Their Chance at Redemption

by Maia Dylan

  Kieran stood and followed the lieutenant out the door. He stepped into the waiting area beside the reception area and saw Mason and Jacob leaning against the far wall, both locked in a glaring match with his cousin. Liam sat sprawled in one of the generic plastic chairs against the far wall, and to the untrained eye he looked calm and relaxed. But Kieran knew that if either Mason or Jacob moved in his direction, he would strike back. He was a coiled spring.

  “Mason, Jacob,” he spoke, but neither man looked in his direction. “My mate seems to have a soft spot for my cousin, and I’m going to need him to win her over. Probably wouldn’t be a good idea to piss her off even more if you tangled with him.”

  Liam barked a laugh as he stood up from the chair, stretching his arms above his head as if he hadn’t a worry in the world. “As bloody if. There ain’t no fecking way in this world those two leopards could get one over on me.”

  Mason pushed off the wall. “I’m not so sure that would be true, but I’m not willing to test the theory.”

  “Wise choice,” Liam answered with a grin.

  Kieran turned and let them out of the police station. “Let’s just get over to the diner.”

  “When we thought you might not make her finish time, we sent Karl and Ricco over there, but they’re holding back a block," Jacob said as they emerged into the fading light of early evening.

  Kieran cursed how long the interrogation had taken. “Damn it. We should have gone to her earlier.”

  “Not sure if that would have been possible, cousin.”

  The trip to the diner seemed to take forever. The entire time in the car, all Kieran could think about was how he’d lied to his mate. No, not just lied. If he allowed himself to think about it in any detail, he knew he had destroyed her by telling her he’d found a mate. She’d forgive him. She had to because there was no future for Kieran Murphy without her in it. Not for him. And once she had, he would spend the rest of his life trying to make it up to her.

  As soon as the car pulled into the curb, Kieran pushed open the door and moved across the footpath faster than any human could have. He didn’t give a shit if anyone noticed. Nothing was more important than getting to his mate. He—

  Kieran stopped just inside the door. Despite the fact that his mate’s scent was in the room, it was clear that it was residual. His mate was not in the diner.

  Chapter Seven

  Five. Fucking. Days.

  That’s how long Josie had been missing. She’d arrived for her shift, but had told Karl she wasn’t feeling well, and was given the rest of her shift off. He couldn’t blame her for feeling unwell, what with being threatened by that crazy bastard Hugh, watching a full-on lion fight and of course her eviction. Now she was out there somewhere, alone, and Liam was only just holding his shit together. The desire to simply give into his lion and throw one hell of a lion-sized tantrum was almost too much to bear. Liam had lost count of how many uncontrolled shifts he had been through in that time, and the longer it took for them to find their mate, the more often it happened. Kieran, the dominant bastard, had managed to keep his spontaneous shifts to a minimum, but even his seemed to be occurring with more regularity the longer they were without their mate.

  He looked up at his cousin, watching as Kieran paced in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of his office. Liam had noticed over the past few days that Kieran had to keep on the move, never seeming to stop. Both of them looked toward the door that led to the hall when they heard approaching footsteps. Liam knew from the scent that preceded them that it was Mason and Jacob’s mate, Violet, who was about to enter the room.

  Liam leaped up at the excitement that shone in the young woman’s eyes when she entered the room. “Alpha Kitty, this just might be the damn break we were hoping for. I’ve been talking to someone who might have seen her.”

  Kieran was across the room in a blur, standing before the diminutive woman, who didn’t even flinch. “Who? Where?”

  Violet winced, and some of the joy bled from her expression. “This is the part you are not going to like.” Violet turned her gaze in Liam’s direction. “Neither are you, Irish, and in all honesty, I am not exactly over the moon by what I found out either. I spoke to a woman called Glenda, who lives over by the Belmont and Kedzie underpass. She’s homeless, someone who has fed me information for years, and despite the offer of something better, she always turns me down and prefers where she is. She told me a woman that matched the description of the woman we’d been looking for around the city was staying over that way a few days ago.”

  Liam’s tensed. “In a hotel or something, right?”

  His heart cracked when Violet shook her head. “I really want to say yes, but no. Glenda said she’d stayed two nights, and from the way she prepared for the night and secured herself and her small amount of belongings she was no stranger to homelessness.”

  When they had discovered that Josie hadn’t turned up for her shift, they had gone straight back to her apartment, and he used that word loosely. The place was no more than a single room, with a small kitchen area in the far corner, and a shower and toilet separated from the room by a curtain. There was a small two-seater couch that must have doubled as her bed against the far corner, and it looked uncomfortable as hell. He had been filled with horror that his mate had lived in such a place, and from Kieran’s continuous rumbling growl he had felt the same way. The place was completely empty, but immaculate, and from the letter on the table sitting beside the eviction letter printed on bright yellow paper beside it, a very grim picture was forming. Josie had left her place because she had fallen into arrears with her rent, and she’d had nowhere else to go.

  “I drove her to the streets,” Kieran said in a quiet tone filled with self-loathing.

  “If you’re talking about the fight outside her apartment, I share that blame,” Liam said as he ran his fingers through his hair in frustration.

  Kieran was shaking his head before he’d even finished speaking. “No, this is all on me. I told Josie that I had found my mate.”

  “What! Why the feck would you do that?”

  “Because I didn’t think she was mine!” Kieran yelled, starting to pace again. “I wanted her more than anything in the damn world, and I knew that I could make her happy. That I would cherish and protect her for life, but what the hell was I going to do when I actually met the woman the Fates had deemed me worthy of? What then?”

  Liam stepped in, pulled back his fist and slammed it into Kieran’s jaw, dropping him on his ass with one punch. Liam wasn’t sure he would have been able to do that if he hadn’t been riding a wave of rage that almost blinded him.

  “You should have fecking loved her enough to say screw the fecking mating bond. Josie is everything any man lucky enough to have her attention could want. I had those some feelings for her from the moment I first met her, and I made up my mind then and there that she would be mine, and I would be hers, and the Fates were eejits if they thought there was a woman more perfect for me than her.”

  Kieran stared back at him, the shame clear to see in his expression. “You’re right.”

  “Too fecking right, I am, you stupid bastard,” Liam snapped back, reaching down a hand. “Now get the hell up off your arse so we can go find our mate and fix this.” Kieran paused for a moment before putting his hand in Liam’s and allowing himself to be pulled up.

  “You still want to partner with me?”

  Liam scowled at his cousin who might be Alpha, but he could be a right dumb arse sometimes. “I can’t do this without you. Josie is the woman meant to anchor two dominant as shite lion shifters, and the two of us together are exactly what she needs. From the moment I met her, I knew there was someone else who owned a large piece of her heart.” Liam saw the hope and pain bloom in his cousin’s expression. “But, in the spirit of complete transparency, I made it my mission to steal every inch of her heart for myself. I thought that perhaps I would have been enough for her, but now that I know she is my fated, and
is meant for the two of us, I can see that it would have ended in heartbreak for both of us.”

  Kieran stared into Liam’s eyes for a long moment. “Then we will do this together, cousin.”

  “Awww, that was beautiful!” Violet said with a slow clap. “And now that you have both pulled your heads out of your asses long enough to see that you are meant for my BFF, you need to hear the rest of what Glenda had to say. Josie was sick.”

  He and Kieran turned at the same time. “How sick?” Now that they had made the decision to go at this together, apparently that meant they were so attuned to each other they were saying the same things at the exact same time.

  “Very,” Violet said quietly. “Glenda went to check on her the second day when she hadn’t surfaced, and found her shaking, and shivering, sweating uncontrollably, and in a really bad way.”

  “What hospital did she take her to?” Liam asked as he moved toward the door, but stopped when Violet stepped in front of him.

  “They didn’t, Irish. You have to remember that many of these people living the way they do, have an innate fear of authority. They would have feared taking her to a hospital, thinking that might bring unwanted attention to them.”

  “Then where the hell is she?” Kieran growled, his lion close to the surface. Perhaps Liam’s earlier assessment regarding Kieran’s control was mistaken.

  “They took her to a women’s shelter on that side of town,” Violet said as she turned to walk out of the room, Liam and Kieran right on her heels. “Hopefully she’s still there. Sometimes these places can limit the number of nights you can stay. There are just too many people in this city who need help, and not enough places for them to get it.”

  The two of them climbed into Kieran’s jeep while Violet jumped into a second one with her mates, and they made for the city. Liam stared out the window and did something he hadn’t done since he was a child, living in a hell he thought he could never escape. He prayed to a God he had once thought abandoned him, but now had renewed faith in. He had put Josie on this earth for him and Kieran, after all.

  ****

  “…wake up soon?”

  “…waiting for the doctor to… she’s going to be okay?”

  “…fecking doctor needs to go back to school … answers.”

  Josie drifted, unsure of where exactly she was. She heard voices speaking around her, and although the words were often slurred, or she only caught portions of what they were saying, she recognized two of them. Liam and Kieran were close by. A loud noise frightened her, and she flinched.

  “Did you see that?”

  She knew that it was Kieran who asked that, and Josie was pleased that his voice sounded clear, and not like he was speaking to her while she was completely submerged in water. Now that his voice was clearer she could hear the excitement in his tone.

  “Sure did, cousin.” This time it was Liam, and the same excitement could be heard in his voice.

  Wait—cousin?

  “She’s frowning. Do you think she’s in pain?” Kieran’s tone had morphed into one of concern, and she felt a cool hand brushing the hair from her forehead. Unable to stop herself she moved in the direction of the hand, seeking the contact like a kitten would warmth. “Josie baby, it’s Kieran. I’m here with Liam.”

  “You can’t be in here,” Josie wanted to say, but it came out a garbled mess, which ended with a dry coughing fit that had her upper body lifting up from the mattress. Unable to bring it under control, she gave herself over to it until it finally released her and allowed her to collapse back against the bed.

  “Relax Josie-girl,” Liam said in a gentle tone, and she looked up into his startling green eyes. “That’s it, just look at me, beauty. Slow, deep breaths.”

  Josie kept her gaze locked to his, and she followed his instructions, struggling at first, but finding it easier the more oxygen she was able to drag into her aching lungs. When she was able to settle a little more, she tried again.

  “Y-you can’t be in here.” Her voice sounded gritty. “No men are allowed on this floor.”

  Josie struggled to focus on her surroundings enough to understand what was going on. Liam and Kieran were sitting on either side of her as she lay in the middle of one of the largest beds she had ever seen. None of this was making any sense. She’d woken once to see that she was no longer sleeping beneath the underpass, and that somehow she was in an actual bed in a shelter. She had no idea how she got here, but she wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. The woman who ran the shelter said she could stay a couple of days, and that the floor was female only. If she hadn’t felt like death warmed over, she might have laughed. Did this woman honestly think Josie was in any condition to entertain?

  “You’re not in that shelter anymore, love,” Liam said gently.

  Josie frowned, desperately trying to get her brain to engage. “Then where am I?”

  “You’re in my house,” Kieran answered. “We found you staying at the shelter, and you were still running a wicked fever. You scared the shit out of us, sweetness. We brought you back here. Violet arranged for a doctor to come and look you over. He pumped you full of meds.”

  “Am I going to be okay?” Josie asked in a small voice. She had no recollection of any of that, and it scared her to think what might have happened to her if she were still out on the streets.

  “You’re going to be fine, Josie-girl,” Liam said, his soft Irish lilt warming her from within. “The doc said that you’d come back to us when you were ready and not a moment before.”

  “Liam accused the man of being a hack,” Kieran said dryly.

  Liam made an impatient sound. “Of course I bloody did. He couldn’t tell us when she’d come to, or what was actually wrong with her. All that fecker said was that she had a virus, and it had to work its way out of her system. What the hell does that mean? I heard they completed their first face transplant in this country not long ago. You’re telling me that medicine in the free world can take the face off one man and put it on another, but they can’t feckin’ tell me why my woman is running a bloody fever and coughing up a lung even in her sleep?”

  Kieran turned to look at her, and Josie inhaled sharply at the tenderness in his expression. “He’s been a little worried about you, baby. We both have.”

  Josie felt a warm pressure on her hand. She looked down at it and was surprised to see her hand being cradled gently between both of Kieran’s. Her heart stuttered at the sight. Kieran held her hand almost reverently as if it were something precious to him. As if she might be something precious to him. Then she was struck with the memory of the night they’d been to dinner at Violet’s.

  “You have a mate,” Josie whispered, tugging her hand free and pulling it close to her chest, almost as if she could erase the pain forming within her with her own palm. “I shouldn’t be here. I can’t—you—no, I should leave.”

  Panicked, she tried to sit up, fighting the wave of nausea that rolled through her at the move. She must have made a sound of distress, or perhaps it was visible on her face. Either way something alerted them to her emotional state, and both men reached for her at the same time. She was having difficulty catching her breath as she fought them weakly, desperate to simply get up and leave.

  “Josie, please,” Kieran said in a tone she had never heard him use before. He sounded distressed, and there was a note of desperation that took her by surprise. “Please, baby, please just lie back and listen to me. I need to tell you something so that I can work on getting you to forgive me, and we need you to rest so that you can get better.”

  Josie forced herself to take a few deep breaths. After a few moments she was able to rest back against the pillows and look up at both of them without feeling like she was going to embarrass herself by puking all over them.

  “Josie,” Kieran said gently, and she left her gaze locked with his. “I lied to you, baby. That night at Violet’s. I hadn’t found my mate yet.” Kieran winced. “Well, that’s not entirely true. I
had found her, but I hadn’t recognized her as mine. No, that’s not entirely true either. Fuck! Why the hell am I screwing this up so badly?” Josie watched as Kieran ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “I had recognized that she was important to me, but I hadn’t experienced the mating bond snapping into place. Something was missing.”

  Josie frowned, desperately trying to understand what he was saying. “How could you not recognize your mate?”

  “Because I wasn’t there,” Liam said.

  Josie turned to look at Liam. “You weren’t there? Do you mean that you and Kieran are mates?”

  “Fuck, no!” Both men denied quickly and in unison.

  “Not that there would be anything wrong with the Fates deciding that two men or two women were destined for each other,” Kieran was quick to clarify while Liam nodded in agreement. “But that is most definitely not the case here.”

  “Kieran and I aren’t mated to each other, Josie-girl. We’re family. Our fathers were brothers.”

  She remembered when she’d first woken that Liam had called Kieran cousin, and they definitely had some similar physical traits that supported what they were saying.

  “The last time we saw you,” Kieran explained, leaning in a little closer. “That was the first time Liam and I were in the same place at the same time. We recognized each other as blood as soon as we were. Then almost immediately after that bond was forged between the two of us, we recognized you as our mate.”

  Josie blinked, unsure she’d actually heard that correctly. “Me?” Her voice was more a squeak than anything else.

  “Yeah, you,” Kieran said softly, then he lifted her hand and pressed his lips to the back of it, his gaze never leaving hers. “You were always important to me, Josie. My lion and I knew you were big for both of us. I wanted nothing more than to tell you how I felt about you.”