“I hope so. I thought maybe we should get out of the city, away from everything. Away from what’s brewing in London. There may be some mayhem over the next few days.”
Cillian’s eyes locked on Brigg’s. “Mayhem? You think something’s about to happen there?”
Brigg nodded, stepping towards the back of the room. “I just spoke to a friend of mine—a journalist. A story will be breaking tomorrow morning about the treatment of shifters, about the fact that they have no rights, that they’re being rounded up in the streets and held in confinement. By midday tomorrow, even the civilians who take no interest in such matters will have started to hear about how our kind is being treated like animals, our rights stripped away.”
“But if the story gets out, they’ll think it was you. The task force will come for you…”
“No, they won’t. I created a trail that leads directly back to Collins’ computer. If anyone is condemned for the release of classified information, it will be him.”
Cillian laughed. “I won’t ask how you managed that, but well done. So I’m assuming that a mass panic is imminent on London’s streets?”
“Possibly. Though a slow build is more likely. People love watching the unfolding genesis of a conflict. Some will see shifters as persecuted victims; others will see them as an instant enemy. I have little doubt that the two sides will begin to feel each other out before all-out war ensues.” Brigg let out a sigh. “Of course, in the end, both sides will likely find a way to blame shifters for all the ills of the world. If we have long-term allies among the human throngs, they will likely be few and far between.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’re right. They’ll see us as scapegoats for everything wrong in Britain,” said Cillian. “Any violence, any economic hardship, they’ll find a way to trace it back to us.”
“Yes, exactly. It’s how things have gone since the beginning of time. Pick an enemy, and turn the world against it.”
Cillian wandered over and took a seat at the rustic wooden table that sat next to a large set of windows displaying a view of the grounds’ expansive garden. For a moment he peered out, shoving his stubbled chin into his hand. “The timing of all of this is shite, you know,” he said. “It really is.”
“All of what, exactly?”
Cillian turned back to face Brigg. He steered his eyes towards the ceiling, pointing up with his right index finger. “Her. Us.”
“You’re talking about the woman who’s upstairs bathing,” Brigg said, walking over and pulling out one of the chairs to seat himself. He narrowed his eyes at Cillian, trying to read his emotions. “You feel something for her, and you hate that this is how you met her.”
“You feel it as well,” Cillian said. “Even if you hadn’t told me, I could tell the moment you got into the car yesterday. I’ve never seen you so excited.”
Brigg nodded, clenching his jaw as he thought about what Sinead did to his insides. Not to mention what she did to his outsides. The Lioness was an incredible force, stronger by far than his ability to resist her. “I’ve been fighting it since the moment I laid eyes on her, yes. I’ve been fighting a bloody war inside myself, more like. Telling myself again and again that she isn’t the One. She can’t be. For all I know, she’d rather be a hundred miles away than here with us.”
“But why fight it? We’re all here together. Why not explore this, find out if she’s meant to be with us? You were so certain yesterday that this was meant to be. That this is our fate. I don’t understand what’s changed.”
Brigg shrugged. “Lions work in prides,” he said. “One male, many females. However appealing we may find her, it’s hardly in her nature to bond with a Dire Wolf, let alone two. I may have been overzealous in my assessment of the situation.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Cillian. “I may not have Roth and Laird’s heightened senses, but I know I smelled something on her. I know the scent of a woman’s arousal, mate, and our Lioness was most certainly aroused in that car of yours.”
Brigg’s lips turned up a little as he recalled Sinead’s intoxicating scent. “Well, arousal isn’t enough,” he said, combatting the inclination to believe she could ever let her walls come down enough to let the men into her heart or her bed. “If she’s interested in us, it’s only because we freed her from a gruesome prison and an even worse fate. No doubt she sees us, on some level at least, as some kind of benevolent liberators. But that’s not enough to convince a woman like Sinead to change her entire mindset. She’s got a way of pushing others away, that one. She’s not one for allowing herself to enjoy closeness. Believe me, I know what it feels like.”
“Yes, well, I still say we find a way to get to know her. We’re stuck together, at least for a few days, right? May as well make the best of it.”
“Make the best of what?” Sinead’s voice drew the men’s gazes to the kitchen’s entrance. She was bent over at the waist, towelling her hair, an oversized bathrobe covering her tall, slender frame. When she straightened up, Brigg’s eyes immediately fell on the metal collar that was still fastened around her neck, an ugly reminder that she was still at her captors’ mercy. Still a prisoner, however free she might be to roam about his house. It was no wonder she was reluctant to get close. How could she ever relax around men who kept her in bondage? How could she ever learn to trust them?
“We were thinking that it would be nice to spend some time getting to know each other tonight,” Brigg said. “Perhaps over a glass of wine.”
“Wine sounds grand,” she replied as she strode into the room, tossing her towel over the back of a chair. “But right now, I’m hungry. What’s to eat?”
Chapter 12
After a modest dinner of leftover roast chicken and rice, Brigg escorted them into a large living room. Sinead smiled to herself when she took it in; the room certainly didn’t exude the stifling aura of a high security penitentiary.
To call herself a prisoner in this home was beginning to seem ridiculous. The place looked like something out of a documentary about the Royals. Massive, floor-to-ceiling windows were coated in luxurious fabrics of rich green and silver. On the walls hung expensive-looking paintings of landscapes, no doubt worth a fortune. The rooms perimeter smacked of opulence, while its furniture, in stark contrast, was so oversized and comfortable-looking that Sinead wanted to lie down on the couch and forget all her troubles, past and present.
“This is the best room in the house for lounging about on a lazy evening,” Brigg said, seeming to read her thoughts as he strode in. He headed over to a side table, a bottle of wine in hand, and filled three glasses. “I call it my man-cave, though it’s more a giant abyss.”
Sinead plopped herself down at one end of the very large, welcoming couch covered in soft woven upholstery, pleasantly surprised to find herself sinking in as though the piece were greeting her with a warm hug. The house was beginning to remind her of the two men. Attractive, interesting, and full of surprises. She could learn to enjoy this life very much indeed.
“A little nicer than the task force’s accommodations, I take it?” asked Cillian, who was standing some distance away, watching her. He had that curious look in his eye that she’d come to know over the course of mere hours. Always trying to sort her out, to guess at her inner workings. But there was something else, too. A subtle, silent kind of hunger set deep in his stare. She picked it up on his scent; that delectable musk of his that made her ache reluctantly for his touch. The moment his fingers had grazed her in the car she’d picked it up on the air, the tension between them palpable.
She mustered a brief smile. “A little nicer than that ghastly prison, yes,” she said, “though I might come to miss the vermin. Rats are excellent companions, you know.”
“Surely not as much fun as Dire Wolf shifters.”
Sinead stuck out her tongue, aware that the gesture was probably a little too friendly. Wasn’t she supposed to hate them a little? To see them as wardens?
No. It seemed only right to
let herself go, after all; she might be here for some time. They weren’t exactly unpleasant company, and now that she’d cleaned herself up, she felt inclined, even, to spend some time with them on a fully voluntary basis. If this was to be her new prison, she’d happily accept her sentence—so long as no one locked her up.
“Rats are something I was well acquainted with in my younger years,” said Brigg in an overly serious tone. He walked over to hand Sinead a glass, his eyes making contact with hers for a moment. “I can’t say I’m terribly fond of them.”
“Surely you don’t have a problem in this splendid house of yours?” Sinead asked. There was no way; Brigg was too fastidious a man to allow his home to be overrun by disease-ridden beasties.
“No,” he replied as he gave Cillian the second glass of wine and grabbed one for himself. He strode over to a nearby armchair and seated himself. “It was another time, another place. Another life, really.”
“Well, are you going to tell us about it, ya great bastard?” asked Cillian. “If we’re going to get to know each other, it would be nice to learn where you’ve spent the bulk of your life, Brigg, you enigma wrapped in a baguette, wrapped in a soggy paper bag, wrapped in Italian silk and men’s body wash.”
“I’ve spent the last few decades working for Scotland Yard,” Brigg replied, his eyes moving towards a distant window as if to warn Cillian away from prying. “That’s really all you need to know.”
Sinead eyed him silently. Somehow, the investigator found ways of becoming more intriguing with each word that escaped his mouth. For the first time in her life, she’d met someone who kept secrets about his past locked away even more securely than she kept her own. She wondered why. What was it that frightened him so much that he couldn’t divulge the smallest detail? What dirty gems did he keep locked away in his private vault?
“Ah.” Cillian shut his mouth, seeming to know all too well that it wasn’t a great idea to push Brigg to provide answers. He marched to sit on the couch at the opposite end from Sinead, granting her a good deal of space. She wanted to laugh when she looked over at his frustrated expression. Poor lad was surrounded by two people who’d clearly devoted their lives to concealing their true natures. Her stare drew his eyes to hers, his eyebrows raising hopefully. “As for you, Lioness? Where did you spend your sordid youth?”
She took a long sip of wine and licked her lips slowly, only realizing after she’d done it how erotic a gesture it was. She lowered her eyes to her bare feet and wiggled her bare toes, trying to distract herself from thoughts of sex. “Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” she replied. “I’m not quite sure you want to hear the answer.”
“On the contrary,” said Brigg. When Sinead pulled her eyes up she could see that he was looking at her with that disconcerting, penetrating gaze of his. The one that drew her in and made her go weak in the knees at once. It was the look he’d given her in her cell yesterday, the moment when she’d felt a strange, unexpected surge of affection for him.
A sudden compulsion overcame her to tell them both everything. Fuck secrecy. Fuck fear. Maybe talking was exactly what she needed right now. During her captivity she’d wished for closeness. She’d wished, more than anything, for affection, for love. Surely to God she could let her companions in on what made her tick.
“My parents sent me away,” she said abruptly, ejecting the words quickly, before she had a chance to change her mind. “When I was very young. To a very posh boarding school.”
Cillian’s eyes widened in surprise. “What? Why would they do that?” he asked. “I’m sorry if I sound naive, but your parents were shifters, surely? I’ve never heard of shifters sending a child away.”
“My mother was a shifter, yes. She was the Lioness in the family. My father was descended from Lions too, of course; he had the blood in him, but not the compulsion to shift. He was ambitious, a businessman who was worried that his out-of-control daughter might hurt his golden reputation. I was attached to my déor, you see. I loved shifting. I loved roaming about, getting into trouble.”
She bowed her head again and stared at her wine glass. She’d never talked to anyone about her childhood. About a father who never really cared about her and a mother who chose to submit to his will, rather than let her daughter know that she was loved, that she was valued. She chose to discard her only child to appease a man who had rejected his inner beast and in so doing had become all the more beastly.
“What was boarding school like?” asked Brigg. Sinead was relieved that he was choosing to focus on the school rather than on her horrid, icy parents. There was nothing in his voice but kindness, warmth, and comfort, and she was grateful for it.
“It was hell, if I’m to be honest,” she said, pulling her eyes to his. “You’d think that was an exaggeration, but the truth is that if someone decided to write a description of my notion of the very depths of hell, I would draft a tale about that place, about how they treated me. About all of it. My prison cell in the task force’s building was awful, but at least there I could be alone. I wasn’t being tortured from dawn until dusk by people who despised me; I was simply left to fester in peace.”
Sinead swallowed hard. A part of her didn’t want to talk about any of this, but for some reason, she knew she needed to keep going. She needed to let it out, after all these years. Too often she’d come close to breaking down, to exploding. Something told her that if anyone on earth could understand what she’d been through, it would be these two men. They knew what it was to live in a world where others judged, where people saw them as different. A world where people saw them as Other, as lesser beings, or even as threats. Shifters had hidden themselves for a long time, but the world was beginning to rise up against them again. The world was a hostile place. But this living room…it was as close to home as she’d ever felt.
“On my first day,” she said, “I was brought up to a room in what looked like a large sort of attic. The ceiling sloped sharply, and it was drafty up there, because there was no insulation in the windows. Oh, the school was expensive, of course, but at ten, I was one of the younger children and hadn’t proven my worth yet. So they threw me up there with eight other girls, all of whom hated me immediately. I was new. I was weird. I was an easy target. They loved pressing my buttons, and I grew restless and angry too easily because I couldn’t let my animal out. I had only begun to learn to control my Lioness when I had turned ten, and the truth is, she was my only true friend. I craved her presence. Every day spent holding her inside was torture, yet of course I couldn’t tell anyone what I was—what she was. To do so would have been to ruin my father’s career.”
“The school was full of humans, of course. No shifters. From the start I knew I could never fit in. I had no place there. I felt like a freak, and the other children thought I was one. They quickly learned that they could make my eyes change colour by making me angry, so they learned new ways to draw my rage because it amused them. They said I had the eyes of a cat, and accused me of everything from witchcraft to demonic possession. They threw stones at me. Poured buckets of putrid fish into my bed. But in spite of everything, they never guessed what I was. I suppose I found ways to hide my true nature, but all of it came at the expense of my Lioness.”
“They knew only that they were afraid of you,” said Brigg. “Humans almost always fear our kind. They’re afraid of what they don’t understand, and God knows, most of them will never begin to understand shifters. They fear our strength, our gifts.”
“Maybe that’s why I was so afraid of them,” Sinead replied, nodding. “I never understood them. I don’t know how to deal with anyone who looks at me like I’m an alien. I’m grateful to be here with you two.” She could feel herself relaxing, growing comfortable enough with the two men to give them a taste of her. She knew that her eye colour was changing, dark brown lightening to bright, impossible gold. Her Lioness was skulking just below the surface of her skin, curious rather than frightened. Wanting to come out and introduce
herself to two creatures who might actually accept her for what she was. “You don’t look at me that way.”
No, they looked at her with admiration. With an oddly intimate affection, given that they’d known one another for mere hours.
This was the first time in her life that she’d ever revealed to anyone the feelings of rejection, of loss that she’d lived through. The hideous sensation of being displaced without a true home, without a true family. It was the first time that she’d explored what it was that made her so terrified of the notion of attachment.
“I understand what it is to have to hide your true self,” said Brigg, but he didn’t elaborate. No doubt he was being sincere; he’d worked for a law enforcement agency for years. He’d hidden his true nature from his colleagues this whole time. It must have been difficult not to release his Dire Wolf. Not to reveal it in his eyes, even in his scent. Humans were easy to fool, but when one of their kind got to know a shifter intimately, they often began to break through the shell, to see that something hidden lurked below the surface.
“Hiding was the worst of it, yes. Nights were brutal,” Sinead said. “I would wake up covered in sweat. Sometimes they found me writhing in torment, moaning like a junkie going through withdrawal. The thing was, there was no way to cure the addiction to my Lioness. The symptoms never went away, even with the passage of time. They just grew worse and worse.” She shot a glance over at Cillian, who was staring intently, his piercing blue eyes narrowed in something that looked like anger. Anger at those who’d sent her away, no doubt. Anger at her circumstances. Anger that she’d suffered. His empathy drew a lump to her throat, which she swallowed. No sense in breaking down now. She was strong, or at least she’d always pretended to be. She wasn’t sure she wanted these men to see any more weakness than she was already showing them.
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