Bear My Heir
Author: Anya Nowlan
A Little Taste …
"Do it."
The way Dice's voice lowered and seemed to resonate with a growl had Prowler and Price both snapping their necks up to stare at him, eyes squinted. Dice could practically feel the threat bubbling beneath the surface, and his muscles flexed.
For the past five months, running Shifter Squad Nine had felt like corralling wild dogs and then playing a game of 'Who's the biggest, baddest Alpha?' with them. Dice had been winning so far, but it hadn't come without a couple of tense moments.
Prowler should have remembered the tooth he'd lost the first time he gave lip to Dice, and by the looks of him and the fact that he wasn't snarling yet, the wolf remembered.
"Fine," he snorted, nodding at his brother to go with him.
Thor watched the twins pass with an impassive look on his face, sticking a cigarette in his mouth and lighting it slowly.
"You know you're playing with fire, right?" he asked casually, flicking a look at Dice. The werebear met it with a nod.
"I know. But I don't think they'll be the ones I really need to worry about."
"I think you're right about that," Thor said with a wink. "I think your girlfriend's about to get here."
Dice heard it too now, the ominous rattle of two large vehicles drudging through the jungle. His stomach twisted and he must have looked like a lovesick puppy for a moment as he heard a very obvious chuckle behind him. It passed over Thor's lips when he turned around to go stalk after the wolves.
The twins might think they're all that, both sets, but it's fucking Thor who could drop me like a rock from a mile away, Dice thought, watching the man leave before turning his attention back to the narrow road leading into the compound.
His heart thudded in his chest as the cars arrived, parking right in front of him. When the door to the first one opened, Dice thought he wouldn't be able to find any words to speak ever again.
It was her. It was Meredith.
And she was alive. And she was there.
"Meredith," he whispered, staring at her dumbly while she seemed to be doing much the same in response.
What's a man supposed to do when he's reunited with a woman he thought he'd lost five years ago? Whatever it was, Dice couldn't quite wrap his mind around it, so he did the one thing that felt natural.
He walked over to her, pulled her out of the car and into his arms and kissed her like she was the only oxygen he could ever breathe again.
© 2016 Anya Nowlan
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Bear My Heir
Shifter Squad Nine
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be used, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means by anyone but the purchaser for their own personal use. This book may not be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of Anya Nowlan. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.
Cover © Jack of Covers
One
Dice
Dice's grip on the handrail tightened as he watched the mayhem sprawl out before him. The explosion almost kicked him back and his wide, muscular forearms flexed as he leaned forward with a grunt, the heat of the blast sizzling against his skin even though the raised platform he was watching on was nearly a hundred feet from the source.
One glance to his right showed Spade standing impassively, his arms tucked behind his back and cold eyes considering the scene before him with about as much interest as a butcher watching cattle get slaughtered. Not a single twitch of his jaw or a change in expression could be seen when a bellowing scream from below in the thicket of jungle was followed by laughter so grating it might have been straight out of some horror movie, haunting and high-pitched.
"Is this necessary?" Dice asked grimly, the goggles he was wearing pointing out the locations of each of the five men he'd come here to view.
"Entirely. You need to see what I'm giving you before you make up your mind," Spade said, his tone so dull that he might as well have been yawning next to Dice.
Dice shook his head quietly, turning his attention back below. The fuzzy green outline that was marked as Rio, the explosives guy, was moving fast as hell for a guy his size, and a few moments later he shifted faster than anyone Dice had ever seen.
He'd gone from a mountain of muscle and sinew and rage into the fully-grown form of a male African lion, his mane thick and luxurious, though his victim had no chance to admire it as the arm the man was using to hold his assault rifle with got torn straight off his body.
Dice almost needed to look away when the ferocious lion ripped out the man's throat, while his brother Ryker tore through two others running towards their fallen comrade's location before they could even make half of the distance there. Dice was too far and too high up to see anything clearly, he needed to be content with the digital outlines, but that was enough to understand how fucking brutal those two were.
"Look at Thor," Spade noted with a humorless chuckle.
The sniper had climbed one of the high trees early on in the fight and gotten at least three clean headshots before anyone realized where he was hiding. The drug cartel the five maniacs had been set loose upon never had a chance, even though they outnumbered The Firm operatives four to one.
What Spade was drawing Dice's attention to was the way that the sniper threw his gun on his back when a man approached him from below and then dropped down on him like some kind of a nightmare, slitting his throat with a dagger before the man could react other than to let out a blood-curdling scream.
Dice shook his head quietly, his lips pressed thin.
Why are you showing me this … ?
The field was growing thin after Rio had blown up the main building that the drug dealers' hired help had been huddling in, taking out at least four of them in one go. Price and Prowler, the werewolf twins, were rounding up a few stragglers and they weren't kind about it.
A few of the smarter individuals involved in the carnage had realized at one point that they couldn't fight the force of nature they'd been pitted against and tried to run away, run anywhere, through the thick, damp and hot jungle evening.
Prowler seemed to corral them exactly where he wanted them by peppering stray bullets here and there to keep the three men moving in the direction he deemed fit, and when they were far enough away from any possible help, he and Price shot them in what could only be described as an execution. It was Prowler who had the dark, chilling laughter, the hacker with the pale skin and luminous green eyes being the epitome of everything a soldier was not supposed to be.
"Are we done here?" Dice asked, his voice strained now.
Sweat was slicking down his back. He was tired from a flight that had taken far too fucking long and had taken him to watch something that wouldn't have made it into the top one-thousand things of what he would have liked to do with his Wednesday evening.
But he hadn't been able to say no. Of course he couldn't have. The order came from The Firm's command. It was only later that Dice found out that the directive had born Spade's name, which only made it that more impossible to decline.
"Not yet," Spade said, nodding in the general direction of the large 'playground' they were overlooking.
The platform itself had been a guard tower used by the drug dealers, some unimportant branch of the local coke trade down in Bolivia, but when Dice had been brought in, it had already been cleared and made into some sort of a twisted VIP stand. The whole scene was built up like a viewing experience. A trained, controlled team would have swept through the twenty badly trained and helpless 'guerillas' in five minutes, ten tops. The Fantastic Five here had been fucking around for twenty-five minutes, and it wasn't for lack of capability.