by Selena Kitt
After Ivy started spitting in their faces—and one of them had gotten close enough to try to kiss her, and she’d rewarded him by biting off part of his lip and spitting in onto the blood-stained floor—they stopped approaching her from the front.
She’d almost preferred that, though, to the uneasy feeling that they were all watching her from behind. And occasionally, someone would grab her ass or shove a hand up roughly between her legs, trying to slide a finger inside.
“She tastes like honey,” someone said after doing the latter, and she heard him lick his fingers. “Can’t wait to eat that.”
“She’s a cow,” Vaughn’s voice cut through their low talking. “Would you fuck a cow?”
“He did fuck the cow, sir,” another man replied and Ivy cringed, closing her eyes against it. “Twice. While Donald was eating her eyes.”
“That’s what I’m gonna do with this one.” That rough hand again, probing, shoving fingers inside her. Ivy squeezed her eyes shut even tighter, wishing it was over. “I’m gonna fuck the cow—then I’m gonna eat the cow.”
“Well I’m gonna fuck her, too,” another man piped up. To Ivy, he sounded incredibly young. “Never fucked a girl before.”
Jesus Christ.
“Too bad this one’s gotta be your first.” Vaughn laughed. “Fat pussy ain’t tight pussy. Like throwing a fucking hotdog down a hallway. Better off fucking your fist, private.”
“Eh, she’s not so bad,” the youngster spoke up in Ivy’s defense and she felt another hand, this one gentler, stroking the back of her thigh. “I bet she’s gonna taste good. Inside and out.”
Jesus fucking wept.
Ivy tried twisting away from the touch and the wire above her head turned on its axis. She swung around, twirling, her toes barely touching the ground. Faces went by in a blurry circle, all of them dirty, bloody, laughing. She saw Vaughn standing there, arms crossed over his chest, grinning, looking utterly delighted at her predicament. That infuriated her and she lashed out with her foot, which just made her twirl faster on the cable.
“Whee!” The young one laughed, giving Ivy a little push, which widened the arc of her rotation from circle to ellipse.
“Don’t play with your food, private,” Vaughn snorted, and she felt him grab her from behind, bringing her wild swinging to a sudden stop. His mouth was against her ear, and she felt his hand move down to cup her mound. He spoke low, and she didn’t know if he was trying to keep them from hearing, or not.
“I’m going to let them all fuck you, you know.” His breath was fetid and she gagged, trying to turn away, but he held her fast against him, his finger moving between her slit. “Let’s see… how many cocks is that? And you’ve got… oh, three good holes at least. Plus your eye sockets. You should have seen Donald go at that cow…”
Ivy gagged, but nothing came up.
“And Lord only knows how many more wet, squishy holes they can cut in you to stick their cocks in.” Vaughn sighed. She tried not to remember what he looked like, the night he’d taken her virginity in the back seat of his father’s BMW. She’d told Caleb she had given it to him, but that wasn’t exactly true.
He’d proposed—also in the back seat of his father’s BMW—and had given her the ring. Apparently, he figured it worked like a key that would unlock the pussy-door. When she’d still refused him, Vaughn had shoved up her skirt, yanked her panties aside, and had taken what he wanted all along.
She could still see him in the dashboard light, sweating and rutting like a pig, his blonde hair cut like Justin Bieber that summer, flapping over one eye, his meaty hands keeping her wrists pinned to her sides so she couldn’t push him away.
“Frankly, none of that interests me,” he told her softly. “I already rolled you and flour and found the wet spot. Your flabby cunt couldn’t satisfy a horse… or a bear for that matter.”
Those words got to her. Ivy choked back a sob and she heard Vaughn chuckle.
“He’ll come for you,” Vaughn assured her. “Not because he wants you—no, sweetheart, don’t delude yourself. With all this padding, you’ll make a great meal, but you’re a terrible fuck.”
Rage rose up in Ivy, and she fought against it. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing his words had any meaning for her.
“No, he’ll come because he thinks it’s the right thing to do,” Vaughn assured her. “And when he does, he’ll get to watch it all. And I’ll finally get to be what he is.”
“You’ll never be what he is,” she hissed, opening her eyes as lightning flashed across the sky, revealing her ravaged garden in wet relief. “You could never, ever be like him. None of you can. You tried and failed, Vaughn. Just like you’ve tried and failed everything you’ve ever tried to do in your whole goddamned life!”
She knew she was provoking him—she felt the way his spine straightened in response to her words. She wished she could see his face, and the anger rising in his eyes. She wanted to provoke him, now that it had begun. She’d realized, finally, that the only way to end this was to get them to end her. Without Ivy hanging in the barn as bait, there would be nothing to tempt Caleb into this trap.
“You wouldn’t be anywhere if it weren’t for your father’s money,” she snapped, gasping when she felt his arm go around her neck. The weight of him yanked on the pulley overhead and her feet finally touched the ground. “You can’t be what Caleb is. Never in your tiny, miserable little life. You can keep trying all you want—but you’ll never measure up, needle dick.”
“Cunt!” He brought his knee up between hers from behind, hard against her pubis. If she’d been a guy, it would have taken her right the hell out. Even as a woman, it hurt so much she saw stars and it jarred her teeth together. “I’m going to eat your fucking heart out, sweetheart. And I’m going to make him watch.”
Lightning flashed outside, and Ivy saw him standing just outside the barn doors in the darkness. Caleb was holding the biggest rifle she’d ever seen, and there was another man beside him, slightly smaller in stature, holding a gun just as big. They were both soaked to the skin as they stepped into the circle of light.
Behind her, she heard men and guns at the ready. Ten of them, maybe more. When lightning flashed again, she saw the men from the house moving quickly, quietly down the garden rows, guns drawn. This was going to be a bloody massacre.
“Caleb,” she whispered, seeing the pain and the anger on his face when he looked at her. For the first time, she felt truly humiliated by her situation. Before that, she hadn’t let herself, not for a minute, be part of what they were trying to do to her. But when she saw Caleb’s face, his reaction, it finally broke her. “Caleb, don’t… please… just go! Leave me!”
“Oh, he won’t do that. He’s a fucking Eagle Scout, sweetheart. No Marine can stand to watch a woman suffer, even a fat bitch like you.” Vaughn chuckled. “Look, boys, we get a two-fer—both brothers for the price of one fat cow. Fuck Jack and his magic beans, this is the best trade ever!”
Both brothers? Ivy blinked in surprise, looking between Caleb and the other stranger with the gun. But Caleb’s brother, Jonah, had been killed at the strawberry patch, hadn’t he? Jonah had been mauled by the other giant—
Bear.
Shifter.
Of course, she realized, meeting Caleb’s eyes and seeing the truth there. If Caleb could shift from human to bear and back again—why wouldn’t his brother be able to do so? The bear that had charged at her hadn’t been charging at her—he’d been protecting her from the other man! And Caleb had recognized him and called him by his human name. His brother—Jonah.
“Let her go,” Caleb said. “And we’ll kill you fast instead of slow.”
“Oh ho ho.” Vaughn sounded like he was enjoying this far too much. She couldn’t see his face, but she saw the way Caleb’s jaw tightened when Vaughn grabbed her breast and started kneading it. “Such threats. You know you won’t make it ten yards before my men drop you. I think you forgot how to count. There are on
ly two of you.”
“Oh we can count,” Jonah said, stepping more fully into the light. “And there are only two of us in front of you. But there are thirty more in the rafters.”
Ivy looked up, past the long, silver braided wire that bound her to the pulley and hoist, squinting past the spotlight that tried to blind her, seeing the faces of men—men with guns—hovering up there in the hayloft.
How? How in the world?
Then all hell broke loose.
Chapter 14—Caleb
Rage had burned like a fire in Caleb’s chest, and it took every bit of strength Jonah and the rest of the bear clan had to keep him from going bear and killing as many as he could before they took him down. If the clan hadn’t been close, he might have done just that, but by the time Caleb realized Vaughn actually had Ivy in his possession, Jonah had returned with more than thirty shifters at the ready.
There wasn’t a lot of time for explanations, but between Caleb’s instructions to the men on how to get to the bunker and into the gun safe below ground, and hashing out plans for Ivy’s liberation and the hopefully painful death of every single one of the men that had dared to put a finger on her, Caleb had gleaned that Jonah had found another bear shifter clan further west. He’d been living with them for the past few weeks.
“Mom and Dad were always so solitary,” Jonah told his brother with a shrug. “But there are more of us out there, you know. Lots more.”
Caleb hadn’t known—he’d been too busy trying to live in the human world to pay much attention to the shifter one—but he did now. And he was more grateful than he could ever say.
Vaughn was a sloppy soldier—always had been. He’d never understood the man’s penchant for the military in the first place, because he wasn’t made for it—except that his father had been a highly decorated officer, now retired. Maybe he’d been trying to measure up. Thanks to Vaughn’s lack of attention to detail, he had only put one scout behind the barn. They’d dispatched him silently, and thirty shifters had climbed the ladder to the hayloft while Caleb and Jonah distracted everyone from the front.
It was a far from perfect plan—but Jonah had been one-hundred percent correct about Vaughn. He was determined to keep the shifter brothers alive for his own purposes.
“Don’t shoot those two!” Vaughn screamed over the din, pointing at Caleb and Jonah. He had an arm around Ivy’s neck, and a knife drawn at her throat. “Don’t shoot the goddamned bears! Get the tranc gun! Get the goddamned tranc gun!”
Caleb shot the soldier who went for the tranc gun—he was just a kid for God’s sake—working his way toward Ivy. She was naked, strung up, her face dirty and full of tears, her mouth bloody. Just seeing Vaughn anywhere near her made him crazy.
He glanced up and saw the shifters aiming rifles at the men below, taking cover behind haystacks. Some of them, though, who had looked at the rifles like they were Martian toys when Jonah handed them over, simply jumped down from the rafters and went full bear. There were six bears on the ground now, gnashing and swiping and roaring above the storm.
“Don’t move any closer. I’ll slit this cow’s throat before you can even think about getting a shot off,” Vaughn threatened. His men were falling all around him. The sound of gunfire was deafening and Caleb felt a bullet whiz by his cheek and ducked. “Goddamnit, where’s the tranc gun!”
“Sir.” Behind him, another man was lifting the tranc gun, aiming directly at Caleb.
“No!” Ivy screamed, twisting and squirming in Vaughn’s arms, throwing him off balance. Vaughn swore, regaining his footing, and Caleb saw a trickle of Ivy’s blood sliding down her throat from the tip of the blade.
Caleb growled at Vaughn, low in his throat, distracted from the soldier with the tranc gun by Ivy’s scream. He probably would have been hit with the tranquilizer that the soldier got off just before a bear swiped a big paw at him from behind—a blow so strong it knocked the soldier’s head clean from his shoulders—if Jonah hadn’t shoved him from behind.
Caleb snarled at the attack from behind, whirling to realize it was his brother. Another bullet went flying by his ear and he dodged it out of instinct, although it missed him by a foot. Ivy was sobbing, and the sound filled his chest with heat. He had to get to her. Vaughn had the wire pulled as taut as it would go, Ivy’s arms stretched out high, in front of her, using her body as a shield.
“Come get her.” Vaughn’s face spread with a smile as he lowered the knife from Ivy’s throat, keeping an arm wrapped around her waist. “Come on. She’s all yours.”
Caleb hesitated only a moment. If he could get close enough to grab her—
“Caleb! Behind you!” Ivy screamed as Vaughn pushed her and she swung on the wire, twisting out of control.
Caleb grabbed hold of the wire, but someone slashed at his forearm with a knife from behind—the warning Ivy had given him—and Ivy’s momentum took the wire back out of his hand again as she swung wildly toward Vaughn once more. Caleb, determined not to let him touch her again, went after Vaughn, knocking his knife away and encircling the man’s throat with one big hand.
The cut on Caleb’s forearm wasn’t deep, but it stung like hell and it was bleeding a ton, making it hard for him to keep a grip on Vaughn’s throat. Behind him, he heard Jonah say, “To your left,” and he ducked out of the way of a goddamned baseball bat. Who brought a baseball bat to a gun and bear fight, for chrissakes?
It was just enough of a distraction for Vaughn to escape. Caleb howled with frustration, grabbing the knife from the floor and turning to go cut Ivy down. But Vaughn was there already. He had her around the waist, grinning wildly at Caleb, his face and neck full of the blood from Caleb’s wound.
“Is this what you want?” Vaughn taunted him, running a hand up to tweak Ivy’s nipple. She cried out, kicking wildly at him, but not getting any purchase. “I’ll rip her goddamned throat out with my teeth before I let you have her. You understand me?”
Caleb hesitated. He’d seen what they could do with their teeth, human or not. It was devastating.
“One last kiss, sweetheart. Show him what he’s missing.” Vaughn turned Ivy’s face to him and she cried out again, trying to turn her face away. She was screaming obscenities at him the whole time—Caleb thought, that’s my Ivy!—trying to get away, even though she was bound tight.
Caleb raised his rifle the moment Vaughn looked away, seeing the man’s tongue threatening to choke Ivy, filled with so much hate and anger he could barely hold the goddamned gun steady. The thing weighed a ton.
And that’s when Ivy went bear.
It happened fast—the same way all shifters do—except when she changed, the wires binding her wrists snapped like twine. All she had to do was open her mouth and close it again—her jaws snapped closed on the surprised man’s throat, and Caleb saw his eyes widen in both recognition of what was happening to him and, at the same time, utter disbelief.
Caleb watched with a similar expression on his face, his body frozen in place. Ivy shook her head once from side to side, making sure she’d gotten to the artery—Caleb could see the pulsing spray paint the already bloody wall when she kicked Vaughn’s body aside.
The commotion that had been already dying down—most of Vaughn’s men were killed or maimed so badly they couldn’t fight back by then—came to a near standstill.
Ivy shook herself off—she was sleek and perfectly black, the most beautiful bear Caleb had ever laid eyes on, shifter or not—and then she was back.
“Caleb?”
He heard her whisper his name and he went to her, pulling off his jacket and putting it around her shoulders as he gathered her in to him. She trembled in his arms, looking around as the bears, who had pretty much buttoned up the mission, began to change back into men around her.
“It’s okay,” he whispered, feeling her fear. He’d been scared, too, the first time he’d shifted. He was just a cub when it had happened—a few months old—and it took some trial and error to get the hang of it. And then,
in his teens, there was a time when he’d lost control again. All the hormones, that’s what his father had said. That’s how Vaughn had discovered his secret in the first place.
“Holy shit,” Ivy whispered, turning her wide eyes up to him. “Did I just turn into a motherfucking bear?”
“Yeah.” He laughed, holding her so close he thought he might break her, but he didn’t want to let her go. “You sure motherfucking did.”
How in the hell had he not known she was a shifter? How had she not known? He’d heard of late bloomers, but this was a little ridiculous!
“It was your blood.” Jonah spoke up, smiling down at the two of them. “When he kissed her. He had your blood all over his face. That’s what let me shift back, too.”
Caleb nodded at this explanation, not fully understanding but accepting it.
“I love you.” Ivy whispered this to him, turning Caleb’s face to hers so she could kiss him. They were both bloody and dirty, and he tasted copper in her mouth. She’d never tasted more delicious to him. “I never said it, before. But I love you.”