Killer Bear

by Dillon, Kym

  And speaking of Mark…

  He was still watching her, still in bear form, but as she approached him he shifted slowly back. “Allie,” he whispered, and dropped to the ground.

  She rushed to his side, knowing they should get in the house but unable to formulate a plan of how to do it. He was so much heavier than she was. She knew she couldn’t possibly lift him, even just to his feet. And it was clear that he wouldn’t be able to move under his own steam. The bleeding seemed much worse now that he was in human form. His skin was pale white, and he was gasping.

  He shouldn’t have shifted, Allie thought, feeling panicked. He had shifted around an embedded bullet, allowing it to tear at his insides, to do more damage. That was why the wound looked worse now. “Mark,” she gasped. “Mark, oh my God.”

  “All right,” he said, his voice hoarse and quiet. He wasn’t getting enough air, she realized, feeling manic. Had the bullet hit his lung? “I’m all right. Gonna be fine.”

  “Yes, yes, you will, we just...we need to get to a hospital. Let me get my phone, Mark. Can you wait here while I run and get it?”

  “Allie.” He grabbed her wrist, his grip still surprisingly strong.”

  “Mark?”

  “Gotta tell you—” He broke off, gasping, and pain twisted his face.

  Allie clutched his arm. “I’m here.”

  He closed his eyes and breathed out, relaxing as the spasm of pain passed. “I gotta tell you...I was lying, Allie.”

  “Don’t talk, Mark. Save your energy.” Nothing mattered except getting him to a doctor before it was too late. She tried again to pull away. “Mark, let me go for my phone, you need help, we have to hurry.”

  “I was lying,” he said again. “When I told you we weren’t mates. I lied.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know, Mark. I know.”

  He closed his eyes. A long time passed before he took another breath, and in the interval Allie felt her blood turn to ice. She pried her wrist loose from his grip and was about to get to her feet and run for the house, for her phone, when his eyes snapped open and he inhaled sharply. Allie knew she should go, but despite herself, she leaned close. “I’m here, Mark.”

  “Had to protect you,” he said, grinding out the words as though each one caused him pain. “I knew he’d come, Allie. Had to get you out...out of town...away…”

  “But he won’t bother us anymore,” Allie said. “That other man, Brian, he said he was the Black Bear Clan’s Alpha. Did you hear that?”

  Mark nodded slowly. “Heard it. ‘S true. Safe now.” His eyes drifted closed and his hand loosened on Allie’s wrist. She watched his chest rise and fall, its movements shallow, and then jumped to her feet and sprinted for the house.

  She had left her phone in her bedroom, plugged into the wall charger, when she’d gone outside to investigate the source of the rocks against her window. It was the stupidest thing she’d ever done in her life, and as she picked it up she felt a rush of relief at being reunited with it. She ran back to Mark’s side, already dialing 911, and gave the operator her address and the details of Mark’s injury, making sure to include their location outside and around the side of the house.

  Shaking, Allie hung up the phone. Mark appeared to have passed out in her absence. He was so white now that his lips were turning blue. She rested a hand very gently on his stomach and felt the rise and fall that meant he was still alive.

  Liam had said losing a mate was a fate worse than death for a shifter. Would she die along with him?

  He’s not going to die. Stop it.

  She laid down on the ground beside Mark, suddenly exhausted, and held his hand in both of hers. Any minute, she told herself. Any minute now, she would hear sirens. Everything was going to be fine.

  17

  “So what’s happening with the bar?”

  Allie hopped up to sit on the counter of Mark’s renovated auto shop. He had bought out his partner, Frank, and now owned it outright, and he’d spent the past month and a solid chunk of the settlement money he’d won in his court case fixing it up. Liam, in addition to having to pay the settlement to Mark, had been convicted of the murder of his parents and locked up. Mark was a free man now, and business was good.

  “The bar’s closed,” Allie said. “I think Dani holds the deed right now, but it’s a temporary situation since she doesn’t want to run a bar. If they don’t find a new owner in the next month or so, the city will reclaim the property.”

  “Do they have any leads?” Mark asked. He was fully recovered from his gunshot wound and currently lay on a rolling dolly underneath a car, fixing up the chassis. No matter how successful his business became, Allie knew he would always want to take part in the hands-on part of the business. That was Mark. As far as Mark was concerned, the business side of running a business was nothing but a necessary evil.

  “Nothing, last I heard,” Allie said. “And I think Dani would have told me.”

  “Still an uncontrollable gossip, huh?”

  “I wish they’d be friendlier to you. Talk to you, at least.”

  “They do sometimes,” Mark said fairly. “It’s a hell of a lot better than it used to be.”

  “But they’re still weird around you,” Allie said.

  “They’ll get there,” Mark said. “There’s a lot of history. Remember, they spent the last year thinking I was a murderer.”

  Allie grumbled, “At least there’s finally a decent lawyer in this town.” She had opened her own firm just recently and had already taken on a few cases.

  “And you’ll soon put the rest of those ambulance chasers out of business, I have no doubt,” Mark said.

  “Well, hopefully not all of them,” Allie laughed. “Someone will still need to prosecute cases, so I have somebody to defend. Otherwise, I’d just be up there arguing with myself.”

  “Allie James,” Mark said, “I believe you could argue with anyone. Even yourself.”

  She tossed a pen from the desk she was sitting on at his knee. It bounced off and clattered to the floor of the garage, and Mark rolled out from under the car he was working on. “Shouldn’t you be over at the office now instead of bothering me while I’m trying to work?” he teased.

  “I closed up for the afternoon,” Allie said. Being her own boss definitely had its advantages. Even the thought of taking a weekday afternoon off would have been a distant dream back in New York, but now she was able to do it on a whim if things weren’t busy. “Maybe you should do the same,” she told Mark, thinking wistfully of the new sheets the two of them had purchased several weeks ago as a housewarming gift to themselves.

  But Mark shook his head. “Can’t do it, much as I’d like to. I have a two o’clock.”

  “You do?” Allie glanced down at the schedule that lay open on the desk beside where she was sitting. Sure enough, the afternoon was wide open. “It isn’t written down,” she told him. “Did you forget? I told you that you need to hire a receptionist.”

  “You don’t have a receptionist.”

  “I don’t forget to write down my appointments!”

  “I don’t need to write it down,” Mark said. “I remembered he was coming in.”

  “Is that a shifter thing?” Allie asked. Over the past several weeks, she had continued her education about shifter lore, culture, and science. She had learned that shifters took many different forms—not all of them were bears, and not all of them belonged to clans. Mark had told her that those who didn’t belong to clans had a tendency to be more dangerous, having no one to keep them in check. Allie shuddered, thinking of that night when she’d faced Liam in her yard.

  Now Mark laughed. “Having a good memory isn’t a shifter thing,” he said. “Lots of people have good memories. Just because you don’t—”

  “There isn’t anything wrong with my memory!” Allie said hotly, but inwardly she was smiling. Even though he was making fun of her, there was something pleasant about being teased like this. It was intimate. She liked being known
.

  At two o’clock precisely, a figure came through the door of the garage’s tiny storefront. Allie heard the ding of the bell that had been installed to alert Mark and his team of a customer’s presence. Mark got to his feet and headed out to the front of the shop, and Allie followed behind him, curious to see who the appointment was with.

  It took her a moment to recognize the man. He had generic good looks—tall and broad-shouldered with muscles that looked like they’d be firm to the touch, sun-bronzed skin, thick, wavy brown hair that fell to his shoulders. His eyes skipped over Mark and landed on her. “Hi, Allie.”

  The voice gave him away. “Brian,” she said, struggling to maintain her composure. Just the sight of him made her heart race, as if she were back in that horrible night being threatened by Liam.

  Brian turned to Mark. “We haven’t been formally introduced,” he said. “But we spoke on the phone. “Brian Krane, Black Bear Alpha.”

  “Mark Harris,” Mark said, extending a hand to shake. “Brown Bear...Alpha? I guess?”

  “Aren’t there more of you?” Brian asked.

  “Pretty sure I’m it,” Mark said. “We had all but died out anyway, before your, uh, Liam intervened. My parents were only children, and so am I.”

  “That would make you Alpha, then,” Brian said.

  “For whatever that’s worth,” Mark said. Allie hadn’t forgiven Brian for what the Black Bear Clan had done to Mark’s family. Even though Brian had saved them on the night of Liam’s attack, even though Liam had been convicted of his crimes, Allie felt that not enough had been done to atone for Mark’s suffering.

  “What do you mean?” Brian asked.

  Mark shrugged. “What’s the point of being Alpha when you have no clan? Alpha of no one.”

  Allie’s heart twanged. She knew that Mark missed being part of a group of shifters. He never talked about it, but when he’d explained the differences between shifters in clans and solo shifters, she had seen a look in his eye that told her all she needed to know.

  Brian raked a hand through his hair, pushing it back out of his eyes. “The point is,” he said, “you and I are the Alpha members of two clans with a longtime rivalry. Maybe between us, we can put that to rest.”

  At that, Allie found she could no longer keep quiet. “Put it to rest? Your clan murdered his family, and you come here to make a peace treaty?”

  Both men flinched at her outburst. “Allie,” Mark said quietly. “Let’s hear what he has to say.”

  “What could he possibly have to say? After what they did?”

  “He didn’t do it,” Mark said. “You know that.”

  “But it did happen under my watch,” Brain said. “Your mate is right. What happened was my responsibility.”

  “She’s not my mate,” Mark said quickly.

  “Of course she is, don’t be silly,” Brian said. “Do you think I can’t recognize the signs? You’ve had a hand on her since I entered the building. You’re claiming her.”

  Mark looked down at his hand, resting on Allie’s wrist, as if it had betrayed him, but he didn’t take it away.

  “You don’t have to worry,” Brian said. “I have no wish to harm you. Either of you. And as for Liam, I can only offer my most sincere apologies for his actions. He was not operating on behalf of the Black Bear Clan.”

  “Why didn’t you stop him sooner?” Allie asked.

  “It’s not in the power of an Alpha to read his clansmen’s thoughts,” Brian said. “I suspected that one of my people might have had a hand in the Harris’s deaths. I questioned everyone. But I couldn’t find any evidence. And I had no idea that you had found a mate, Mark, so when my investigation turned up nothing, I decided that at least no one else was in danger.”

  “Except for Mark himself,” Allie added.

  “Yes, but Mark had been alerted to the fact that someone was after his family, just as I had. And he could protect himself,” Brian said. “I wasn’t worried about leaving him to fend for himself when I couldn’t figure out what had happened.”

  Mark nodded. “He’s right about that.”

  “The complicating factor was you,” Brian said to Allie. “Liam was stalking Mark, so he caught your scent much earlier than I did. But he was behaving suspiciously, and eventually I started to follow him. That’s when I realized what was going on. When he didn’t return to his den one night—”

  “I’m sorry, his den?” Allie broke in.

  “It’s a term we sometimes use for our house. Just a nickname. Anyway, Liam didn’t come home, and I had a gut feeling he was making his move against you. I raced to your house and arrived in time to intervene.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe you want peace with us?” Mark said. “After everything?”

  “Our families have been through enough,” Brian said. “We’ve been fighting for generations. Do you even remember why it started?”

  “I don’t think I ever knew,” Mark admitted.

  “Exactly. I don’t either. No one does. I’m not saying we have to be best buddies,” Brian said. “But we could stop trying to kill each other. Stop passing the hostility down to our children. We could agree on that, here and now, as Alphas.”

  Mark nodded. “All right,” he said, extending a hand. “You’ve got a deal.”

  The men shook hands. Allie felt a strange rush go through her, as if she were watching a slice of history.

  Then Brian broke into a smile. “That’s settled,” he said. “Now, I’ve got an old car that needs fixing up. Is that something you can help me with?”

  Slowly but surely, a smile made its way onto Mark’s face too. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  18

  To finally be with Mark, after all they had been through together to get to this point, felt like a long, slow exhale. Allie had never experienced lovemaking like with him. It felt as if they had all the time in the world, as if there were no goals and no finish line, and the only urgency in their actions came from the need they had for more of each other. It waxed and waned, allowing them to take their time, so that Allie lost track of how long they had been exploring each other. How long had it been since their clothes had come off? How long ago had she been riding the edge of release, before he had backed off and crawled up her body to kiss her?

  The rest of the world seemed to disappear. Everything that had been frightening and stressful over the past several weeks was gone, and there was only the bliss of soul mates. He murmured things that were not quite words in her ear, and she gasped at his every touch, sure it had never felt like this with any other man. Was it the mating bond that was acting on her, pulling her focus so tightly in to his orbit? Or was it simply Mark? Maybe it was impossible to distinguish between the two, and as time went, on, Allie found she didn’t care. She just wanted to spend every free moment with him.

  It was dark outside by the time they wore themselves out. Allie lay on the carpet, recovering. She had fantasized about breaking in those new sheets, but once they’d gotten home, the idea of making it all the way upstairs had seemed ridiculous. She had been wanting to do this, she realized, ever since the day they’d first seen each other in the police station, ever since he’d grabbed her arm in that holding cell and shoved her up against the wall. She was mesmerized by the power he’d shown, both that day and today. He could have hurt her, she thought as she watched him build a fire in the fireplace. He was so much bigger and stronger than she was. But he’d been so tender. It was bewitching. Who could help but fall in love?

  When the fire was done, Mark came back over and stretched out beside her, pulling a blanket down from the couch to cover them. “That was really something,” he said, tracing a line down the side of her neck.

  “Amazing,” she agreed, her breathing not quite back to normal yet. “We should have done that a long time ago.”

  “Mmm, I’m glad we waited,” Mark said. “Now is a good time. And we have the rest of our lives.”

  She curled up, feeling the warmth of his
large body behind her. “The rest of our lives? Do we?” It was a good thought. She didn’t want to imagine ever being without Mark. But there were things they hadn’t said to each other yet, things Allie felt ought to be articulated before they were counted upon.

  “The mating bond is for life,” Mark said.

  “But you did try to send me away,” Allie told him. “Remember?”

  “You know I didn’t want to. It was for your own safety. I had to do it.”

  “I know,” she assured him, squeezing his hand. “I understand that. I do. But how do I know it won’t happen again, Mark? You’ve made peace with the Black Bear Clan, and that’s wonderful, but this shifter life...it’s so new to me. There’s still so much I don’t understand. What if you face another threat someday, and you decide the best thing for me is to be far away?”

  “What can I do to reassure you?” he asked.

  “Promise me that you won’t send me away.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “If it’s for your safety? How can you ask me to promise that? Wouldn’t you send me away if you thought it would save my life?”

  She thought about it. “Then promise you won’t lie to me,” she said. “If something happens and you need me to go, tell me the truth.”

  “And you will go?” Mark said shrewdly. “You won’t try to sneak behind my back and stay?”

  “I’ll at least consider it,” Allie said. “And I promise to be honest with you too.”

  Mark planted kisses across her shoulder blade. “That seems reasonable.”

  “Really?”

  “We have to be able to trust each other,” he said. “Otherwise, this relationship won’t be worth anything.”