by Selena Scott
He physically jolted at the implication that he might be in love with Dawn. An almost crazed laugh burst out of him at the thought. Because wouldn’t that just be perfect? One more layer of shit on the shit sandwich of his life? To roll over and realize that not only was Dawn his friend, but that he was in love with her? To realize that he could never, ever be with her? To have to choose between his own life and the freedom of the woman he loved?
Yeah. No.
His brain absolutely shut out the idea of being in love with Dawn. Not possible. Did not compute. His body full-on rejected it. If he were in love with her, his life would be one million times worse than it already was. He was not going there. Ever.
“No,” he eventually choked out. “No. We’re not in love.”
Her eyes narrowed as she observed his reaction. “Okay. So, you’re just hooking up then?”
“Diana, I swear, everything is kosher between me and Dawn.” He rushed to cut off Diana’s line of thinking. He did not need her planting ideas of love in his head and he did not need her planting ideas of hooking up in his head. “I mean, we’re friends. I’m better friends with her than any other mentee I’ve had before and yesterday I was kind of a dick to her. I’m here to apologize. But seriously, we haven’t screwed with any rules and we’re not going to. I swear.”
Diana bit her lip. “And everything else is all right with you? If it’s not Dawn, is it another mentee? You’ve just seemed a little off lately and I want to make sure you’re okay.”
His brain, so sluggish just a minute ago, seemed to work at quadruple speed. He realized that he was going to have to initiate part of the plan he’d worked out with the Director. This was the part of the plan designed to throw Diana, a sure liability, off the scent. He just wished he had the paperwork to toss onto her desk the way he and the Director had planned. “I’m just preoccupied because there’s this project I’ve been working on for the center and I’m stressed that it’s gonna fall through.”
“Project?”
“Yeah. I heard about this government grant we could apply for and I’ve been working on the application a ton but I’m really stressed we won’t get it.”
“What kind of grant?”
“It’s actually a federally funded medical research project. They’re looking for participants. Shifter participants.”
She lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “A federally funded medical research project that is specifically looking for shifters to apply? Quill, you of all people know that the US government hasn’t been particularly kind to shifters in the past. I’m kind of shocked that you’d be interested in signing anyone up for a program like that.”
Diana was a little too sharp to make this easy on Quill. If he’d been a different man, who hadn’t been tortured and trained into being the Director’s perfect little mercenary, he might have had a bead of sweat leaking down his spine. “Normally I’d agree with you. But apparently it’s part of that whole image rehabilitation thing the government is trying to do. You know, that initiative where they’re building housing and subsidizing car loans for shifters.”
She squinted at him. “I’m familiar with that initiative. But I don’t exactly understand how ‘medical research’ could possibly fall into the same category as free housing for shifters.”
“Apparently, if you’re selected for the program, the government will wipe out any existing medical debt you might have.”
Diana’s eyebrows raised up immediately. Quill saw, with a leap in his gut, that he’d piqued her interest. Shifters were the demographic with the most medical debt in this country. Because six years ago, when the internment camps had been shut down, it wasn’t exactly like any of those shifters had had medical insurance. And most of them had been so malnourished, so roughed up and sick that they’d basically been ferried straight from the internment camps to the hospital. Where they’d been tended to and promptly saddled with crippling medical debt. What a welcome home gift.
This federally funded program would have been something the shifter community could have desperately needed. If it had been real. Unfortunately, it was just a dummy program that the Director had cooked up, hoping to lure shifters back into his laboratory. When the Director had first pitched this idea to Quill as the initial part of the plan to get his hands on the Wolf siblings, Quill hadn’t thought much about it. In fact, he’d rather tepidly admired the Director’s guile.
But now, seeing the light in Diana’s eyes as she considered the opportunities a program like this could afford shifters, Quill suddenly felt sick, a stone turning over in his gut.
Don’t think about it, he commanded himself.
“Wow,” Diana mused. “Can you send me the information on it? There are so many clients we could submit for this! It could change so many futures! This is incredible.”
“Actually,” Quill cut in, sticking to the script. “They only accept three applicants per organization. I think because they’re anticipating such a big applicant pool and they want to get started as soon as they can.”
“Only three.” She looked disappointed. “You said that you’d already started the application process. Which three clients were you thinking of submitting?”
Quill cleared his throat and nodded toward the house. “Phoenix, Orion, and Dawn.”
“Wow,” she said again, her eyes clouding over. Due to an accident with a forest fire the year before, the Wolf siblings certainly had accrued a significant amount of medical debt. It would take them decades to pay it all off.
Diana’s eyes cut to Quill and he saw what he thought might just be a lick of suspicion. “What kind of medical research are we talking about here?”
“The paperwork outlines it. The research is mostly in pursuit of understanding the transition that a shifter’s cardiovascular system goes through during the shift. Lots of monitors and wires, and they definitely specify that they need shifters who are well in control of their shifts.”
“Huh.” Diana shifted on her feet again. “Well, I guess just send email me the information on it and I’ll help any way that I can.”
“You got it.” Quill rocked on his feet and turned toward the stairs, headed back toward his car.
“Quill,” Diana called. “Aren’t you going to talk to Dawn?”
He was already halfway down the walkway. Talking to Dawn was what he’d come here to do. Stay! Something inside of him screamed. Stay! Talk to her. Work this out. Let her know how much she means to you.
But it was for that exact reason that he took another step away. “No. No, you were right. It’s too early. I’ll see her later.”
The stone in his gut turned over once again. He’d come to this house this morning to make amends with Dawn. Instead, he’d initiated part one of the plan. There was no turning back now. Nor should he turn back. His only path through this was the way he’d already planned. He couldn’t waver now. It was a matter of survival.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Orion sat very still in the chair and let a woman hold a knife to his Adam’s apple.
“Orion,” Wren laughed, bringing the straight razor back to her hip and laughing at the expression on his face. “You’d think by now you’d be used to me giving you a shave, I’ve done it every week for like six months.”
“I know,” he said, cracking his neck to one side and then the other. “I’ll just never get used to baring my neck to a weapon. It’s freaky. Must be all those years as a hunter. I’m not comfortable showing weakness.”
His friend laughed again. “Then why the hell do you keep coming back to my salon? Just shave on your own!”
“Because you’re good at it. You can do that blendy thingy with my beard and my sideburns.”
She rolled her eyes. “God save me from vain shifters.”
He snorted. “Last time I checked, you were both a shifter and fairly vain yourself.”
Wren stuck her tongue out. “Not a crime to look good.”
Orion cocked his head and watched her in the mirror. Wren wasn
’t pretty, exactly, but she was certainly attractive. She always had a new hairstyle, and a new hair color. She had piercings and tattoos and a thin face, like a fox. Though her shifted animal was a raven. Her body was long and thin and athletic. He’d mostly been joking when he’d called her vain, but now that he really looked at her, he could see that she did take a great deal of care with her appearance. Maybe she didn’t exactly look mainstream, but she was put together, in a certain sense of the word.
“Wren, why don’t you have a boyfriend?”
She frowned at him, one eyebrow inching up toward her hairline. “Tip your head back, let’s get the shaving part done.”
He followed directions, not because he was any less nervous about the sharp blade against his jugular, but because at the end of the day she was his friend and he trusted her. He waited until she was wiping the shaving cream off with a hot towel to try again. “You’re not going to answer my question?”
“It’s a stupid question.”
“It’s a genuine one. I’m not trying to be rude. I’m just curious.”
Her posture went from suspiciously rigid to kind of deflated. “I don’t usually talk about this kind of stuff. Not with anyone but Ida, that is.”
“Oh. Well. Am I being nosy?” He asked because he genuinely didn’t know. Growing up as a wolf, only shifting into his human form every now and then, he hadn’t gleaned much human culture. He didn’t always know when he was pushing too far. In Orion’s eyes, if he was curious about something, he should ask about it. Simple as that.
“No. Yes.” Wren laughed. “We’re friends. I guess it’s okay for you to ask stuff like that. So, yeah. The short answer is that you have to trust someone for long enough to make them your boyfriend. And that hasn’t happened for me in a really, really long time.”
He mulled that over. He hadn’t particularly thought of Wren as distrustful, but he had to admit that she wasn’t exactly open when it came to personal details of her life. “So, you’ve had boyfriends in the past?”
A dark look came across her face, making her brow furrow. “Just one. A long time ago. Speaking of boyfriends, how are things going with Diana?”
He recognized the deflection for what it was, and he was still curious about Wren’s life, but he decided not to push too hard. “Things are… actually really good.” He laughed a little. “I’m actually kind of surprised. I’d figured she’d put up a little more of a fight about dating me.”
“Nah, I had her pegged as a secret softie a long time ago. I bet she’s just a pile of pudding on the inside, right?”
That wasn’t exactly the way he would have categorized Diana, but he could see where Wren was coming from. “Yeah.”
“You two made the beast with two backs yet?”
“The beast with two… Oh! You mean sex? Yeah, last night actually.”
It occurred to Orion that maybe he should be a little more discreet about his sex life with Diana, but he also knew that Wren wasn’t being nosy. She was just the kind of friend you talked about sex with. If Ida were here, she’d be blushing and admonishing Wren, but as it was just the two of them, neither was particularly embarrassed by the blunt nature of the conversation.
“Good for you, man. Any good?”
“Are you kidding? Have you seen Diana?”
Wren laughed. “Fair enough. But the good looking ones aren’t always the best in the sack. Trust me. They think they can just lay there and look pretty.”
“Not Diana. Nah. She’s a champ.”
For some reason that made Wren burst out laughing. “Orion, you’re priceless. I’ve never heard a man refer to a woman as a champ at sex before.”
He furrowed his brow. “There’s not really a better word to describe it.”
Wren opened her mouth to say something but clapped it closed and squinted out the window instead. “That’s weird.”
“What?” Orion leaned forward and caught just a flash of tail lights before a car disappeared down the driveway.
“That’s the third time today that Quill has driven up to the house and then turned and driven away.”
The home that the Wolf siblings lived in was more than just Wren’s Grandmother’s former home, it was also housed her hair salon on the first floor. She would have been in the prime position to see anyone who’d pulled into the driveway.
Orion mulled over this information, trying to think of any human custom that would involve driving one’s car up and down a driveway repeatedly. He came up blank. And judging from the look on Wren’s face, she was coming up blank as well. And she’d been born and raised in human culture, so that was really saying something.
“Why would he be doing that?”
“I don’t know,” Wren said slowly. “I mean the only reason he comes around is for Dawn, right? He’s her mentor after all.”
“Right, so he pulls up, realizes that she’s not here and then drives away?” Sounded plausible enough to him.
“Sure. Because cell phones don’t exist,” Wren said drily.
“Oh. Yeah. Why would he drive over here instead of calling her?”
“Maybe,” Wren began. “Maybe he has something to talk to her about that he wants to do in person.”
This one Orion didn’t need spelled out for him. If Quill needed to talk to his little sister about something in person, there was a very good chance that it was of a personal nature. He… didn’t like the sound of that.
The truth was, Orion liked Quill. He thought he was competent and interesting. But there was something just a little bit off about him.
It was strange to Orion that Quill was a bear shifter. As someone who’d grown up in mountains outside of Portland, Quill had had a lot of experience with bears. They were protective, straight forward, hunters. Quill on the other hand gave off a vibe much more like a scavenger. He was wily and good at hiding in plain sight. If Orion didn’t already know Quill was a bear shifter, he would have guessed he was a fox or a coyote.
“You think he has something personal to talk to Dawn about,” Orion guessed.
Wren shrugged, her eyes squinting in just such a way that told Orion that yes, that was exactly what she’d thought.
“What kind of personal thing do you think they have to talk about?” he asked slowly, a pit of dread opening up in his gut.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, seeing as she’s your little sister and all, but Dawn is a very pretty girl.”
“You think Quill thinks that Dawn is pretty.”
Wren cocked her head to one side. “Have you spent much time around them lately?”
“Not really.”
“Maybe just try to catch the two of them together and see what conclusions you come up with.”
“You’re saying that I’ll spend some time with the two of them and I’ll suddenly realize that Quill thinks Dawn is pretty?”
“Orion,” Wren dropped her head into one hand. “I tried to be discreet here, but yeah. Come on! Look what happened with Phoenix and Ida! You and Diana for god sakes. Based on what little information I have, I think there’s pretty much a ninety percent chance that Quill and your sister are banging it out on a regular basis.”
Suddenly, unexpectedly, Orion was standing, one hand in his hair. He was looking around, completely befuddled. He’d known that Dawn was pretty, sure. And he’d known that she was getting older. And yes, of course he’d known that people in their twenties generally found other people to have sex with. It had just never occurred to him that…
“Good Jesus, she’s been so cheery lately. You think…? No. Oh, lord.” He pulled his cheeks down with his hands, smushing his face into a mask of horrified older brother. “You think she’s been in a good mood because she’s…” he lowered his voice into a whisper. “Making the beast with two backs?”
Again, Wren burst out laughing. “I don’t know! Go ask her if you’re so curious. I’m just saying that maybe lil sis isn’t so lil anymore.”
“I need to talk to Diana.” Orion was up an
d walking toward the front door of the salon.
“Wow, hold on, big guy. I didn’t mean to rile you up.”
“No,” Orion said, waving Wren off. “It’s okay. I just, I need to talk to Diana.”
He was out the front door and jogging toward the bus stop. It didn’t even occur to him that a year ago, this was the kind of problem that would have stayed securely within the confines of his own mind. Wanting to spare his siblings the worry, he’d never have talked this over with them. He’d have left it up to himself to figure it out.
But here he was, racing off to find the only person on this earth he trusted to help him with his problems, his equal in every way.
***
“You think Quill is boning my sister?”
Diana blinked up from the document she’d been reading. Orion stood in the doorway of her office, his hair standing on end and an utterly befuddled look in his eye.
“Maybe close the door?”
He strode in, kicked the door closed behind him and collapsed into one of the chairs on the other side of the desk. His eyes did a slow perusal of her hair in its tight ponytail, the neat edges of her dress. “You look cute. But yeah, do you think he’s boning her?”
Diana winced and laughed at the same time. “Will you quit saying boning? I hate that euphemism.”
“What’s wrong with it? Am I using it wrong? Never fails to amuse me how many different words human use to talk about sex.”
“You’re using it correctly. It’s just gross to me is all. Pick another term.”
“Beast with two backs? That’s the one Wren taught me this morning.”
Diana couldn’t help but wince/laugh again. “You’re moving in the wrong direction. How about we just call it sex.”
Now he was the one wincing. “So, is that a yes? You think they’re having sex?”
Diana sighed. She pushed aside the information regarding the medical research that Quill had emailed her and she’d printed out. She’d been poring over it all afternoon. “No,” she answered slowly. “I don’t think so.”