The next morning found my latest patient awake, but in a lot of pain still. I made it worse when I checked the wounds, cleaned them, and then changed her bandages. There wasn’t anything else I could for her left arm, the fracture was along the bone so I’d reset it and now it was in a cast. I asked her if she wanted to go to a real hospital or for me to take her to the police, but I got a glance from her that shut me up quickly. No to a real hospital then.

“Just so long as you know you aren’t a prisoner here, Sasha. You can leave any time you want to.” I thought about that and added more. “Not that I’m trying to get rid of you, I’m just saying, you can go any time you want to.”

I think she was still in too much pain to care about what I thought but she didn’t complain. She spent several days asleep, and when she’d wake up, I’d buzz Sabina to help her in the bathroom. Sabina was a huge help, and I know it made Sasha a lot more comfortable with me. I’d noticed she was at ease with me, but there are some things a girl just wants to do on her own. I might be a man, but I’m not stupid.

I didn’t push her to give me details, but I gave her a pen and paper when she asked for them. It was hard for her to write with her right hand, she was left handed I noticed, but she did what she could and wrote down whatever it was she wanted to write down. She’d put it all away in the side table, but I didn’t bother it. She’d tell me when she was ready to tell her story. Until then, I let her heal, fed her, and tried to keep her pain free.

I was in bed three days after her arrival, my thoughts on her face now that some of the swelling had started to go down. Her skin was that kind of porcelain women envied, and men adored. It was currently yellow, purple, red, and green in a variety of places, but you could see how pale and smooth it was beneath the bruises. A whimper from her room caught my attention. She had nightmares sometimes and I figured that’s all it was. Until she screamed.

“Jim, no!” It was a scream of anger, a scream of pain and terror, and I shot from the bed in only my boxer shorts to run into the room. Had someone got in? I flicked on the light, my gaze flicked over every inch of the room but all I saw was Sasha, her head buried under a pillow.

I turned the light off and went to sit on the edge of the bed next to her. “Are you alright, Sasha?”

I could hear her as she sobbed into the pillow and saw the way her shoulders shook. Her ribs had healed, but they were still too painful for her to move too much. The pillow was over her face, and I took it away to hand her a towel I’d retrieved from a hook on the wall. “Here, come on. It’s alright Sasha.”

“It may never be alright again.” She moaned into the pillow but I was able to make it out.

“It will be hard, I’m not going to lie to you, Sasha, you’ve been through hell, but you know, sometimes surviving is like that. Some days you think it would be better if you’d died rather than live through your trauma, but, well, then you start to have days that are better, until those days start to outweigh the bad ones. Then, one day, you don’t want to think about it anymore, so you don’t.”

I paused and wondered if I’d put her to sleep with my speech. I looked over when she lowered the pillow.

“How come it sounds like you know all of that from experience?” She looked at me with squinted eyes, as if she wanted to see into my brain.

“Because that’s exactly where I know all of that from. It’s not been an easy life for me, that’s part of the reason I live up on here on my own. I like my own company, too, so that helps when you decide to be a hermit.” I gave her a soft smile that made my beard twist around on my face and she smiled back.

One tooth was chipped on the upper right side, but it only gave her smile more charm. If it had been a perfect smile, Sasha might have been too perfect. That little flaw made her seem real. I knew it was probably a result of her ordeal, but still, it brought her down to earth for me.

“Do you want something? A cup of tea or something to eat? A heating pad?” The nights were cold now, and the heat would not only keep her warm, but might ease some of her ache.

“The heating pad sounds nice.” She gave me a watery smile and I decided a cup of tea would take that wobble away. I went into the kitchen, put on a kettle of water, and left it to boil. I took the heating pad into her room, plugged it in, and handed it to her. She wrapped it over her belly, and sighed when the heat started to kick in. “That is so nice.”

She sighed, and I went to make her a cup of tea. I took a swig of bourbon from a bottle I had in the back of a cabinet, for medicinal purposes only, and then took her the tea. “Drink this, it will warm you up too.”

“Thanks, Fell. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you for all of your kindness, but I hope I will be able to one day.”

“Don’t worry about it, sweetie. Get some rest.” I took one final look at her, and walked out of the room.

The bear in me wanted to crawl into that tiny bed with her and keep her safe and warm, but I knew that’s wasn’t what she needed. Not just because I was a stranger, but because of her injuries. She still needed to heal.

The mating bond would draw her to me, the longer we were together, but for now, she was in too much pain to notice most of it. Unfortunately for me, the only pain I had was in my groin area, and there was nothing I could do about that, not with her in the house, and not with her at all. It just wasn’t the time for things like that.

Sasha needed time to heal, mentally and physically, before I exposed her to anything that had to with my world. A woman that had just been traumatized didn’t need the further trauma of finding out shifters existed and that she was settled into a nest of them. Outsiders didn’t always take the news well, and even when we cared for an injured person, we tried to keep the reality of our world from them. Unless they were our mate, then we told them. Eventually. When we were a little more certain they wouldn’t just run away in terror.

I tried to sleep, but couldn’t get her and those full peach colored lips of hers out of my head. I listened for the sound of her light snores, and then left the house as quietly as possible. I kicked off my boxer shorts, held my arms out to my side, lifted my face to the moon, and shifted. I needed to run.

I needed to snuffle under logs, scratch at trees, and mainly, I just needed to not think. I let full bear-mode take over my brain and ran through the forest. It was cold on my paws, but the thick skin there, and the brown fur of the Grizzly bear that covered my body, kept me mostly warm. There were no grizzlies in Georgia, but I was descended from a foreign clan, one with Grizzly genes, so a Grizzly I was, when I shifted. I let all of the angst out with every harsh breath, the old sadness, the old fear, and the new anger as I loped over fallen trees and scrabbled up loose rocks to climb the mountain behind my cabin.

This was all I needed, all I wanted right now, this climb, this use of energy and strength to accomplish something. I got to the bare ridge at the top, lifeless, treeless, just a bald expanse of windswept rock, and let out a roar. The roar took away the frustration and the rage that had filled me since the first moment I’d seen Sasha’s battered form.

Running was good, my bear brain thought, running was so good. I ran back down the mountain and found a tree I’d seen earlier. There was an old honey comb in the fallen tree and I dug at it with sharp claws to get the sweet nectar from the wood that held it. I licked it from my claws and my paws before I carried on down the hill. I raced back, the need to completely exhaust myself hadn’t escaped me and I’d added to my energy reserve with that little dose of honey.

I raced around trees, I skidded for yards as my left paw caught a rock on the wet ground and I couldn’t stop the slide. I came to slow halt as I reached the bottom and stared at the cabin. All of the lights were off still, so she was either asleep or hadn’t moved. I sat on my wide bottom and just watched the darkness around me.

I knew the person that had done that to Sasha would likely never find Bear Club, not even if they were in need. That’s just the way our world worked. If you were a human and you hurt someone inside our world, you weren’t as likely to find it. You could only find it if you needed it anyway, so a human that had injured someone inside our world would have to be at death’s door to find us. Still, there were guards anyway, just in case.

We didn’t know who had hurt her, after all.

Other shifters would be able to get in, we’d stand out to them easily. It was only the humans that we hid from, after all. I didn’t want to, but I knew I needed to shift and get to sleep. Sasha would need me early, I’d have to change her medicines and check her bandages again. With a sigh of acceptance, I shifted back into my human form and left my bear behind me in the forest.

Soon enough, I might be able to change my mate into a shifter hybrid, but for now, I had a wounded and terrified human on my hands. I heard her in her bedroom, her soft snores broke the silence. I smiled, added wood to the wood stove that gave us heat, and slid into my own bed. Soon, I’d try to find out what had happened to her. I had plans to make, after all.