by Selena Scott
Katya chewed back her smile and beckoned for Glory to approach them. “You need new clothes, child,” she said to Glory.
“And a haircut,” AJ commented, cocking her head to one side.
Glory instinctively raised a hand to her hair. “You want to cut it?”
“Just to make it look a little more intentional,” AJ said, standing up and squinting her eyes at Glory. “I’m in school for it. I did my own.”
“Oh!” Glory lit up. “Well, yours is very beautiful so you can do mine.”
AJ glowed a little at the praise. It wasn’t often someone told her something about her was beautiful. Cute, sure. Sweet – ugh – always. But beautiful? Never. She knew she’d never have the appeal of this wild woman standing in front of her. Tall as an amazon and curvy, even under those borrowed clothes. No. AJ suppressed a sigh. She’d never be the kind of woman that would look right on the arm of a Malashovik brother. She pictured Glory standing next to Emin. And then, just to be cruel to herself, she pictured Glory standing next to Anton. And yeah. Punch to the gut. Because she was just a masochist like that. Well, they could just go ahead and be breathtakingly beautiful together. Meanwhile AJ was just going to keep playing the sister role. She was so good at it.
“I’ll go get my things to cut your hair, okay? And I’ll see if I have something that would fit you.”
“Clothes?” Glory asked, her eyes squinting in confusion. “But you are so much tinier than I am. Like a little fox.” She reached out to stroke AJ’s hair.
Katya and AJ laughed, making Glory jump at the sudden sound. But then Glory laughed along with them.
“I’ll find something for you, don’t worry.” AJ turned to leave the room.
“And can you make my hair as soft as yours?” Glory called out.
“For you, Glorious Glory, anything,” AJ replied and was a little stunned by the absolutely effervescent smile she got in return. Wow. This woman was a killer.
AJ jogged out of the house and through the woods on one side. She only lived on the other side. She loved the familiar walk. The birds in the trees. The little path worn out by only her feet or the Malashoviks. Somehow it felt like a secret little passageway between her life and theirs. She walked it at least once a day. Sometimes at night she would drive instead of walk the path, because Anton didn’t like her walking in the woods at night. She made a little face.
Maybe she wouldn’t mind how protective he always was of her if he was taking care of her needs in all ways. And she did mean ALL ways. But he steadfastly refused to see her as anything but a little sister. Still, AJ thought as she spotted her little one story house through the edge of the trees. There had been that moment last spring. One moment in all the twenty thousand she’d had with him. Where he’d flashed, hot and hard. Angry, but also… untethered. She’d thought for sure he was going to kiss her. Her heart had been about to leave earth. Just second star to the right and straight on till morning. But he’d pulled away, looking disgusted. With himself, with her. And he’d been even more distant ever since.
A decade ago, when she’d been only fifteen, he’d saved her from a mountain lion. In his bear form, of course. And he’d brought her home, to his family. That had been the real favor. The Malashoviks had saved her life. Given her a family where she basically had none.
She sighed as she jogged up the steps of her quiet, lonely house. And then froze when she realized that the door was unlocked. The door was always locked. She swung the door open and took a step inside, automatically grabbing the baseball bat she kept by the door.
“Hey, bug,” Brett Constance said as he stepped out of the kitchen.
AJ swallowed the scream that had bubbled in her chest and let out a weak sigh of relief. “Dad. I didn’t know you were gonna be home.”
He was a trucker and his schedule was all over the place. He made it home maybe a night or two every three months. Ever since she was a kid it had been like that. And when her mother had died, nothing had changed.
“I’m home for a few days. A little staycation.”
AJ squinted her eyes in confusion at the hopeful look on his face. “Okay,” she said, and she couldn’t suppress the mildly suspicious note in her voice. “I just came back to get a few things and then I’m headed back to the Malashoviks.”
“Home for dinner?” he called out to her retreating back.
“No, I’m eating over there. And then I’ve got class tonight. Don’t wait up.” She scurried fast out of the room, just like the fox that Glory had said she was. And she didn’t see the look on her father’s face. Wouldn’t have been able to interpret it if she had.
CHAPTER FIVE
If explaining to his three brothers why they had to come over for dinner at Mama’s house put Emin in a bad mood, it was nothing compared to what he found when he finally made it back.
Glory sat in his mother’s kitchen, holding completely still, yet somehow vibrating with energy. AJ stood behind her, just finishing up drying Glory’s hair, a satisfied expression on her face.
Emin stepped into the kitchen and pulled up short, Maxim running into him from behind.
“What are you – oh, thank you, Lord,” Maxim hummed, easily stepping around Emin and striding toward Glory.
Emin couldn’t move.
“What did you do to her?” Emin asked AJ.
Some of the light fell out of Glory’s eyes at Emin’s words. “You don’t like it?” she asked. But then she was grinning and glowing again as Maxim fell to his knees in front of her.
“My light, my wife, my only. Let me take you away from here,” Maxim crooned, reaching out with his hands for hers.
Emin still couldn’t move. AJ had changed Glory’s hair a little, lopped off a few inches and made it even more… tumbly. And given her blunt bangs that fell just over her eyebrows. Her hair framed her face in a shiny, crimson cloud. Emin could smell it from across the room and it made his skin pull tight over his muscles. He felt irrationally irritated.
He strode across the room and slapped Maxim’s hands away from her. “Do not talk to her like this. She does not know better. She will think you are serious.”
Maxim, intrigued by a feral glint in his brother’s eyes that he’d never seen before, stood. “I am serious.”
“No, he is not,” Emin growled to Glory, gripping her by the hands and dragging her up. Which, he realized immediately, was a mistake. As now he got a good view of what she was wearing and it definitely wasn’t his old baggy clothes.
“What is this?” Emin gestured at her outfit, turning to glare at AJ.
AJ wisely bit back her smile. “The only thing of mine that she could fit into.”
Emin surveyed the yoga pants damn near splitting at the seams and the soft jersey sweater, stretching over her breasts.
“You call this ‘fit’?” he spat out.
He was too busy trying to keep his eyes from flopping out of his head to notice the look that AJ and Maxim shared at his expense. Surprised, amused, delighted at Emin’s discomfort.
“You bring one but not all my sons?” Katya asked as she entered the kitchen, a basket of laundry on her hip.
Glory tugged her hands out of Emin’s and went to relieve Katya of the load. Glory buried her face in the laundry. “Ah! It smells so good! Like fresh water and wind and-”
Emin interrupted her. He couldn’t possibly hear her gush about one more thing. He was already this close to having to murder Maxim anyways, just for being in the same room as her. “Danil and Dora will be here soon. Papa was with them. Anton, well, he said ‘later’.”
“Then we go to living room while we wait,” Katya said, one eye on the oven where dinner bubbled.
All the children obediently followed, Emin purposefully blocking Maxim’s view of Glory’s sinful ass.
They were just settling down into the living room when the front door kicked open.
“You could not just wait for me, Ptûska? You simply MUST go on your own?” Danil’s irritated, sarcastic voice
preceded him into the hallway.
“Oh, don’t worry, Danil. Whenever you’re not there to hold my hand, my legs just up and fall off. I never get anything done without you, darling.” Dora came into view first, walking backwards to look her husband in the face and teasingly fluttering her eyelashes. Her stylish cap of mahogany hair caught the light as she whipped off her bomber jacket and tossed it in the general direction of the coat hooks.
“The boy is having problems telling his wife what to do,” Ilya Malashovik said as he skirted around the arguing couple, and entered the living room, grinning.
Katya gave an appreciative laugh from where she sat in her rocking chair, working on a crossword.
Ilya stopped still when he saw Glory, blinking his eyes against the sheer beauty of her. “So,” he grinned. “Which one of my sons will you marry?’
“Papa!” Emin growled as Glory grinned and laughed, utterly delighted by the question.
Danil ignored the rest of his group. “Not even a phone call, Ptûska? You had to go that very second?”
“Danil,” Dora fisted her hands on her hips. “It wasn’t dangerous and we both know it!”
“Danishka,” Katya said to her youngest son, “you cannot make a lion into a lamb, no matter the haircut.”
Dora crossed the room and kissed Katya on the cheek. “You’re a smart lady, Mama.”
“You’re a lion?” Glory exclaimed, leaping off the couch and knocking Emin to the side in her hurry to get to Dora. “I’m a tiger!”
Glory whipped her arms around Dora’s middle, hugging her close and unabashedly sniffing her hair. Danil cleared his throat and loosened his tie, lowering himself to the couch next to Maxim. The two brothers grinned in tandem at the pained scowl on Emin’s face.
“I’ll just bet you are,” Dora said, closing her mouth. She broke the hug and peered into Glory’s face. “It really is you, huh? The tiger in the woods?”
“Yes,” Glory nodded in a very definite way. “And I’ve seen you before. But I didn’t know you were a lion.”
Dora tugged Glory over to the couch and they both sat down. “I’m not. Figure of speech.”
Glory cocked her head to one side and turned to Emin. She didn’t understand what Dora had said and she was asking him. For some reason that made him want to pound one fist on his chest. He didn’t look closely at his feeling. “Mama meant that Dora was LIKE a lion. Because she is fierce. And smart. And a fighter. Not that she is a lion shifter.”
Glory’s eyes lit with delighted understanding. “Oh, that is true. You are a smart, fierce fighter. I’ve seen it.”
“That night in the woods?” Dora asked, remembering a time about six months ago. Dora was an investigative reporter and she’d been sneaking around a site in the woods, looking for information. She’d thought her eyes were playing tricks when she’d seen the shadow of a tiger in the woods of Spokane. That was before she’d married into a family of bear shifters and suddenly a lot more had seemed possible in the world.
“At the bad place,” Glory nodded solemnly. “I saw you there, sneaking and climbing and looking around. And then again, later, you came back, even though the place scared you. And then I saw you fight a bear. You are very small and the bear was very large. But you tried to fight anyways.”
“Wow,” Dora said, her eyes wide. This girl tiger had apparently been quite the tail last spring when Dora had been eyes-deep in the investigation of a lifetime.
“Bad place?” Danil asked from across the room. He thought he knew what she was talking about, but he, all of them really, needed confirmation. And a lot more information. “I’m Danil, by the way.”
“I’m Glory,” she glowed. But then a cloud was drawn across that glow and Emin had the insane urge to brush the hair back from her face, curl her into his lap. “Yes, the bad place-”
Glory cut off and her eyes went wide as Anton filled the doorway of the living room, tugging a shirt over his head. He’d obviously just come inside from having been in his bear form.
“Now, what is big emergency?” he asked, grouchy as usual.
Again, Glory was springing to her feet. But this time she was sniffing at the air as well. She hopped gracefully over Dora’s outstretched feet and sprang across the room to Anton. He barely had the shirt down before she was gripping his shoulders, sniffing at his neck, his face, his hair.
A wild grin stole over his face and made Emin want to burn the house down. If a smile like that from Anton hadn’t been so rare, Emin may have smacked it right off of him.
Glory stepped back, staring into Anton’s face.
“Hello,” Anton said, charmed by her gorgeous, guileless stare.
No one noticed the sleeve of AJ’s sweater being twisted to smithereens in her hands. Yup. Just as she expected. Glory looked perfect next to Anton. Of course. And she’d just spent an afternoon making her look even more perfect. Good one, AJ.
Glory sniffed at Anton again.
Stop sniffing my fucking brother! Emin screamed in his head.
Stepping back, Glory looked Anton fully in the face. “You’re a Navuka bear,” she exclaimed emphatically, wiping the smile completely from his face. “I’m a Navuka tiger. Did they hurt you? They hurt me. But,” she reached up and brushed the small shock of white hair behind one of his ears, the light scarring down his neck, “it looks like they hurt you more.”
Emin’s brothers expected him to look to them for confirmation. They all expected him to give a dark, pained look and ask who the hell this lady was. They expected him to sulk into a corner or disappear back out the door, desperate to shift again and get away from his past. He did none of those things.
He gripped Glory by the shoulders. “Navuka had you? For how long? Where? You are okay?” His English was the worst of all the brothers; he rarely used it. Only when he was talking to AJ, really. But now it was flowing out of him. Fast.
Glory nodded, gripped his shoulders right back as if she were imitating him. She probably was, Emin realized. Considering she pretty much had no idea how to talk to people who weren’t her mother. “I’m okay. I got away.”
“Glory, come tell us all,” Katya said. “We need to know.”
Katya’s voice broke the spell between Anton and Glory and the two of them looked back at the room. Anton took a step back, out of the room, but Glory tugged him forward. She folded herself down on the floor and when he stood above her, she tugged him down to sit next to her.
Emin felt a great, yawning pit open up inside of him.
Great, AJ thought. She was watching them fall in love before her very eyes. They were gonna have a quickie wedding and be pregnant in about three seconds. Great. Yeah. Maybe she’d have the honor of being godmother to their drop-dead gorgeous children. That would be nice.
“Where do I start?” Glory asked Katya.
“Tell about your mother. How you lived,” Emin said, absurdly satisfied to know something about her that the rest of the group didn’t.
“Okay, well, we live in the mountains. Just the two of us. My grandmother used to live with us, but she died when I was little. She was a Navuka tiger, too, when she was a little girl. She had a big white stripe down her spine.” Glory turned to Anton and again touched his small shock of white hair. “We stayed up in the mountains alone because my mother was afraid they would come for us, the way they’d come for my grandmother once. We hid from people so they wouldn’t know we were there. So no rumors would get started about the tigers living in the mountains. I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand a lot of things. My mother had a collection of books in our cave, and she’d let me look at them, she taught me to read. But you can only learn so much about the world from a few books. And you definitely can’t learn about an organization like Navuka.”
Glory’s eyes were far away, distant, devastated. Again, Emin just wanted to pull her onto his lap.
“When she told me about them, I pictured bad men, with angry faces and weapons chasing me. But when they found us, when they cam
e for me, it was this time last year. Autumn in the mountains. When they came it was a man and a woman. And they looked in love. They held hands and had a picnic. I crept to get closer. The woman saw me and smiled. She wasn’t scared. She held out her hand. I was - I was curious.”
Glory’s voice broke for a second. “If my mother had been with me, she’d never have let me approach them. But I was alone. I went to them. The woman smiled. I was so happy. And then I was so sleepy. And everything went dark. And I woke up in the bad place.”
“The testing site where you saw me a few months ago,” Dora said.
“Yes.” Glory nodded solemnly. “I had been there a while. I don’t know how long. And they restrained me and - and - and buzzed me.” She searched for the word. She put two fingers at her throat and vibrated her body.
Emin’s stomach turned. God. They’d tasered her.
“And they took blood from me and my fur. They put chemicals in me and they screamed and screamed. Because all they wanted was for me to shift to my human form. But I wouldn’t.”
“You did not shift for them?” Anton asked, his eyes wide as he surveyed Glory from where he sat next to her. “Even with their chemicals in your blood?”
Glory shook her head. “I knew it was what they wanted. And I hated them,” she whispered, as if she were saying something she was ashamed of.
“How did you get away?” AJ asked, her sweater between her fingers still, but her jealousies long forgotten. The sweet woman before her had had enough animosity in her life.
Glory laced her own fingers together. “They needed to move locations. They felt like someone knew they were there. Maybe it was you who knew?” Glory asked Dora and Dora treated her to a quick-fire grin.
Glory continued. “They moved a lot of their supplies first. And then they were going to move me last. But in the confusion, they’d forgotten to make me sleepy. They always made me sleepy. But I was much more awake that day. So I pretended to be sleepy and when they came to move me, I fought them.”
“I destroyed as much of the site as I could and I was gone, into the woods. I knew they’d never find me because I’m so good at hiding.”