Bear My Soul (Fire Bears Book 1) (11 page)

Rory startled awake. It was dark in the guest bedroom, and she cuddled Aaron closer against her. Chills rippled up her skin from a nightmare she couldn’t quite remember. The air was thick with something that prickled the back of her neck, and the scent of iron clung to the air particles like a fog.

“Cody?” she whispered, unsure why his name would even register on her lips.

“I’m here,” came a voice so deep and growly she didn’t recognize it.

Fear pulsed through her veins, forcing her to act or she’d scream. She sat straight up. “Where are you?”

A shadow shifted under the window, and she gasped. Blue moonlight illuminated a crouched figure, eyes glowing with an animal reflection she saw from raccoons and stray dogs on night roads.

“Cody, I can’t see very well.” Her voice quivered and she hated how scared she sounded. “Can we turn on the light?”

“Best we don’t. I just wanted to see you. Go back to sleep, Rory. We’ll talk in the morning.”

The hell they would. She kicked out of the covers and followed him out, the oversize T-shirt she’d swiped from his drawer billowing around her knees. The door clicked closed behind her, and when she turned, the soft light from the kitchen showed a terrifying figure. Cody was in a man’s body, but his face had morphed into an expression she didn’t recognize. He was wild and shook with barely checked rage, or agony, or both.

His black T-shirt was ripped down the arm, and red followed a bulging vein down his bicep and pooled in the crease at his elbow before the stream continued down to his fingertips. Blood had splattered up his neck, and his eyes weren’t the muddy brown and green that indicated his animal was fighting for control. They were bright gold.

His Adam’s apple dipped low as he swallowed. Straightening his spine, he looked down at her as if he was daring her to hold his gaze. She couldn’t. Not even for a second.

He arced his attention to the couch where Boone was sitting with his hands clasped over his knees. “I’m calling a Crew meeting. No phones. I’ll meet you at Ma’s at dawn, and I want everyone there.”

Hair mussed from what appeared to be a restless sleep, or none at all, Boone nodded and pulled on his shirt that was lying crumpled on the floor beside the couch. He murmured his goodbye to Rory, then let himself out the front door.

“What happened?” she whispered.

Cody clicked his tongue against his teeth and turned for his room, leaving her to trail after him.

“What’s happened is I’ve found a safe house for you in Montana. I have a half-brother named Bruiser there, and his crew can protect you.”

“His crew?”

“You’ll stay with the Ashe Crew until I send for you. You and Aaron will be safe there. They have protection from a shifter named Damon Daye, and Bruiser will keep you safe—”

“Stop it! I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what is going on. I brought Aaron to you because it was safer than being out in the world alone, not knowing who to trust. And now you’re sending me to a stranger—”

“Not a stranger. He’s family.”

“I didn’t even know you had a half-brother, Cody! I’ve been left out of all of this, and for what? Why are you hiding from me?”

Cody shook his head and let off a snarl, then strode into the bathroom and pulled his shirt over his head. The man didn’t even wince at the deep slice in his arm, which gushed with his movement.

“Why?” She leaned on the frame and waited. “Why, Cody? I’m not going to quit asking until you give me a fucking answer. I’m not leaving for some safe house if that means we’re split up and you are at risk.”

“We’re all at risk, Rory. Every one of my Crew is in danger, and I can’t keep my head if you are here. If Aaron is here.”

“What am I running from? You owe me that much, at least. Give me anything, Cody. Give me something. Please.”

Cody closed his eyes against his reflection in the mirror. He cut her an anguished look and held it. “You’re too good for this. Too good for me. I’m dark inside, and I’ve done awful things. Things that will taint you and Aaron.”

“Tell me.” Her voice trembled like a branch in a storm, but fuck it all. Gritting her teeth, she tried again, louder and stronger. “Tell me, Cody. If you keep pushing me away, I definitely won’t stand for that shit. At least if you share your life with me, we have a shot at being okay. I’m not fragile, and your secrets won’t break me. I know you think you’re protecting me by throwing up walls I don’t have the tools to batter down, but you aren’t. You’re hurting me.”

Cody swallowed hard and crouched down, holding onto the sink as his long legs folded beneath him. An anguished sound wrenched from his throat. “You’ll leave me.”

“Cody, you are good. I can see it. You’re a good man who loves his family and protects his own. Spill whatever is hurting you, and let me share the burden. Let me in.”

“I killed them,” he said so softly, she almost missed it.

“What? Killed who?”

“My own kind. A dozen marks. They weren’t terrorists.”

Rory shook her head slowly as dread filled her stomach and made her limbs too heavy to move. Slowly, she fell to her knees beside him, the tile unforgiving against her shins.

“The government has an agency who handles my kind. Shifters. The International Exchange of Supernatural Affairs has a leader, a handler, and he’s the one who sanctioned my tours in the war.”

“I don’t understand. The government made you fight?”

Cody sat hard, resting his back against the bathtub, and drew his knee to his chest, as if it would protect him from the heartbreaking admissions coming from his lips. He reached deep in his pocket and pulled out a small plastic bag of what looked like electronic pieces that had been smashed to bits. “I found these in my bedroom and in the living room. They’re bugs. Sound only, but we’ve been monitored, and I have no idea when my handler, Krueger, had them placed. I do missions for him. Black ops terrorist sniper shit that he needs someone with my abilities to do. My brothers have been recruited, too, but the bulk of the marks are given to me. He told me my targets were terrorists, but tonight, Dade and I talked to the mark. He was a shifter, Rory. Another bear whose entire crew had been wiped out, and I almost pulled the trigger on him.”

“But you didn’t—”

“But I have! A dozen other times I killed shifters who didn’t deserve it. They just weren’t buying Krueger’s bullshit anymore, and he used me to end them. Their blood is on my hands.”

“Cody, how could you have known? How?”

“I shouldn’t have taken missions blind like I did. I trusted him too much and got desperate to save my own people. I didn’t ask enough questions.”

“What did he hold over you?”

“Exposure. Public registration for shifters. And lately he has been threatening my family’s safety. And then when you came along…” Cody swallowed hard and looked ill, shook his head slowly from side to side. “Krueger knows about you and Aaron.”

“What?” she whispered. Her face tingled as the blood drained from it.

“He knows Aaron is my kid.”

“Does he know he’s a bear shifter?”

Cody nodded but wouldn’t meet her eye. “It would’ve been safer for you and him if you had never come back.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because he wants him tagged, Rory! This,” he said, stretching his neck to expose a short, surgically straight scar that ran along the taut muscle, “is where my tracking device was placed. Gage, Dade, Boone, Leah, Ma…even the cubs have them, Rory. This is part of the control. This is our leash. When I had a meeting the other day, it was to get my instructions for this mission, and Krueger said he wanted me to bring Aaron in for his tag.”

“He calls it tagging?”

“Yeah. That’s what it is, right? I’m an animal who needs to be controlled in the unsuspecting public.” The words sounded bitter and filled with self-loathing.

“Fuck that, Cody. Krueger is the animal. Our son isn’t having some tracker put in him. Over my cold, rotting corpse will that ever happen.”

“Yeah, that’s what I told him, too. He’s not budging on it, though, and I wouldn’t put it past him to snatch you and Aaron when I’m not looking and force the tracker on him.” Cody pressed the heels of his palms against his closed eyes and muttered a curse. “Everything got so messed up, and just as you came into my life. It shouldn’t be like this.”

“No, Cody. Things were really messed up before we came. You just have more to protect now, so it feels bigger. What do we do?”

“
We
don’t do anything. You’ll go to Montana while I figure out a way to neutralize the threat.”

“I’m not leaving.”

Cody jerked his gaze to her and leveled her with a glare. “Yes, you will.”

“Sorry, sexy. Your dominant alpha shit isn’t going to work on me. I’m not a bear, remember? You want to boss people around, go push your super bear powers on the other shifters who feel a need to bow down to you. I’m not leaving you. Aaron and I are safest here, with you and the rest of the Breck Crew, as a family.”

Cody’s face went slack. His shocked expression would have been funny if not for the very un-hilarious situation they’d found themselves in. And if his eyes weren’t blazing like a demon’s.

She’d seen a ton of spy movies, and the reality of their situation was that a bag of real-life shattered bugs was sitting on the tile in front of her and her mate had been a working assassin for a government program that didn’t give a shit about his welfare or the welfare of shifters who wouldn’t do their bidding. The reality was that she’d stepped tits first into a secret government program that was taking advantage of a group of supernatural beings who were trying desperately to keep to the fringes of society. She could only imagine what humans would do if they ever found out shifters existed. She’d imagined a hundred horrifying scenarios in the years that she had raised Aaron alone.

But could she take Aaron and run from the man whom she felt safest with? From the father of her son and the one she’d given her heart to? Could she run from Aaron’s only shot at normalcy?

She’d be in the wind again, this time with strangers, and with the knowledge that the people she feared the most already knew about Aaron and what he was. They’d be hunted, always looking over their shoulders and always waiting for a phone call on Cody’s fate.

No, she was done running. Done hiding and fearing the life she’d been thrust into. She thought of Leah and Ma. Of the Keller brothers who’d accepted her completely as mate of their alpha. As family. She couldn’t turn her back on them and run, knowing it wasn’t any safer out there than right here with people who cared about she and Aaron’s welfare.

Half-brother or not, a stranger wouldn’t have the instinct to protect Aaron. Not like Cody.

“I know you’ll drag the ghosts of your targets to the grave. It’s the way you are, Cody,” she whispered. “But I’m going to be here, fighting alongside you to avenge the people you were tricked into hurting.”

“Not hurting, Rory. Killing. I killed them. I put the scope to their heads, pulled a trigger, and left their bodies for a clean-up crew to take care of. It doesn’t matter that Krueger betrayed us. All that matters is that they are lying in a shallow grave or a lab somewhere because I wasn’t strong enough to tell Krueger to fuck off.”

“And if you had?”

“He would’ve killed my family.” Cody said it void of hesitation. “But what makes me or my people any more important than the ones Krueger ordered a hit on?”

Tears burned her eyes as she witnessed the pain that flashed across Cody’s face.

“As long as I live, I’ll be tainted. My bear has been damaged by years of war and violence, and I’ll never be a good mate for you or father for Aaron. How can I look my boy in the eye and try and teach him to be a good man when I’m a murderer?”

“Stop it,” she ground out, dashing moisture from her eyes with her fingertips. “Stop talking like that. You didn’t know. You were used and threatened, and you didn’t know. All you can do now is avenge them.”

“And I will.” He hooked his hands around his knee and leaned back. “The Breck Crew is about to go to war with a man who has never lost a battle against us. And when I think of anything happening to you or to Aaron…” His voice cracked on his son’s name. He shook his head and dropped his gaze. “I never wanted any of this.”

Swallowing down her heartache at seeing what Krueger had leached from the man she loved, Rory stood and busied herself with warming tap water in the sink, then moistening a dark washrag she dug from the linen closet. Straddling his lap, she kissed the short stubble on his cheek, then began to wash away the blood on his arm. The cut looked deep, but already the layers of muscle were sealing together, leaving a slightly raised scar under the skin that had been laid open. Aaron could heal from a scraped knee in minutes, but the ability shifters had to recover never ceased to amaze her.

Cody’s face never changed. He never winced away from her touch. He only stared at the wall beside him and held perfectly still. His nostrils flared. He angled his face, then lifted his supernatural gaze to hers. “You’re afraid of me now. I can smell it.”

“You smell fear, but it isn’t for you. I’m scared of what will happen now. I’m scared you’ll be hurt, that Aaron will be tagged, and that I won’t be able to save either of you.”