by Anya Nowlan
Bear My Heir
Shifter Squad Nine
Anya Nowlan
Contents
A Little Taste…
Copyright
1. Dice
2. Meredith
3. Dice
4. Meredith
5. Meredith
6. Dice
7. Meredith
8. Dice
9. Meredith
10. Dice
11. Meredith
12. Dice
13. Meredith
14. Meredith
15. Dice
16. Dice
17. Meredith
18. Meredith
19. Meredith
20. Dice
21. Meredith
22. Dice
23. Meredith
24. Dice
Epilogue
Kitten Me Twice Excerpt
Want More?
About the Author
Thank you for reading!
A Little Taste…
“Do it.”
The way Dice’s voice lowered and seemed to resonate with a growl had Prowler and Price both snapping their necks up to stare at him, eyes squinted. Dice could practically feel the threat bubbling beneath the surface, and his muscles flexed.
For the past five months, running Shifter Squad Nine had felt like corralling wild dogs and then playing a game of ‘Who’s the biggest, baddest Alpha?’ with them. Dice had been winning so far, but it hadn’t come without a couple of tense moments.
Prowler should have remembered the tooth he’d lost the first time he gave lip to Dice, and by the looks of him and the fact that he wasn’t snarling yet, the wolf remembered.
“Fine,” he snorted, nodding at his brother to go with him.
Thor watched the twins pass with an impassive look on his face, sticking a cigarette in his mouth and lighting it slowly.
“You know you’re playing with fire, right?” he asked casually, flicking a look at Dice. The werebear met it with a nod.
“I know. But I don’t think they’ll be the ones I really need to worry about.”
“I think you’re right about that,” Thor said with a wink. “I think your girlfriend’s about to get here.”
Dice heard it too now, the ominous rattle of two large vehicles drudging through the jungle. His stomach twisted and he must have looked like a lovesick puppy for a moment as he heard a very obvious chuckle behind him. It passed over Thor’s lips when he turned around to go stalk after the wolves.
The twins might think they’re all that, both sets, but it’s fucking Thor who could drop me like a rock from a mile away, Dice thought, watching the man leave before turning his attention back to the narrow road leading into the compound.
His heart thudded in his chest as the cars arrived, parking right in front of him. When the door to the first one opened, Dice thought he wouldn’t be able to find any words to speak ever again.
It was her. It was Meredith.
And she was alive. And she was there.
“Meredith,” he whispered, staring at her dumbly while she seemed to be doing much the same in response.
What’s a man supposed to do when he’s reunited with a woman he thought he’d lost five years ago? Whatever it was, Dice couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it, so he did the one thing that felt natural.
He walked over to her, pulled her out of the car and into his arms and kissed her like she was the only oxygen he could ever breathe again.
Copyright © 2016 Anya Nowlan
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Bear My Heir
Shifter Squad Nine
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be used, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means by anyone but the purchaser for their own personal use. This book may not be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of Anya Nowlan. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.
Cover © Jack of Covers
One
Dice
Dice’s grip on the handrail tightened as he watched the mayhem sprawl out before him. The explosion almost kicked him back and his wide, muscular forearms flexed as he leaned forward with a grunt, the heat of the blast sizzling against his skin even though the raised platform he was watching on was nearly a hundred feet from the source.
One glance to his right showed Spade standing impassively, his arms tucked behind his back and cold eyes considering the scene before him with about as much interest as a butcher watching cattle get slaughtered. Not a single twitch of his jaw or a change in expression could be seen when a bellowing scream from below in the thicket of jungle was followed by laughter so grating it might have been straight out of some horror movie, haunting and high-pitched.
“Is this necessary?” Dice asked grimly, the goggles he was wearing pointing out the locations of each of the five men he’d come here to view.
“Entirely. You need to see what I’m giving you before you make up your mind,” Spade said, his tone so dull that he might as well have been yawning next to Dice.
Dice shook his head quietly, turning his attention back below. The fuzzy green outline that was marked as Rio, the explosives guy, was moving fast as hell for a guy his size, and a few moments later he shifted faster than anyone Dice had ever seen.
He’d gone from a mountain of muscle and sinew and rage into the fully-grown form of a male African lion, his mane thick and luxurious, though his victim had no chance to admire it as the arm the man was using to hold his assault rifle with got torn straight off his body.
Dice almost needed to look away when the ferocious lion ripped out the man’s throat, while his brother Ryker tore through two others running towards their fallen comrade’s location before they could even make half of the distance there. Dice was too far and too high up to see anything clearly, he needed to be content with the digital outlines, but that was enough to understand how fucking brutal those two were.
“Look at Thor,” Spade noted with a humorless chuckle.
The sniper had climbed one of the high trees early on in the fight and gotten at least three clean headshots before anyone realized where he was hiding. The drug cartel the five maniacs had been set loose upon never had a chance, even though they outnumbered The Firm operatives four to one.
What Spade was drawing Dice’s attention to was the way that the sniper threw his gun on his back when a man approached him from below and then dropped down on him like some kind of a nightmare, slitting his throat with a dagger before the man could react other than to let out a blood-curdling scream.
Dice shook his head quietly, his lips pressed thin.
Why are you showing me this…?
The field was growing thin after Rio had blown up the main building that the drug dealers’ hired help had been huddling in, taking out at least four of them in one go. Price and Prowler, the werewolf twins, were rounding up a few stragglers and they weren’t kind about it.
A few of the smarter individuals involved in the carnage had realized at one point that they couldn’t fight the force of nature they’d been pitted against and tried to run away, run anywhere, through the thick, damp and hot jungle evening.
Prowler seemed to corral them exactly where he wanted them by peppering stray bullets here and there to keep the three men moving in the direction he deemed fit, and when they were far enough away from any possible help, he and Price shot them in what could only be described as an execution. It was Prowler who had the dark, chilling laughter, the hacker with the pale skin and luminous green eyes being the epitome of everything a soldier was not supposed to be.
“Are we done here?” Dice asked, his voice strained now.
Sweat was slicking down his back. He was tired from a flight that had taken far too fucking long and had taken him to watch something that wouldn’t have made it into the top one-thousand things of what he would have liked to do with his Wednesday evening.
But he hadn’t been able to say no. Of course he couldn’t have. The order came from The Firm’s command. It was only later that Dice found out that the directive had born Spade’s name, which only made it that more impossible to decline.
“Not yet,” Spade said, nodding in the general direction of the large ‘playground’ they were overlooking.
The platform itself had been a guard tower used by the drug dealers, some unimportant branch of the local coke trade down in Bolivia, but when Dice had been brought in, it had already been cleared and made into some sort of a twisted VIP stand. The whole scene was built up like a viewing experience. A trained, controlled team would have swept through the twenty badly trained and helpless ‘guerillas’ in five minutes, ten tops. The Fantastic Five here had been fucking around for twenty-five minutes, and it wasn’t for lack of capability.
No, they were having fun.
It made Dice’s stomach churn.
There was one man left on the field, huddling behind a tree and clutching his rifle by the looks of it. Ryker and Rio and Prowler and Price must have smelled him around the same time, because the wolf twins came running in their animal form and they made it there at around the same time. What happened then made Dice audibly groan.
The wolves and lions were at a standoff, manes pricked up and their maws bared in snarls. They were arguing over who got to eviscerate the idiot who’d chosen a life of crime over toiling on some goddamn field somewhere. Dice’s hands were rolled around the wooden railing so hard now that he thought he might just break it in half in a moment or two. It was Thor that saved him from having to go down there in bear form and kicking the asses of every one of those fucking fools.
One clean shot to the forehead ended the hysterical man’s struggles, Thor having aimed right between the growling duos of lions and werewolves.
I’d like to think he did that out of some modicum of human decency but I bet he just wanted the fucking kill.
“Now we’re done,” Spade said with a nonchalant shrug, before bringing a finger to his ear and speaking into the earpiece. “Get them out of there. Clean and sweep.”
Spade turned to look at Dice and the large werebear, still clutching the rail like a lifeline, glared back. He hadn’t seen the man in five years. Oh, he’d heard plenty about Spade, along with all the nicknames The Firm operatives had given him, and how he’d been made into this ghost of a beast that seemed to incite fear in even the most brazen of men. He’d thought it to be bullshit. It didn’t sound anything like the man he’d known.
But looking at the strict, stern and blasé man standing before him now, all those rumors had obviously been true.
What the fuck happened to you, man…?
“Why?” Dice asked, his voice little better than a growl as he forced himself to stand up straight.
Projector lights were flicked on as the cleanup crew moved in, one of the special Firm mop-up squads who could have cleaned up any major disaster in half a day and made it look like it had never happened. From what Dice had heard, the Russians were particularly fond of using them.
“I wanted you to see your new team,” Spade said mildly, glancing back to the mangled jungle spreading out below them, plumes of smoke wafting into the night sky from several locations.
“You must be insane if you think I’m taking these people on,” Dice said with a scoff.
“Oh, but you are,” Spade said simply, not an ounce of threat to his words, just simple confidence in what he was proposing.
Like there wasn’t a way in the world that Dice could say no. As usual.
It was simply a statement of facts, an unquestioning knowledge that his will would be done. Dice wanted to punch him in the face for that, an emotion he’d never thought he’d have to deal with when facing that particular friend of his. ‘Friend.’ Perhaps the word didn’t quite fit anymore.
“Explain,” Dice said, standing straight and crossing his arms over his wide chest.
He was a large man, 6’4’’, with dark auburn, short-cropped hair and gray and hazel eyes, the hazel growing fainter the further from the iris it was until it turned entirely gray. Standing opposite of Spade, he had wider shoulders and more mass on the man, but it would be a cold day in hell that he’d think that getting into a fight with Spade would be a smart thing to do.
He remembered the guy too well from basic, and even better from the missions that had followed while they’d both been in the Navy SEALs. Still, a very large part of him wanted to sock him one, just to see if there was any emotion left in the cold husk of deadly purpose standing before him or not.
The rumors said there wasn’t. But he’d always preferred seeing with his own two eyes. Now, he wasn’t so sure if he’d needed to know.
“I know you’re new to The Firm, Dice, but things work a little differently here than they do in the Navy,” Spade began with a pleasant enough smile, all teeth and none of it reaching his eyes. “These five are the worst we have. I’ll send you their files. Dishonorable discharges, every single one of them. They’re some of the best at what they do, their individual skills are beyond question. But they are, simply put…” Spade said, trailing off slightly in search of the right word.
“Psychotics?” Dice offered with a quirk of his brow.
“Troubled,” Spade offered as a tamer substitute. “They’re on their last option here in The Firm. If you want to be poetic about it, then this is their ninth life. After this, there’s nothing. They’ve gotten replaced out of every special team they’ve been in. The twins have been separated, they’ve been put together, it doesn’t matter. Whatever they touch, it turns to ashes. They’re practically uncontrollable.”
“Is this a sales pitch? Because I’m not interested in buying what you’re selling so far, Spade.”
“Well then, you better keep listening,” Spade said with the makings of a sigh, as if it annoyed him to have his trail of thought cut into.
Spade was the main intelligence officer of The Firm, an international institution, for lack of a better word, that dealt with all the problems you didn’t want to face. They were mercenaries for hire, a paid army for those who had the fattest coffers, but underneath it all, the company seemed to be striving for some sort of a gray hat in the sea of bad guys and bastards. The Firm was not good, not by a long shot, but it was a damn bit better than most of the alternatives.
Or at least that was what the people working for them thought. Or hoped.
For years, Dice had tried to avoid getting tangled up in the seedier underbelly of the military trained world. Once you were out of the service, a man didn’t have a lot of options available to him. He was either going to put up his gun for good, or turn bad. Other than those two shining examples of excellent choices, no one was offering much. No one could really go from saving the world to working as a bouncer, after all.
So a few months ago, Dice Alderson had taken the red pill and joined up. Bootcamp had been hellish, far worse than anything he’d done as one of the elite Navy SEALs, but after that, he’d found himself finding old friends and buddies by the armful. At one point, it had even started to look like that working for The Firm wouldn’t be such a shitty thing to do. But of course, then he’d been brought to Bolivia.
&
nbsp; “I’m giving you an option here. You take these sorry excuses for human beings and you make soldiers out of them. Fast. You’ll report to me directly, with the whole team. This means certain privileges. Certain expenditures that wouldn’t be allowed to you working anywhere else in the company. The missions will be ‘need to know’ only and they will all go through me. There’ll be more downtime, the pay will be bigger. I won’t stop any of you from working with the other squads when there’s a lull between missions.”
“So you’re looking for a private kill squad?” Dice asked, scoffing.
“If you want to call it that. I’ve come to think that it’s easier to let people know exactly what I want. The whole covert thing got so tiring with the last group,” Spade said, smirking wryly.
Dice frowned, leaning back against the sturdy trunk of the tree the platform had been built around.
“Why these guys?”
“Because they don’t have anything left to lose,” Spade said. “They can’t say no to me.”
“But I can,” Dice said, clearing his throat. “I meant it, Spade. I don’t want to be running some kind of a Suicide Squad for you. I’m not a babysitter for the morally challenged.”
“You sure about that?” Spade asked with that gleaming smile of his, making a cold jolt run down Dice’s spine.
“Pretty damn sure. I don’t think there’s enough money in the world that you could offer me.”
“Oh, it’s not money I’m offering,” Spade said, his voice almost a purr now.
“What then? You think I’m itching for a lesson in insanity here, that I want to spend time with the ripper squad down there?”
His question was followed up by another explosion that rocked the lush forest below, felling two trees. Dice rolled his eyes. The clean-up crew must have found it easier to detonate the traps Rio had left behind instead of dismantling them. He was sure that it was mostly because the werelion wouldn’t offer any help in figuring out his designs.