Wild Wolf Mate: League Of Gallize Shifters (The League Of Gallize Shifters Book 5)

by Dianna Love

  Her face had given away how his words hit her.

  She cared. She didn’t want to because she had some worry about him staying close to her. If she’d only realize he wanted to be by her side and help fight her battles.

  Prying deeper risked losing this time with her. He cherished that too much to be stupid enough to ask more. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have said you were amazing.”

  She slashed a quick look his way.

  Before she could feel hurt, he finished, “I should have said phenomenal.”

  Her cheeks perked up with a smile. “Trying to woo me with big words, wolf man?”

  “Hell, yes.” He chuckled and couldn’t recall being this happy in a long time. Tomorrow would be a shitstorm of problems to deal with, but that could wait. He’d heard what he’d needed to hear and that’s all he needed for now. When the time came, he’d get Tanza to listen to facts.

  Maybe even listen to Jaz.

  When Jaz lifted a hand and ran her fingers over his face, he kissed her palm.

  She surprised him with asking, “Tell me about what is causing the nightmares, Adrian. What happened overseas?”

  Chapter 15

  When asked how he’d destroyed his bond with his wolf, Adrian’s first instinct would normally be to shut down. Even with his Gallize brothers, he’d brushed off talking about it. They only wanted to help when reliving that torment took him to his knees.

  But Jaz had calmed his wolf tonight once already, then used her healing ability to bring Adrian out of another night terror.

  If anyone deserved to hear this, Jaz did. “Months back, I had a mission in Burkina Faso. I had to insert into a terrorist camp, locate a French female journalist they were holding hostage, and extract her.”

  “Where is Burkina Faso?”

  He brushed a hand over her hair. Just touching her helped him talk. “In the western part of Africa. It’s an area colonized by the French, but it’s had a volatile leadership and government. An armed group kidnapped a female journalist investigating a story in that area. We knew what happened to women who were kidnapped, at least to the ones who were found alive. Every second counted while ransom negotiations were being made. Her employer scrambled to find the millions demanded, even while knowing the chance of getting her back alive was almost zero.”

  Jaz rubbed her arms. “That’s a sickening situation.”

  “True. Everyone feels helpless.” Adrian’s pulse climbed at the memory, but he wanted to get this told. “The leader of our special shifter unit sent me in for the extraction and to take down this militant cell, which had their hands in everything from kidnapping to detonating bombs in civilian areas. Intel showed them to be human, at least physically. Once I pulled out the female, I had to get her to the helo extraction point on time.” He saw those moments so clearly and hated knowing the end.

  A warm hand covered his fisted fingers. Jaz’s energy flowed into his hand. He relaxed and looked into understanding eyes. “How do you do that?”

  Her lips curved in a sweet smile. “To be honest, I don’t know where this energy came from or what exactly it will do other than heal when I’m in human form and ... kill when my wolf uses it.”

  Interesting. He’d tuck that away for later, then drew in a calming breath, now that he could, and continued. “I neutralized three guards, the only kidnappers on site, cut the ropes holding the woman and gave her clothes I’d carried in. Then I put her on my back and ran through the jungle. While doing that, I sent the clicked message to a helo waiting to head in.”

  The next few moments changed his life and drove his wolf mad.

  Jaz ran her fingers through his hair and even that simple caress had a calming effect. Her patient silence encouraged him to keep talking.

  “I heard the helo coming in right on time. Shots were fired behind me. I remember wondering how the kidnappers had found the dead guards and caught up to me so fast if they were human? I reached the helo and tossed the woman in where our people got busy caring for her. I stepped on the blade and the rotors picked up speed. Shots pinged the helo. With my hands now free, I returned fire along with two human military operatives in the helo.”

  He searched the jungle again in his mind, seeing muzzle flares, but knowing the enemy would shoot and move.

  His words spilled out of him on their own. “If we’d had an Apache chopper, we’d have already been gone, but we had to depend on local support. It still should have worked,” he mused a moment. “The chopper spun around, returning fire as it lifted off, but ... a surface-to-air missile hit us from the blind side. One moment, I was shooting, and the next, an explosion at the tail sent the bird spinning and flipped me off. I went flying through the air. Another missile hit a few seconds later and destroyed the helo.”

  He ran a hand over his head and expelled shuddering breaths. He’d never shared all this and his body ached with going through it again. “I was the only one who survived. When I came to, my body had been stuffed into a three-foot square cage that wouldn’t allow me to move ... or to shift.”

  He shouldn’t be alive.

  Killing him and Red would have been humane, but that group wanted their pound of flesh over and over again.

  “Adrian.” Jaz’s pained voice came to him from a distance.

  She should run, save herself from being around him when he couldn’t protect her from himself. He wouldn’t blame Red. His wolf had done nothing wrong.

  Her warm fingers cupped his cheek, pulling him back from the edge of a bottomless hole he stumbled closer to each time.

  He turned to her.

  “That was so inhumane and hideous.” She swallowed. “You did nothing wrong.” She kept stroking his face and hair. “You did your best.”

  His throat felt raw. “My wolf hates me. He blames me for what happened. He’s right. I had the lead. It was my job to protect us.” Unshed tears blurred his vision. Thinking about all of the loss that day, including his wolf, threatened to choke him.

  Jaz continued soothing him with her touch and her words. “You did not do this to Red. He’ll understand. You have to reach him and mend your bond. That rift is tearing you two apart. You can do this.”

  His blurred vision cleared and he knew right then this woman had the power to keep him off that edge.

  That didn’t mean he should be her burden to handle.

  The nightmare had returned more quickly than before. He struggled between wanting to stay here with her to soak up all the healing energy she offered and getting as far away from her as he could to protect her.

  She studied him with sorrowful eyes. “How long did you stay in that cage?”

  “Eleven days.”

  She sucked in a sharp breath of air. “Your people couldn’t find you?”

  He quickly explained, “Not my team’s fault it took that long. The terrorist cell moved my cage every day on different trucks. They had a shifter in their group. He showed up later. That’s the one who caught up to the helo. He’s the one who told them how to best hurt a shifter.”

  Her horror-filled eyes told him he didn’t have to explain what all those days and being stabbed constantly had done to him and his animal.

  In a hushed voice, she murmured, “No shifter would survive that.”

  “We didn’t. When my team found me, they sedated me from that point on, including the flight back. My boss had me delivered to a huge outdoor reserve out West where I could run free without hurting anyone and no supernatural being could get to me except him and the team.” Pinching his eyes, he breathed deeply a couple times then cleared his throat. “That’s when Red’s name changed to Mad Red. We couldn’t fix the damage. We couldn’t tolerate each other. We shouted at each other in anger, every word more vicious than the next. My shifter brothers-in-arms came often to work with me. My wolf attacked every one of their animals that Red had once known as friends.”

  Her fingers kept contact with his face as if she understood what her touch did for him. “I know that’s incred
ible for any shifter and no one can truly understand what you went through without being there, but I’m telling you that you can heal,” Jaz said with certainty.

  He smiled at her declaration and his heart filled with hope, but he’d had a second nightmare tonight when he should have been at peace for a few hours.

  Pulling her to him, he kissed her. “My wolf and I have no connection. We’re clearly still at odds with each other. That makes us a danger if I let my guard down, which happened a few times at first. Now? It’s every time I sleep, even after we shifted earlier and your wolf helped him snap out of his rage.”

  She shook her head, denying his words. “Healing something like what you two suffered does not happen overnight or at one moment. You have to accept even small steps as progress. You didn’t harm me.”

  “I could have if not for your energy calming the two of us in beast mode. I’m determined to help you out of this mess you’re in before I have to ... figure out my future.” Nothing good would come of telling Jaz his days were numbered. Not even the Guardian, who pulled out all stops to save his shifters, could deny that Adrian’s wolf had to be put down soon.

  Adrian hated to give up his earlier moment of hope. It had felt so good to think about a future, but just reliving this story pointed to why he couldn’t save his wolf from that fate.

  With that hanging over him, he turned to fixing Jaz’s problem. “What happened with Kaiser?”

  Jaz sighed heavily. “Stay out of my mess, Adrian. You have no idea how bad it is and you’ll only end up being a casualty I’m not willing to lose.”

  Her words stalled his next breath.

  His Guardian and teammates had said the same thing from a different perspective. They were family and loyal to a fault, but Adrian no longer heard their words. He’d made up his mind he was of no value to anyone, especially them. They needed strong team members. The amount of time and energy spent trying to save him had taken from each of their lives.

  Time better spent on the other team members and especially those that had families. He’d never had a family of his own.

  The Gallize should focus on those who could.

  But hearing Jaz say she didn’t want to lose him even after he told her he wasn’t salvageable, that he was dead weight, and a danger to her ... those words got through to him.

  He just didn’t know what the hell to do with these strange emotions stirring his gut. Yes, he wanted this woman, but he couldn’t just make that choice. While he’d once looked forward to having a mate and a family of his own, all that had gone down the drain.

  Right now, he had to take one day at a time.

  For the time being, he’d press on to get as much potential evidence as she could hand him to prove her innocence.

  He’d promised to leave this morning. With dawn continuing to brighten the room, time felt as if it ran through his fingers. “Now that I’ve told you my story, tell me what happened that day with Kaiser without getting pissed that I’m asking. Please.”

  Her face shuttered, hiding whatever stirred in that mind. This had to be major for her to tell anyone when she hadn’t told her friend Scarlett all the details, and those two were close.

  When he made it clear he’d sit there as long as it took, she growled and crossed her arms. Finally she said, “You do realize my version is not going to sound like Tanza’s, right?”

  “I don’t care. I’ve always listened to both sides of any conflict and made my own decisions. That’s why I need to hear your side in your words.”

  She slid off of him and sat up, pulling her shirt back on.

  He lifted his eyebrows at the move. “What’d I do wrong?”

  “Nothing.” She laughed. “I just can’t talk about some things with your dick nudging me.”

  He chuckled and drew the sheet over his lower half. “Fair enough.”

  Leaning against the bed, she lifted her shoulders as if bracing for the words she’d say. “I was born and grew up in Kodiak, Alaska after my mother had escaped being imprisoned by a wolf shifter pack associated with the Black River group.”

  “Down here?” Adrian asked.

  “Yes. In the Southeast. She was a Kodiak bear, but the clan was not happy to see her back and pregnant by a wolf. She’d run away years before to mate a wolf who was killed when she got captured. When she escaped, it took months for her to make her way back to Alaska. By the time she arrived, she was halfway through her pregnancy and babbling about losing her child.“ Jaz walked over to the tiny kitchen and pulled out a couple mugs, then instant coffee.

  “She wasn’t talking about losing you, right?” Adrian asked.

  “No. While my mother was held captive, she gave birth to her first child. Kaiser.”

  “You’re kidding?” Adrian murmured. He stared at the floor then back at her.

  Jaz tried to sound unaffected, but she’d been deeply hurt for years and killing Kaiser had poured salt in a raw wound. “Unfortunately not. Sometimes my mother would look at me and say she gave up the one she loved, because of me.”

  “Holy hell, Jaz. No parent should say that.”

  Waving a hand as if to wipe away years of pain, Jaz explained, “She was lost in her own world. I couldn’t reach her as a child. I didn’t understand her not wanting me. Her Kodiak clan would have allowed her to stay, but she could not bring home a non-bear shifter to mate.” Once Jaz had microwaved two mugs of hot water, she scooped coffee into each one, stirred, and walked over to sit on the bed again.

  “Black. Just the way I take mine.” Adrian took his mug and sipped. “So how did you end up here?”

  “They told me my mother would go off for long stretches, then eventually she left permanently and settled thirty miles away with a mixed group of shifters. Not a pack, just drifters. She claimed I’d be safer with the Kodiak clan. To be honest, I probably was. They raised me as one of their own and were good to me.”

  “I’m glad. Having a family, even if they were a surrogate, had to be better than none,” Adrian told her honestly, but Jaz had been ditched by her mother.

  No other way around it.

  She stirred her coffee. “Where’s your family?”

  “Uh ... “ He studied the smooth surface of his coffee. “Don’t know about my dad. My mom couldn’t hold a job, then got into drugs. We ended up on the street when I was twelve. I woke up one morning and she was a cold corpse.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too, but I didn’t know I had someone watching over me at the time.”

  “What?” Jaz said, frowning at him. “Whoever it was failed as a guardian.”

  He almost laughed at her saying the name of the person who had saved him. The Guardian had stepped in when he normally stayed out of a Gallize shifter’s early years. “It does sound bad put that way. What I should have said was when I got taken into child services, an elderly couple did some fancy paperwork and took me home. They were in their late eighties.”

  She kept frowning. “Waiting to hear a punch line to this dark joke.”

  “You’re funny, you know that.” He hadn’t spoken of his past to anyone, not even to his Gallize brothers, because he hadn’t wanted them to look at him with pity. He’d simply told them his parents died young and he’d been adopted.

  “You can’t leave me hanging there, Adrian.”

  “Sorry. They told me they weren’t capable of raising me, but neither did they want to see me stuck in the system with no support. I spent a month with them. They were kind and used every waking minute to brainwash me, but in a good way,” he hurried to clarify before she questioned him. “They were the reason I went to a military boarding school. I didn’t find out until later after they died and I was called in for probating their will that they’d adopted me. They weren’t rich, but I sold the small house and had enough money to make my way.”

  “How did they find you?” she asked.

  “I told you, I had a guardian angel who orchestrated it all. Now, finish telling me about your Kodiak gro
up.” He did not want for this to reach the point she started wondering about how he did all this as a shifter, which he hadn’t.

  Jaz scooted around and leaned against the wall beside the bed. “When I was old enough, my Kodiak clan told me what they knew about my mother traveling down here on her own before mating with a wolf shifter, and what happened, based on her words. Last year, I told the clan I wanted to find my brother and let him know he had family, but I wouldn’t bring him to the clan. I’d carried the pain of being unwanted for a long time and thought Kaiser might feel the same. I also thought if meeting him worked out, he might want to meet his mother. Then, I’d bring him to her. Maybe it would help heal her mind.”

  While listening and drinking his coffee, it hit Adrian that Jaz had been deeply wounded for a long time. She’d been abandoned. Even worse, she carried the burden of being the reason her mother gave up her son to get Jaz to safety.

  Adrian had heard about post-partem depression and could only guess at what mixing that with having to leave her first child had done to the woman.

  Still, he hurt for Jaz.

  She said, “I came down here last year. Had no idea how to find Kaiser, but met Scarlett. We made friends and she helped me track down the wolf pack where the alpha had claimed Kaiser. To give back to her, I helped her when she wanted to donate an egg to her sister who kept losing babies.” Jaz laughed. “When I warned Scarlett just one egg might not survive, she’d assured me her sister would only need one.”

  “Hell, I guess so,” Adrian said, agreeing with the humor in Jaz’s voice. Scarlett had kept a big secret for years. She’d been the child of a Power Baron and a cougar shifter mother. The Power Baron had bred Scarlett to be his future enforcer, but she’d run from him.

  Scarlett and her father met up at the tiger shifter’s compound in a clash of wills. The same place Adrian, Jaz, and Scarlett’s sister landed in large cages after an army of predators had come for the mother and child while in hiding. They’d captured Scarlett’s sister, but he and Jaz stood between the predators and Scarlett, as she and her future Gallize mate escaped with the baby.