by T. S. Joyce
Kiera’s throat was tight with emotion as she choked out, “Four months.”
Beast gripped the back of his head. His face had turned red in the dim moonlight. He looked gutted. He slammed his head back against the wall. “Human. Kiera tell me it’ll be human.”
Tears blurred her vision. She didn’t understand what was happening, but she understood the bottomless pain in Beast’s eyes. “It’ll be a lion cub.”
“Fffffuck.” Beast slid down the wall and squatted on the floor, hands gripping the back of his head. “Who?” When Beast looked up at her, his eyes were rimmed with moisture. “Who fathered it, Kiera.”
“Justin Moore of the Tarian Pride.”
“Justin Moore,” he said in a hollow voice. Fury churned in his eyes.
“You know of him?”
“No, Kiera, I know him. Everything about him. He gave me this.” He jammed a finger at his face. “He’s the bachelor that got away, and only one because he secured an entire fucking pride under him to protect him from my wrath. I’ve been waiting for him to fuck up, Kiera. Waiting for him to be outed by another male so I can kill that mother fucker. I can’t do it now, or by Lion Law, I would have to take over his pride. He’s untouchable, torturing me with every breath he takes. Out of everyone…Justin? He’s the father of—he’s the—fuck!”
“Oh, my gosh,” Kiera whispered.
Beast’s fury morphed to panic in an instant. “Kiera, you have to get out!”
“Beast, please. I’m sorry!”
He stood and bolted for the door, but he didn’t make it. An enormous lion ripped out of him with such power it blasted her backward on the bed. He rounded on her and charged in the same graceful motion. Beast was shockingly fast. He was a blur, and then he was on her, paws the size of her head on either side of her shoulders, gold eyes locked on her and full of fury. She whimpered and covered her belly protectively, but what could she really do against an animal like this? He was the size of a truck.
“Beast, please. You bit me, remember?” she pleaded in desperation. “Look, I’m still bleeding from your claiming mark. It’s me. It’s me and you.”
He opened his mouth and roared a deafening sound, but she knew he was in there somewhere because he didn’t move to hurt her. Terrified, she reached up and ran her palms over his thick, coarse mane. Beast was a beautiful animal. The perfect specimen of dominant alpha lion. Black scars webbed his face, and his ear had a notch taken out of it, but his mane was chestnut-colored and full, his head massive. His teeth were impossibly long and white, his body unimaginably powerful. And his eyes… The anger faded and was replaced by the saddest look she’d ever seen. He looked down at her belly with a slow blink, then slunk off the bed completely. He paced one tight circle, barely able to fit in the small space of the room, then lifted one side of his lip, let off a soft rattling snarl, and walked gracefully from the room.
A howl lifted on the wind, then another, followed by the roar of a grizzly and the scream of a panther.
Holding the sheets around herself, Kiera stood slowly, but hunched when the sound of shattering glass blasted through the trailer. The battle cry of a lion followed within seconds, and Kiera screamed, “Beast, no!” She bolted for the living room, but she could see it from here in the glowing lights of the gazebo.
The D-Team was at war. They were bleeding each other with such frenzied violence Kiera barely felt the shard of glass on the floor that cut her foot as she came to a stop in the middle of the destroyed living room.
The grizzly and Beast’s massive lion looked like they were trying to murder each other.
The twin roars of the Blackwing dragons rattled the mountains and shook the floor under her feet.
Kane’s Mountains were full of unrest.
And all of this was her fault.
Chapter Nine
The roar hadn’t been for Kiera. Beast had released the bellow he knew would call the other animals to him. It was a challenge to the D-Team, because right now, he needed to bleed something, and he would kill himself before he drew another drop from Kiera again. The claiming mark had been hard enough.
He needed the wolves, the panther, but most of all, he needed Logan’s grizzly. No one had ever been a match like that psychotic ex-mercenary. His animal was an even fight for Beast—broken and empty and only sated by blood.
His world felt like it was collapsing inward as he’d smashed through the front picture window in desperation to engage with the others.
Pregnant. Kiera was his dream girl, perfectly broken into the exact jagged shape that matched his rough edges, and now she was pregnant? God, how badly had he wanted cubs? How desperate had he become to have even one? He’d obsessed over his failures, and here was his match, his mate, his potential everything, so unlike any of his pride females. She was enough for him, more than enough, but a cub? Justin had the claim. The Tarian Pride had fucking dibs on that baby, and on Kiera, too.
His claiming mark stood for nothing because that little life in her belly would change into a lion someday.
He’d had hope for a minute! For one blinding moment, he’d convinced himself he could be okay because he wanted to devote his life to making sure Kiera was okay. He wanted to be stronger for her, and it had been so potently life-altering to feel like he had a purpose again.
He’d been a damn caged animal, released into the gorgeous wild, and then shoved into a dark cage and chains again. How could hope hurt this fucking badly?
Make me forget this pain!
Logan was ready for him, his eyes glowing silver as he charged.
A flash of relief washed through him in the instant before he and Logan connected. This was where he belonged—in violence. He could forget everything here. This was his reset. Pain blasted through him as Logan got a claw down his ribs, but Beast was already countering, sinking his teeth into Logan’s neck. The roaring and snarling of battle was deafening. No room for inconvenient thoughts of heartbreak here. Just survival.
Dustin was on his back, teeth in his hip, but he wasn’t dominant enough to make any real move, so Beast let him chew on him to keep his grip on Logan. Fucking wolf was annoying, though. Winter had both claws in him now, and her teeth pierced his back. Fuck! They were serious tonight.
Beast swung to the side and ducked out of Logan’s swatting range. Emma had her teeth sunk into the muscular hump on the brown bear’s back, completely locked onto him. The D-Team were trying to split them up and distract them, but it wouldn’t work. Not tonight. Logan shook her hard. Beast tried to get back to Logan, but Dustin blocked him, zigzagging back and forth, snarling, snapping his teeth. Fucking move!
A dragon roar shook the ground beneath his paws, and another followed immediately. Well, shhhit, he’d only meant to call the D-Team’s animals. He had to hurry. Rowan would let them brawl, but Kane would split them up, and Beast wasn’t ready to go back to hurting on the inside again yet.
He snarled and rounded on Winter, but he was bigger than her by three times. She backed off quick with a hiss. Smart panther.
Beast charged Logan again after he shook off Emma, and Dustin couldn’t stop him this time.
Someone was yelling now. Familiar. Pretty voice. A voice that distracted him and got him a claw to the belly. Logan would gut him if he wasn’t careful.
“Beast, stop!”
Fuck Logan, he could feel Beast’s claws, feel his teeth, feel his wrath. This was for the fuckers who took everything. Fucking lions. Why was he born to this godforsaken shifter animal? A lineage of killers and barbarians bred generation to generation to annihilate each other, just so they could put their dicks in females.
“Beast!” Beautiful. Beautiful shriek. It was a song he wanted to listen to, and he rounded on her.
She stood there, wrapped in his sheet, skin pale and so perfect, the swell of her little belly pushing against the linens, her hair wild in the wind, tears streaming down her cheeks. Over the scent of blood and anger, he could make out his own smell on her. So thor
oughly claimed. But it didn’t count.
Now, the pain on his insides matched his outsides as Logan tackled him. Fucking bear stole the beauty from his line of sight. Too heavy. Claws down his back. Fuck you, Logan.
There was fire now. He could smell it, but he didn’t give a single shit what the dragons did because Logan had opened himself up, and they would be too late. The grizzly had given him just enough room to twist and reach his soft underbelly.
Now Winter was screaming, too. She’d Changed back too late to change his mind, though. The lion had him. The bloodlust had him.
He sank his teeth into Logan, but didn’t get his jaw locked before the massive bear was knocked off of him and into a tree. Furious, Beast righted himself and glared into the green, prehistoric eyes of the demon dragon himself, The Darkness.
Smoke billowed from his nostrils, and his face was so close, Beast could count his teeth behind his snarled, black-scaled lips. His head was the size of Beast’s trailer. Anger boiling in his veins, Beast opened his mouth and roared at the monster.
Two clicks of a fire starter sounded, and the scent of fire accelerant filled Beast’s senses. Kane reared his long neck back and spewed a line of fire into the air, illuminating the night. Ashes rained down on the trailer park.
Do it! Kill me!
Beast turned and stared at the perfect swell of Kiera’s belly. If the baby had been human, he could’ve had everything.
He’d been so…fucking…close.
Kane might as well light him up and turn him to ashes and dust.
Beast was as good as dead inside anyway.
Chapter Ten
Kiera couldn’t move. She was trapped in the massive lion’s heartbroken gaze. It was clear he wouldn’t be able to move past this. He wasn’t one of those shifters who could accept another man’s child. And it wasn’t just another man, either. It was the child of a man who had helped kill his pride and taken everything away from Beast. It was the child of the man who helped to break him.
Her heartbreak was infinite.
Somewhere over the last couple of days, she’d toyed more and more with the idea, pretended perhaps, that she could have everything. That she could keep her baby and be good enough for it. If she had someone like Beast keeping her on the straight and narrow and supporting her, maybe she could be okay at this.
But her first instincts about Beast—and the giant, dominant animal inside of him—were right. He was governed by his animal side. That much was clear by the bloodshed he’d just started. Lions in the wild killed other male’s offspring. They couldn’t accept cubs with different genetics. And Beast was more animal than man with an acute hatred for Justin.
Everyone was bleeding. The clearing smelled like iron and smoke.
She should be focused on the fire-breathing dark dragon perched above them, but she couldn’t take her eyes of Beast. Beautiful, dominant, brawling Beast had just roared a challenge to Kane. A challenge like he’d given the others. She’d watched him spiral. Watched him bleed his crew. Watched him roar for his own death in the face of The End of Days.
He couldn’t keep her steady. He couldn’t even keep himself steady.
Tears streamed down her cheeks, burning more than they should, as if made of lava. Cradling her belly, she whispered, “Beast, I wanted to tell you, but I wasn’t ready to tell anyone.”
Kane backed off, careful not to crush the trailers in the park, stepping gingerly as he snarled a deep rattling sound with every smoky breath. She’d never seen the dragon so in control. The Kane she knew in Apex would’ve burned Beast to nothing with that challenge.
So, people could change. Just maybe not people like Beast.
Kiera ripped her gaze away from Beast because he was staring at her belly with such fire in his eyes. And yeah, it hurt. It hurt, okay? He looked at her differently. She was a pregnancy now to him, not a person. Not someone beautiful and mysterious and worth getting to know. She’d given away her heart when they were making love and now it felt like he was squeezing it in his hand.
The others were Changing back, so she wiped her eyes. Logan’s chest and abs were shredded, and he couldn’t stand on his own. Emma and Dustin were trying to get him to his feet, but Winter had other ideas.
Naked, clawed up, and with gold fury in her eyes, Winter ran at Beast. She shoved him so hard she stumbled. “Fuck you, Beast. Fuck you! We were sleeping. We were happy. You ripped our animals out of us, and then you nearly killed him. You nearly killed him, you fucking fuck!” Winter’s shoulders shook with her crying, and she shoved him again.
Beast didn’t fight it. He let her push him and walked slowly past Kiera toward the woods, each footstep graceful, but heavy as if he shouldered the weight of the world. Perhaps he always had.
Hands touched Kiera’s back, and she jumped. It was Rowan looking down at her belly. “You got a baby in you, Kiera?” she asked softly.
Kiera broke down…just…sobbing. It felt so good to have it out there, and so utterly terrible all at once. Rowan hugged her tight, but she could still see him, the shifter she wanted walking away. She watched him until he disappeared into the shadows, and never once did he look back.
A few seconds more, and a long lion bellow sounded, and then another and another. They got shorter and shorter until Beast quit his lament and shrouded the trailer park in silence.
He was just on the edge of the woods, so close…yet completely unreachable.
She was mindless with sadness right now, overwhelmed and overpowered by it. For a moment, she’d felt whole. She’d lost the hollowness. Beast had filled it up, and now she had to go back to being empty again. “I almost had him, Rowan. I almost had everything.”
“Shhhh, he just needs some time.”
But Rowan didn’t understand. Kiera had seen that dead-eyed look in a lion before. She’d seen it on Tammy’s face when she told Kiera’s social worker she couldn’t take her in. It was the look of goodbye.
“Emma, can you get the bleeding stopped?” Rowan asked over Kiera’s shoulder.
“I’ll do my best,” the woman answered. They were trying to get Logan inside the doublewide trailer he shared with his mate, but he was dead weight and not much help. His feet dragged behind them, leaving two lines in the dirt.
Beast had done that. She’d done that.
Kiera was in way over her head here. Too much hung in the balance with these troubled shifters. One argument could spell death for one of them. Or all of them. They’d gone to battle with such single-minded tenacity, it left her shaken.
“Come on,” Rowan said, pulling her toward the silver RV. “You’re bleeding, too.”
Kiera stumbled numbly beside her and stared down at the new claiming mark. What had possessed him to do that? With Justin, she’d begged and begged for the shot to get her animal back like Kane had. He’d been bitten by Rowan, another dragon shifter, and his dragon’s return had been immediate.
But with Beast, she hadn’t begged. She hadn’t pleaded with him to claim her. Hadn’t cried to him about the shame she felt when she saw Justin’s bite in the mirror every morning. Hadn’t asked him to cover it up with one of his own. He’d just done it.
Kiera Pierce—twice claimed, and the keeper of none.
Her face crumpled with her crying as Rowan guided her into the Airstream trailer. The dragon shifter’s hands were shaking as she hit the tap water in the tiny kitchen sink. It was brown as it came out and took a few seconds to run clear.
When Rowan pulled a rag from under the sink, her hands were shaking harder, and a soft rumble emanated from her.
Kiera sniffed. “Are you okay?”
The door banked open, startling Kiera, and in walked Kane, clad in jeans and nothing more, looking flushed and still smelling of dragon’s fire. His jet black hair hung in front of his face, and when he leaned against the closed door, he looked up and sighed. “Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant, Kiera?”
How did she explain this when she was feeling so vulnerable a
nd raw? She didn’t know where to start, so she opened and closed her mouth a couple times in search of the right words.
“I can’t have babies,” Rowan whispered raggedly. “You probably know this. Kane and I have too much dragon in us, and carrying a pure dragon child would kill me. Do you know this?”
“Yes,” Kiera whispered.
“I have expressed interest in a surrogate. Do you also know this?”
“Yes.”
Rowan huffed a breath and spun, rested her hands behind her on the edge of the counter. “Why were you stalking us, Kiera? Beast said you were here weeks before you let Kane see you.”
“Because I wanted to see if you were the ones. I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I can keep the baby and be any good. I was raised by a rogue, and she died early. I couldn’t secure a pride, have been stripped of my lioness, and have spiraled my whole life.” Kiera wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “I don’t want it raised by a pride, and especially not Justin’s pride. He’s awful, Rowan. No lion other than my mother has ever done anything for me but hurt me.” She shrugged and cupped her belly. “Until Beast.”
Rowan lifted her chin, and her gold dragon eyes were rimmed with moisture that spilled onto her cheeks. “Winter will be my surrogate. She offered, and the paperwork is done. She’s serious about it. If all goes well, she will be having mine and Kane’s baby, a dragon at little risk to her, and then she and Logan will be trying for their own cub when she’s ready. Kane and I won’t be raising your cub, Keira.”
A flood of relief washed through her, and Kiera huffed out the breath she’d been holding. The baby fluttered hard in her tummy, and she smiled emotionally down at it. “That’s okay,” Kiera said, lifting her attention back to Rowan. “I’m happy Winter is going to give you a baby.” And she truly was. She’d just grown a huge respect for them, not only for Rowan and Kane, but for Winter and Logan as well.
Rowan’s smile was slow and steady, and her nostrils flared, as if scenting the air. “And that reaction right there says you’ll do just fine as a mother.”