Timberman Werebear (Saw Bears Book 3) (10 page)

“Is that what happened to Brighton’s voice?”

Horror had transformed her face. Horror and devastation, and he could tell she was cut to her middle with his admission because she was wearing the same haunted look he’d seen in the mirror for the last nine years. He pulled his shirt on and avoided eye contact. Any emotional upheaval from her now, and he was done for. His throat would clog, his voice would shake, and his animal wouldn’t allow such weak behavior. He’d Change again to avoid the pain.

Danielle approached and rubbed her hands up his back. He let her reassurance wash over him. When she wrapped her arms around his waist and rested her palms against his stomach from behind, he pressed his hand over hers to keep her there. Her cheek rested between his shoulder blades, and a warm, calming sensation spread from where she touched him, downward until his limbs tingled with the comfort.

“Brighton won’t talk about what happened,” he murmured. “He won’t talk at all. They took his voice from him and scarred his body with their testing. He hasn’t ever said it, but I think he remembers. It’s an unspoken rule between us that we just don’t ever bring it up. Brighton will disappear for days if I do.” Pain seared through Denison’s middle as he remembered the awful years after they’d been taken. He’d been lucky enough to have been spared the memories, but Brighton had gone dim and became a ghost of his former self with whatever demons he was carrying. “When I came around, we were back home. Brighton had gotten me back somehow, but he was cut up real bad. We’d been missing for three days. Three days at the hands of people who knew exactly what we were. This would be your life, Danielle. You would be at risk if anyone ever found out.”

“The others in the Ashe crew… are they like you, too?”

“All but Skyler. She’s a falcon shifter, but she is one of us in all the ways that count.”

“All the ways that count,” Danielle repeated in a hushed voice.

Denison turned and rested his back against the giant evergreen, then pulled her closer, settling her between his splayed legs and against his chest. “I want to be with you. My animal chose you as my mate years ago when we were together. There was never going to be another for me because that’s how it works. If a shifter like me is lucky enough to find a mate, it’s a onetime bond. I have instincts, and they constantly urge me to claim you.”

“Claim me? Is that the biting part Brooke talked about?”

“Yeah.” He swallowed hard and hoped he had the right words to explain. “We can still be together if you’re human. We don’t have to do anything. We could stay just as we are. We could live the rest of our lives happy, just like this. There would be no bite, though. That would Turn you. I don’t need that to be with you. It would hurt, and I don’t want to hurt you. You should know how it is because the guys will bring it up.”

“Are Brooke and Skyler claimed?”

Denison nodded slowly.

Her face fell, and she dropped her gaze to his tattoo. “I can’t belong to the Ashe Crew if I’m not claimed by you, can I?”

His chest hurt as he watched the pain flash across her face. “Not as a human and not according to our traditions. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be with me and live with me. The Ashe Crew would still be your friends, even if you aren’t a shifter.”

“But I wouldn’t be family. Not like you all are.” Her soft brown eyes went round. “Brooke said it was hard to have babies. Would it be hard for us, too?”

He wished the answer was different. Wished he could put her mind at ease and tell her that someday he would be able to give her a cub. He wouldn’t keep the truth from her anymore, though. From here on, she got nothing but honesty from him. She’d earned it. “It would be hard for us. Impossible maybe.”

She dropped her chin to her chest. He’d dealt her a blow, and he rubbed her back in sympathy. He wanted to give her the world, not take things away from her. They’d never talked about having children, but she would make a wonderful mother. She was caring, sensitive, and had deep empathy, and the thought of never watching her swell with his child ripped his guts out.

“We don’t have to decide anything right now,” he murmured. “Even without the mark, you’re mine, and I’m yours. I don’t care if you stay human. You are my mate.”

“Yeah?” She looked up, doe eyes brimming with moisture and full of hope.

If she only knew how deeply she’d burrowed into his heart, she’d never be insecure about his devotion to her again. “Always.”

How was Danielle supposed to settle down and have a professional business meeting with Reynolds and Darren after everything she’d found out over the past twenty-four hours?

Her mind was frazzled with the influx of information she’d absorbed. Vampires! Damn, had she been wrong. She’d made friends with a crew of badass, rip-roaring, protective-as-hell grizzly shifters.

She leaned over the steering wheel of her jeep and laughed out loud. Denison was a lumberjack werebear! Now
that
was sexy.

Sexy but dangerous.

He wasn’t a danger to her, though. Every instinct she possessed screamed that he’d never hurt her. Even yesterday when he’d Turned in front of her, he was a gentle giant. He looked scary enough with his big barrel chest and powerful arms that shook the earth with each thundering step. But his eyes had been soft and sad when she’d been crying with the relief of finally understanding what he’d been hiding from her. No, he wouldn’t hurt her, but rather he lived in constant danger.

She’d wondered why Denison hadn’t gone big with his singing. Why he hadn’t left this tiny town and made a name for himself. Anyone with ears could tell he was special with that clear baritone, natural affinity for musical instruments, and a memory for lyrics that stretched for miles. Now, she got it. Big dreams like that would be a risk for a man like Denison. It would expose him to more people and put his animal in situations he wouldn’t be able to control. He wouldn’t be able to hide his shifting eye-color or the snarl in his throat, and it would put all shifters at risk. So here he was, year after year, frozen in time as he played his weekly gig at Sammy’s and plucked out tunes around the bonfire for his crew.

She was so proud of what he was, of the man and the bear he’d grown up to be while she’d been away, but that didn’t mean he led an easy life.

What he and Brighton had gone through when they were teenagers was awful. Even if he didn’t remember much of his time being tested on, she’d witnessed firsthand the devastation in his face as he told the story. No wonder Brighton didn’t want to talk, not even at a whisper. His missing voice had to be a constant reminder of what had been done to him. If she chose to stay here with the Ashe Crew, she would have to learn to be overly careful to protect the people she loved.

She’d done as Brooke asked and knocked on her door after she and Denison had come down from the mountains. Brooke had showed her a beautiful painting she’d done of Danielle and a grizzly, Denison, sitting beside each other on the edge of the landing, looking out over the stars, sitting close to each other but not touching. Afterward, Brooke had sat her down and told her of how she had been Turned by Tagan at the cruel order of the last alpha. She had told Danielle about how he’d killed one of his own crew to save her and explained how hard it had been when she’d first been Turned. She had told her about how much it had changed her from the person she used to be. Danielle had already known what she would gain by joining the Ashe Crew—friends, family, and an unbreakable bond and sense of belonging—but Brooke had also let her know exactly what she would be giving up if she chose to allow Denison to claim her and put a bear inside of her.

She had a big decision to make, but she couldn’t make it now. Not when her head was supposed to be wrapped up in this meeting.

There was an environmentalist outpost half an hour’s drive from the Asheland Mobile Park. She hit the brakes and pulled to a stop in front of a dilapidated log cabin with overgrown landscaping. She tried to match it to her memories of the outpost from her internship here years ago, but couldn’t. She frowned and checked the directions Reynolds had texted her again.
101 Pine Pass
. This was definitely the place.

A black SUV was parked alongside the house, and she stifled the nervous flutters in her stomach as she exited her jeep and gathered her notebooks. This would be her second meeting with Darren, but her first with Reynolds, and he was the one who held the power to extend her contract so she could stay here with Denison.

With a deep breath, she stepped around an empty, moss-colored birdbath and knocked on the front door.

“Come in,” a man called from inside.

She opened the door and squinted into the dark room. The lights hadn’t been turned on, and it took her eyes a couple of seconds to adjust after coming in from the sunny weather outside.

The cabin seemed to be one room and definitely not the outpost she remembered. In the middle of the floor was an old desk, polished to shining, and a high-backed office chair turned away from her.

When she closed the door behind her, the chair turned, and the man from the lumberjack competition, the one with the pitch black hair gone silver at the sides and cold hazel eyes, stared back at her with the empty smile he’d given her the first time they’d met.

“Mr. Reynolds?” Her voice trembled as frost blasted up the back of her neck.

“The one and only. Have a seat, Ms. Clayton. I do believe you have some information I need.”

“Right.” The beetle infestation.

She folded herself carefully into the creaking leather chair in front of the desk and settled her stack of notebooks into her lap. Reynolds was wearing a black, three-piece suit, and more power to the man for dressing well, but this wasn’t a corporate business meeting.

He gestured to her with an open palm. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“Aren’t we waiting for Darren?”

He blinked slowly. “Darren isn’t working for me anymore. He couldn’t follow directions.”

The way he talked down about Darren, as if he were a petulant child who couldn’t mind rules, grated against Danielle’s nerves. She hadn’t liked the guy either, but when she’d initially met with him, he’d seemed professional enough and passionate about the environment here.

Reynolds lifted his eyebrows and clasped his hands on the desk between them, the picture of impatience.

Clearing her throat, she pulled a stack of printed notes from the front flap of her biggest journal. “I’ve printed off the most important findings for you as a quick reference for what I’ll be talking about.” She slid the paper-clipped papers across the desk.

Reynolds lifted his hands so she could push the papers under them, but he didn’t look down at her notes. He only stared blankly ahead at her.

Uneasiness spread through her, making it hard to focus on the notebook she held clutched in her shaking hands.

“The infestation is much worse than previously thought,” she began. “The beetles have demolished, or are in the process of demolishing, more than a quarter of the trees here already. Worse than the loss of the trees, though, is the loss of balance in the ecosystem. Native animals and insects that make their homes in and around these infected trees are already being affected. In small quantities, the pine beetles can be beneficial, serving to wipe out old and sick trees to allow for sunlight to reach the pinecones on the forest floor. But it has been so dry and hot in recent years and the forest is mostly made up of mature trees with fewer saplings that the beetle population has exploded. They use the bark to lay their eggs under, and they also introduce a blue fungus to the tree that slowly stops water and nutrient flow, eventually starving the tree. With the ongoing drought, the trees are already stressed and susceptible to the beetles. The land owner who hired crews to clear territory in sections is onto something. At this rate, the living ponderosa and lodgepole pines won’t be salvageable and will sicken like the others at an alarming rate.”

“Fascinating.” The way Mr. Reynolds said it made it seem like he wasn’t interested at all. “Now, share with me some information I could actually use. Tell me everything you know about Denison Beck and his brother, Brighton.”

Shock slashed through her chest and sucked the air out of the room, congealing the oxygen in her lungs. “I was hired to study the beetle problem in this area. That is what I’m trained in, and that’s the only reason I took this job. If you have questions about anything else, I can’t help you.”

Mr. Reynolds opened a drawer beside him and pulled out a stack of glossy eight by ten pictures, then slid them in front of her.

The horror and gore of the picture in front of her made her gasp and cover her mouth with her hands. A woman in a lab coat lay on a sterile-looking tile floor, her stomach ripped to shreds and her throat torn out.

“You don’t have to play coy with me, Ms. Clayton. I’m fully aware of what Denison is. I realize you likely feel an unnecessary loyalty to him, which is why I chose you to spy on the Ashe Crew.”

She couldn’t take her eyes away from the woman in the picture.

“You see, Denison is a murderer. So is Brighton.” He brushed his palm across the stack, fanning out the gruesome images.

All featured a man or woman in a lab coat, their middles covered in crimson and unrecognizable as human anatomy.

“This victim of their savage rage,” he whispered, pulling the last one from the stack, “was my wife.”

The blond woman stared back at the camera with a blood-smattered face and glossy, vacant eyes. Even in death, she looked horrified.

But Danielle had heard the other side of this story, and a slow fury built in her veins. “Were you there?” she asked in a strangled voice.

“Yes. I witnessed their brutality firsthand.”

“No, I mean,” she gritted out, looking up, “were you cutting them and bleeding them and torturing them with these other
doctors
?” She spat out the last word like a curse.

A slow, cold smile drifted across his face. “I see you’ve grown sympathy for the plight of these animals, but I assure you, they are no more than servants to their instinct to kill. These doctors had families and homes. They had names and were real people.”

“Denison and Brighton are real people, too. They have value, and you tortured them. Your team deserved what they got. They shouldn’t have been experimenting on people. Blame yourself for what happened in that dungeon, you pompous prick. You kidnapped two innocent kids from their family. They were kids! And you cut them and bled them. You took strips of their flesh.” A sob clogged her throat, and she gritted her teeth and swallowed it down. “You took Brighton’s voice, and for what? What purpose did it serve to torture them?”

“We took Brighton’s voice box to study how he was able to talk like a man and growl like an animal at the same time. It was a scientific enigma until we studied him. Our research has merit. We are able to study evolution as it’s happening thanks to my research, you ungrateful cunt. You have no idea how valuable my work is.”

“It’s not evolution that is happening here! They aren’t some super race. They aren’t human’s morphing into animals. Their genetic make-up hasn’t changed since the dawn of man, so you’re wrong. You’re studies are worthless. They have nothing to do with you or me or where our species is headed. They are separate. Just a small group on the endangered list, trying to survive douche wagons like you who think you are superior enough to hurt people in the name of science. Fuck science, and fuck you.”

She stood and spun for the door, determined to not say another word to this man. Denison and Brighton might have killed those people, but it was in self-defense after unspeakable things had been done to them. Whatever revenge Reynolds was seeking for his wife’s death, Danielle wasn’t going to be any part of it.

The crack of metal on metal sounded, and she froze, her hand on the doorknob.

“Turn around,” Reynolds growled out.

She dropped the notebooks with a clatter on the wooden floorboards, then held up her hands in surrender as she turned and stared in horror down the short barrel of his handgun.

“Your little animal lover tirade doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, Ms. Clayton. My team is already hunting your friends. I just needed you out of the way as my bargaining chip. Didn’t want you getting caught in the firefight before I was able to use you.”

“I won’t help you hurt them,” she whispered, tears of determination stinging her eyes.

“Then you’ll die for them. For those animals.”

“No,” she said on a breath. “I’ll die for the people I love. You’re the animal.”

Reynold’s eyes went cold and vacant like the corpses in the pictures.

Then he pulled the trigger.