Denny watched him go, hands on his hips and throat moving as he swallowed. He twitched his head, wiping his eyes on the sleeve of his shirt, then lifted his agonized gaze to her. He looked so vulnerable for just a second before he sighed and gave her a ghost of a smile.
A giant flapping of wings sounded, and a falcon bigger than any wild bird Danielle had ever seen stretched its curved talons out. As her feet hit the ground, her feathers disappeared and were replaced by human skin.
“No losses,” Skyler said. “Drew took the worst of it before we were subdued, but he’s already healing. We all are.” She stretched her head to the side and flicked her dark locks out of the way to expose a long gash across her collar bone.
Good God, Danielle wished she could heal like that. If anything, her injury felt like it was getting worse.
Skyler knelt down in front of Danielle and ripped open the canvas hiking shirt she’d worn to the meeting with Reynolds. Danielle sucked air through her teeth and tried her best to ignore Skyler’s stark nakedness. In fact, she was trying to avoid looking at the mass of naked, eight-pack wielding, big armed, tattoo-riddled men who were greeting each other and talking low in small groups on the landing. Only a few remained as bears, who meandered through the crowd.
Skyler made a clicking sound behind her teeth and turned Danielle’s shoulder to look at the exit wound, which felt like hell.
“He got you good, didn’t he?” Skyler lifted her bright green eyes to Danielle’s and grinned. “Looks like you got marked after all.”
“Yeah,” Danielle murmured, confused, “but not by Denison. And it didn’t Turn me. It doesn’t count.”
Denison was jogging toward them, limping less with each step.
Skyler lowered her voice and leveled her a look. “It does in my eyes. You took a bullet for us, and you called in reinforcements. The Boarlanders and Gray Backs were already on their way here before I even got to them to beg their help. That was you, wasn’t it?”
Danielle nodded her head, too overcome with emotion to find her voice.
Skyler lowered her eyes to Danielle’s torn shoulder again. “You’re Ashe Crew now.”
Danielle’s happiness at those words overpowered her insecurities. All those years feeling like she didn’t belong anywhere dissolved away. The loneliness and fear of never finding her place in the world would be nothing but a dim memory now.
She’d found Denison, and she’d found her people.
Denison scooped her up in his arms and hugged her close. His whiskers scratched against her face, such a contrast to the soft fur he’d exposed to her yesterday. Man or bear, she didn’t care at all, as long as he was alive and here with her.
Crying, she wrapped her good arm around his neck as he settled her into the passenger’s seat of his Bronco. “Is it over?”
“It’s all over. You’re safe,” he said.
The door shut so hard, it rocked the car, but he was rough because Denison was still riled up. She could tell because his eyes were too light.
“Is Brighton okay?” she asked as soon as he slid in behind the wheel.
“No. But he will be.”
“He was the one who hired me, Denny. Reynolds planned to use me as his bargaining chip to be Turned this entire time. I think he’s been watching you and Brighton all along. Watching me, too, even after I moved away. He followed my career and offered the perfect lure to get me back here.” She explained everything that had happened on the way down to the trailer park, from the ad she’d found in the paper for the job, to the first phone call with Reynolds when he hired her, to the text messages she’d sent to Matt and her fear that he wouldn’t respond to her plea for help.
And every time Denison took his eyes off the winding road to glance over at her, he looked so proud. It made her braver, made the pain in her shoulder easier to bear when he looked at her like that.
It was obvious seeing her hurt like this was hard on him. His eyes stayed fever bright the entire time it took him to draw a bath and gently scrub her clean. They remained silver as he cleaned the wound and stitched her up with a medical kit that made her wonder just how often bear shifters needed this kind of first aid. His eyes didn’t darken to his normal stormy sky gray as he settled her onto his couch or busied himself with heating a gigantic pot of beef stew on the stove. It wasn’t until the pain pills he’d given her kicked in and she leaned back and sighed in relief that he began to look like himself again.
The tension left his shoulders as he stretched out above her and pressed his lips against hers.
He eased away. “Are you going to leave?” Worry etched in a deep wrinkle across the bridge of his nose.