War had never been hard for Jathan Barns to watch before.

It was part of life for a shifter, especially a Gray Back. His crew, like all the crews in Damon’s Mountains, were no strangers to fighting. Wars were fought under human radar, quietly, quickly, to inflict maximum damage to those who would come after his people, but minimal damage to the shifter reputation in the public eye.

No…war had never been hard to watch…until now.

He knelt on the pine needle-covered forest floor between two oaks and, in agitation, scratched his beard with his thumbnail. Lynn was at it again. Over and over, she’d called the shifters here to war, one at a time. Jathan had watched her from a distance over the last three weeks, and he wasn’t the only one. Creed Barnett, alpha of the Gray Backs, stood a hundred yards off, watching Lynn’s panther battle a monster she’d pulled from the mountains. Crazy Lynn had called Nox, the son of the Cursed Bear, to fight her. Clearly, she had a death wish. From the pissed-off look in Creed’s dark eyes, he knew it too. She was trying to end it. Again.

Jathan lifted his phone and took a picture. He’d done it every time she’d called a shifter to fight. He didn’t know why. Maybe soon he would show her the pictures and explain the damage she was really doing to herself. He wanted to throttle her. He wanted to shame her for being weak. Weak, weak, weak. Eden, Lynn’s best friend and Red Havoc crewmate, had told Jathan it was a broken mating bond that made her snap, but that was bullshit. Mating bonds didn’t exist, and love was a crock of crap people pretended to feel so that their lives could have meaning in the short time they were on this earth.

Lynn had snapped because she quit trying.

Jathan spat on the ground as the screaming panther and blond grizzly bear waged a war that had felled two damn trees already with the violence. Jathan knew what was coming. So did Creed. Lynn had a move at the end of a fight when she was getting tired.

Jathan narrowed his eyes at Lynn as she spun and raked her claws against Nox’s neck. She was goading him. Pissing him off. Hurting him so he only saw red. She’d been working her way through each member of each crew systematically, looking for one who would lose control. Well, she fucking found it with Nox. He was almost as crazy as her.

Creed was taking his shirt off now, preparing to Change to stop Nox from what Lynn was begging him to do, but there was no point. A massive silver bruin meandered out of the woods and paced along the edge of the battle. Nox was distracted now. Even if he was crazy, nobody wanted a fight with Beaston.

Lynn had her back to the silver bear, so didn’t know Beaston stalked the fight. She latched onto Nox’s throat until the blond bear bellowed in pain, and then she did it. She went weak. She slid to the ground and exposed her neck and asked for a kill bite.

Beaston charged, and Nox backed off. Lynn…weak, broken Lynn, lay there in the dirt, chest heaving, eyes vacant—she’d left this world again. Jathan wanted to yank her up by the scruff of the neck and scream in her face, “Fucking try. Try! Do better than this.” He’d wasted his concern for three damn weeks though, and she was no better than when her crew sent her to Creed to try to save her.

“Fuck,” Creed muttered. His eyes were too light to be human, and his face was contorted with rage. He was an alpha who took in the troubled souls and tried to rehab them, but Lynn was too far gone. Creed spun on his heel and disappeared into the woods. Beaston and Nox went their separate ways, while Lynn lay limp, breath steadying out as her long, black tail twitched every three seconds. One, two, three, twitch. One, two, three, twitch.

With an irritated sigh, Jathan stood and made his way to her. When he glared down at the massive, solid black panther, she locked those dead eyes on him. He wanted badly to hate her, so why the fuck was he here? Why did he follow her around, watch every fight, and make a list of the shifters in Damon’s Mountains she had called out? Why did he take pictures of her brawling? Why did he so badly dread his own fight with her? She would call him to battle, and he’d never shied away from a fight. He reveled in them. Fighting made him feel steadier. But the thought of fighting Lynn? It made him want to retch for reasons he didn’t understand.

It was probably because her Red Havoc Crew kept calling him, and he felt some sense of responsibility for her. Yeah. That was all. Tonight, when she was all tucked up in her little Crazy Lynn treehouse behind the Grayland Mobile Park, he would ride his Harley into town, drink until the whiskey pushed these inconvenient thoughts about a broken girl out of his mind, and he would find a local chick to hook up with. He would come back all better in the morning. Back to his self. Back to the Bad Bear that everyone said he was.

But for now, like after every fight, he picked up her limp body and cradled the giant-ass panther to his chest. He ignored the growling because she never clawed at him, or bit him. She lashed out at everyone else, but not him. Not the person she should be clawing the most. Because a long, long time ago, before she got weak and pitiful, back when she lived just outside of these mountains, she was a tough girl. She’d had a quiet strength when they were kids. He’d watched her in school when she wasn’t looking. He’d wanted to figure her out, without getting too close to her, because she’d felt dangerous. But it was him who had been dangerous to her. He’d been to a hundred parties, but they were all a blur in his memory. All but one—the party he’d hurt Lynn at.

The beginning of her end had all started with Jathan.

Her life would probably end because of him, too.

War had never been hard for Jathan Barns to watch before.

Not until the war lived inside of someone he wanted to save.