys on the detective teams pretend to be interested buyers when they’re looking for girls who have been trafficked. I did the same, posing as someone interested in the science behind whatever it was they thought they’d found. I thought they were a couple of crack-pots or grifters.”

  Oh, they had been crazy, but that wasn’t why.

  Harry picked at his now cold French fries, eyes distant. “I exchanged a few emails with these people. They claimed to be doctors. They sent me all sorts of data based on their experiments. The ones that had been performed on the…woman, they had highlighted. It was like they were proud of the things they’d done. I don’t know how they did any of it.

  “Eventually, I thought about abandoning the lead. It felt like a bunch of made up bullshit. Nothing like that could be real, right? But I figured I would send them one last email. I asked for video evidence. If I could just see the woman they had in captivity, I would know if it was my sister. I thought, if it wasn’t then I could just pass it on to my higher-ups.”

  Van watched Harry swallow, as if he’d thrown up in his mouth. The man pressed his eyes shut and breathed deep, silence surrounding them. This was the man the doctors had been in correspondence with. This was the outsider who knew about them.

  At that thought, Van let out a sigh of relief. There wasn’t going to be a string of hunters invading their town. They were safe.

  “They sent you a video,” Van filled in.

  “I thought it was edited, at first. There was no way that could be true. It just…couldn’t be!”

  “But it is,” Van breathed. He gripped the edge of the food court table. “People like us exist. We live together in what we call packs. Carol came to us so she could learn more about what she is now.”

  “What, exactly, is my sister? When did this happen? Why wouldn’t she tell anyone?” Questions poured from Harry in a torrent, a cras
hing wave that seemed like it would never end.

  A growl broke from Van. He swallowed it and cleared his throat. Little by little, he told Harry what he knew about how Carol had been changed. It wasn’t a whole lot and it probably didn’t sate Harry’s confusion, but it was the best he could do for the time being. Until Carol could come and see her brother herself.

  “Why are you still hiding her from me?”

  Van sighed. “We aren’t doing anything. Carol made this decision on her own. The best you can do is wait for her. You’ve found her, you know she’s alive. Now wait for her to become the person she wants to be again.”

  Harry tensed. “How long is that going to take?”

  Van didn’t have an easy answer. He couldn’t say a week or a month. It could take years for Carol to feel comfortable reaching out to her family again. He couldn’t tell Harry that, though. It would break the man’s heart. It would also give Carol too much time to wallow.

  She needed a better incentive. Reuniting with her family could push her to fix the gap between her and her wolf. At least, that was what Van hoped. The past few days made him think that perhaps they were moving in the right direction.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The beast ripped at her from every direction. She felt as though she was made of paper and the beast were ripping her to little shreds. There was no fighting the force inside her. Not when it thought the doctors had returned.

  She promised the beast that there were no doctors. The monsters had not come back for her. The pack had seen to that. She would never have to deal with their experiments again. This didn’t satisfy her beast, though. The creature could still smell chemicals in the air. It knew there was something wrong, and Carol’s denial made the creature angrier.

  It fought harder, thrashing wildly. Tears slipped down her cheeks. She couldn’t escape the pain building inside her chest. She pressed her hands to her breastbone, but the pressure did nothing to keep the beast at bay.

  Finally, she looked around, trying to find the source of the chemical smell. If she could reason with the beast and show it the truth, then perhaps she could save herself this one time. Instead of a source, Carol found nothing. The chemical smell drifted in the air from an unknown source, as if the bearer were invisible.

  She whimpered. Lowering herself, she pressed her forehead to the ground. The beast growled for her to lift her head. It refused to be blind. Carol could do nothing other than obey. It was her only option.

  A door swung open. It slammed against the wall, followed by rushed footsteps.

  “Carol?” A familiar voice drifted to her.

  The pain began to recede. She drew in gasping breaths. Van dropped to the ground beside her. His hands hovered over her back. She leaned into him, grateful for his presence. There was no more hiding it. She couldn’t lie about her problems any longer.

  “I need help,” Carol confessed, her throat pinched tight. The words had to fight their way out.

  Van did not flinch. He didn’t narrow his eyes at her. If anything, she saw sympathy. That irritated her, even though she knew it wasn’t the same as pity. All she wanted was for someone to look at her and see strength.

  Couldn’t they tell how much work it took to keep it together? Rodrigo might understand, but he was rarely around. The only time she could see him was if she wanted to brave the crowd in the bar at night while he was working. Even if the loud noises didn’t set her teeth on edge, there was no way to have a proper conversation with someone while they were working.

  Van nodded, but she could see the panic etched into his face. He held onto her, his warmth a promising anchor, but he didn’t seem to have words. Not while her face was twisted in a painful grimace and parts of her body slipped between one form and another. Her fingers sharpened into claws and pressed into his arm where she held onto him. Just as the smell of blood blossomed on the air, her claws became human fingers again.

  Over and over this happened. With her eyes. Her ears. Her teeth.

  The beast in her fought for freedom but offered no explanation. Carol tried reasoning with it. The beast gave nothing but a threatening growl. She was tired of this life, of struggling every day and having nothing to show for it. Everything had been ripped away from her.

  “We can make this better. You just have to trust me.”

  He smelled like French fries and humanity. She wanted to ask him where he’d been, but her beast was still thrashing. It thought that they buyer was close. Someone was going to come and steal Carol away again. The beast wouldn’t let that happen. Not now that she had found her mate.

  She reached and clung to Van’s arm. The way he looked at her, she couldn’t escape the disappointment in his eyes. It wrecked her. Wasn’t she better than this? Hadn’t she healed? Even a little?

  “Do you trust me?”

  “Yes,” she managed to rasp.

  ***

  Trusting Van meant driving out to the middle of nowhere. No, not quite the middle of nowhere. While it looked like a remote forest, similar to where they’d made love, it was the edge of a park. On the other side of a copse of trees was a campground, filled with the sound of rambunctious children and tired parents.

  Tents and trailers had already been pitched and parked. When Van chose the spot, she’d eyed him and asked why he would ever choose an area like this. She’d slept past the early hours of the morning, when all would be quiet. It was now creeping toward the later afternoon. His response was that she needed to learn control. What better place was there than a place where humans could easily spot them?

  It was a bit like playing chicken, but she didn’t say anything. Van was the one who could control the monster inside him. She would take whatever she could get.

  “Talk to me,” he demanded. “Tell me what frightens you.”

  She looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “Shouldn’t I be meditating or something? Not poking the beast?”

  “This is why you need to control your beast.” He pointed toward the row of trees that separated them from the humans. “If you can’t face your fears and keep your beast under control, it will lead to a confrontation.”

  “But you said Dante doesn’t put shifters down. Or, that he doesn’t want to, at least.”

  “The confrontation won’t be with Dante. It will be with them. The humans. They get pretty pissy when we aren’t perfect.”

  Carol snorted. She was deflecting. She didn’t want to tell him about the things still lurking in her mind. It was like tainting something new and happy with her dark past. If she could just shut it all off and lock it away, then she could move on with a happy life.

  She had a mate now! This was where things should have gotten better. Yet, one sniff of chemicals and her beast lost its mind. They’d found out that someone downstairs was cleaning the kitchen. That was what she’d smelled.

  Cleaning chemicals.

  She hated her beast. She hated everything it had done to her. The beast growled back with the same intensity. She couldn’t understand what it was saying. There were times when she knew exactly what it was telling her, but most of the time she felt like she was communicating with a rock.

  The beast growled, not liking her analogy.

  “Tell me what you’re afraid of,” Van pressed. “I’m right here. Nothing is going to hurt you while I’m around.”

  She swallowed. No. This wasn’t what she wanted to do. She never should have asked for help. Panic was rising along her throat. It made it tight, made it hard to breathe. Soon, the beast would be trying to slam against her walls. It would be fighting for freedom.

  “I can’t do this,” she whimpered.

  Van closed the distance between them, gently touching her cheeks. He made her look up at him. She didn’t want to. Not at first. She didn’t want him to see the failure that she was. Nothing would ever be right.

  Not when everything the doctors had done to her still lived in her memory.

  Not when she was looking over her shoulder for a mystery
buyer. A person who wanted to learn more about what she was, who wanted to take her apart in the same ways, who wanted to show her off like some exotic pet.

  She clasped her hands to her face but found Van’s hands still there. His warmth was an anchor that allowed her to breathe. She drew in a shallow breath before it shuddered out of her. The next was deeper, the one after that deeper, and so on.

  With him nearby, she could gather herself.

  “The doctors did some awful things, but the worst thing they did means I’ll never escape them.”

  Van looked down at her in confusion. He grasped her forearms. Carol could feel his need to pull her into his body, but he held back. She needed air to breath, air so she could tell him what was hanging over her head.

  “The doctors wanted to make some money to fuel their research. Money that didn’t come from their day lives. I heard them talk about how they didn’t want anyone to figure out what they were doing. They were really careful about their cursed operation.” Carol shuddered, transported back to the cottage, back to the cage. It was Van’s grip on her that reminded her she wasn’t actually there. “The doctors decided to try to sell me. They put me on some website and found a potential buyer. The deal was nearing a close when I escaped the first time. They told me that the buyer was on the way.”

  Van stilled.

  “You’ve seen him, haven’t you? I knew I felt someone following me.” She was nearing panic.

  The buyer was nearby. He had successfully hunted her to this small town. There was no escaping him now. All she could do was buy herself time. The pack hadn’t protected her the first time. She wasn’t sure they would be able to protect her this time.

  Van would try, but he was one person.

  It was up to her to protect herself. The beast agreed. It snarled and snapped, clawing to be free so she could run. But Carol held tight to Van, tight to her control. She wasn’t going to let the beast run her life. She wasn’t going to let it destroy every moment.