Danil’s Mate(31)

“You tracked us to Spokane?” Danil asked, a strangled note in his voice. He felt as if a hand were squeezing his stomach.

“No,” Dora answered, again waving a hand through the air. “I didn’t even know you guys existed. I tracked Navuka here and figured you were here because of them.”

“What did you just say?” Ilya asked. His normally jovial voice was darker and more serious than any of them had ever heard it. Katya included.

Danil instantly reached a hand out to Dora. Her eyes were confused. Clouded. “Pandora, what do you mean you tracked Navuka here?”

She looked even more confused now. “I’ve been looking into them for over a year. I finally got wind that they’d set up camp about fifty miles from here. I thought that’s why you guys were here.” She looked around at each of the faces and her own went white.

“Why would we be here if we knew Navuka was here?” Emin asked quietly.

Danil automatically put a hand around Dora’s shoulders. He needed to touch her, to protect her, even if she was the one who felt like a threat to his family right now.

“Didn’t - Didn’t Navuka make you? Engineer you into being bear shifters?” she asked, her voice low and unsure for the first time since Danil had ever known her.

Ilya stood. His hands curled into fists at the table. “A bear shifter is not made. A bear shifter is born.” With that, he pounded one fist on his chest like King Kong.

Dora’s mouth fell open. “I - I don’t understand. You’re born as bear shifters? It’s genetic?” She looked to Danil for confirmation.

He nodded.

Her brow furrowed and her eyes searched the faces in front of her for the answer she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear. “Then - then what does Navuka do to bear shifters?”

“Tortures them,” Anton said, rising immediately from the table and disappearing out the back hallway.

All his brothers rose to go after him but it was AJ who got up first. “I got it,” she said and darted out of the room.



***



AJ was deeply glad to get the hell out of that tense room. She wouldn’t want to be in Dora’s position right now. But she didn’t particularly love her own position right now either. She ran after Anton as he disappeared through the laundry room. She fought back a sigh at the sight of his retreating back. It seemed that she’d spent the last decade of her life chasing after Anton.

She ducked into the laundry room and caught his arm just as he was about to crash out onto the back deck.

“Wait,” she told him, tugging on his arm. She tried, to no avail, to ignore the rock hard play of muscles in his shoulder.

He stopped but didn’t turn back to her. “Let go, Autumn.”

He was the only one who called her by her full name. Everyone else just called her AJ. Short for Autumn Jane.

“No, Anton. Don’t. Just wait for a second.”

He attempted to shrug off her hand and it almost worked. But AJ clamped harder. “Get back. I need to shift.”

“No, don’t shift, Anton. Stay. Stay here with me.” She didn’t think she could bear to see him disappearing into the woods in his bear form again. Sometimes she felt like it was all she ever saw him do.

Now, he turned back to her, his eyes black as coals in the dark room. Neither of them had bothered to turn on the light. “You do not know what you ask me,” he growled.

“Yes, I do. I’m asking you not to shift and go be alone.” She gave his arm another tug, a gentler one this time. He was still immovable, but at least he was looking at her. She went for broke. “Every time anyone brings up your past, you shift as fast as you can. I’m beginning to think that you can ignore your past in your bear form better than you can in your human form.” His eyes bored into hers. “I’m asking you to stay here, in your human form, and talk to me about it. Any part of it. As a man.”

“You want me to act as man,” he repeated, his words slow and dangerous. “With you.”

AJ nodded, her dirty blonde hair waving lightly past her shoulders in a blunt, trendy cut. Her midnight-blue eyes stared up at him through the dim room. He imagined that she could barely see his already dark features in the dark lighting. He, however, could see every centimeter of her face. The gentle arch of her light eyebrow, the lobe of hair that fell over one eye. And. God. Her smudge of raspberry lips.

He searched her eyes. Those heavy-lidded, lazy eyes. Eyes he was sick of thinking about. They were always there. On the tip of his mind.

Occasionally she’d lay a gentle hand on his arm, but she’d never tugged at him the way she was doing now. In fact, they’d barely touched in a decade. Not since he’d carried her home to his mother after the mountain lion attack.