Denali

I still dream of him at night.

The deep rasp of his voice. The sense of quiet command, even as a prisoner. The giant bulge of his muscles when he moved. When he shook and sweat above me, his thick manhood filling me, satisfying me.

Sometimes I swear I feel the gentleness of his touch just before I wake. But then I always hear the nightmare voice. The rough snarl of a lion in pain.

Denali, I’m coming for you.

I bolt upright in bed, gasping. Just a dream. A dream, a dream, a dream, a dream. Another dream.

Not real.

It doesn’t take a psychotherapist to know what the dream means.

I shove back the memories of the lion who marked me, ignoring the familiar twist in the pit of my stomach.

Nash.

Did he ever make it out? Or did he die in there and it’s his ghost who visits me in the night?

Will the guilt over not going back to try to save him ever run dry? Doubtful.

I throw off the covers and pad silently to the kitchen, careful not to make any noise to wake Nolan.

I make coffee and wave through the window at my portly neighbor and landlady, Mrs. Davenfield, who is out early weeding her garden. She’s the reason I ended up settling here.

After I escaped, I stayed off the radar. Took only under the table cash jobs—gardening and migrant farm work. I ended up in Temecula—wine country—working the vineyards during harvest season.

Mrs. Davenfield was willing to take cash and skip the credit check to let me rent the little cottage on her property. She took one look at my swollen belly and decided I must be escaping domestic abuse. I never corrected her, because hell, she seems to love the drama and feeling like she’s my secret-keeper. And I needed her help.

And in a way, I was escaping domestic abuse. Just not the way she imagined it. Not some baby-daddy I had to get away from.

No. Nolan’s father is the only part of my horrifying ordeal worth remembering. I guess that’s why he’s the one who haunts me most.

Because I got away.

And I left him there to rot.

Nash

Cold light. Grey light. The howls rise in my ears.

The concrete walls never change, but at night, they close in. My lion can see in the dark but that doesn’t mean night doesn’t affect me. I always know when it falls.

And those howls.

I don’t know whether they’re real or imagined. I’ve killed so many. Their screams are my penance. Awake or dreaming, it’s all the same. My life is the nightmare that never ends.

Someone, somewhere is singing.

“When Irish eyes are smiling...”

Barred sunlight trickles over my face. I’m in bed, not a cot. The walls are no longer concrete but dingy white. And paper thin. I hear voices murmuring in the living room, along with the Irish caterwauling. The sound washes over me, and my knotted muscles relax.

My vision, tinged red, clears as my lion retreats. I’m in a bedroom, not a cell with guards outside the door waiting to burst in. But my animal is ready to fight. He always is. Years of abuse have permanently broken him.

Sweat soaks the sheets under me. Another bad night, filled with dreams of being locked in a cell. Or flashbacks. But sometimes, the dreams feel more real.

I pull myself out of bed and make it with military precision, like I have every damn day since week one of bootcamp. “You can take the man out of the army, but not the army out of the man,” my drill instructor told us. He was right. But sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to take the killer out of my lion.

As soon as I open my bedroom door, the singing stops.

“Nash?” A head pops into the hall.

“What are you doing here?” I glare at the shifter, a young face with a shock of prematurely grey hair.

Parker shrugs and steps back so I can enter the living room. “Got kicked out of my last place. They saw my animal running around and told me no pets. And you have an extra room.”

I have nothing to say to this, so I turn to the other two interlopers lounging on the battered couch. Two men, one with black hair and a bottle of rotgut in his hands, the other taller than all of us and too thin. The tall one wears thick glasses and blinks constantly. The black haired one grins.

“I told you not to come here,” I growl to the room at large.

“You’ve got the biggest place.” Parker hides a smile. For a moment I consider wiping it off his face, then wiping the floor with him. But no. He’s my manager. If I fuck him up, who will schedule my fights? Bleeding an opponent on a regular basis is the only thing keeping my animal alive.

“Hey.” I point to the black-haired man, who’s opening a bottle with an illegible handwritten label. “What the fuck is that stuff? Stinks like paint remover.”

“This? Just a wee bit o’ hair of the dog. Had a good night last night drinkin’ and such. This will perk me up right quick.” The Irish accent penetrates, and my brain throws up a name. Declan. Shifter—animal unknown. He smells a bit like a wolf, a bit like… something else. A shifter mix, a product of the experiments in the underground labs of Data-X. The Irishman is one of the few that survived. I’d call him lucky, but he’s not. The lucky ones died or escaped early. The rest of us still suffer, even though we got away. Even though we burned the place to the ground.

“Ya want some?” Declan offers the bottle. My lion surges to the fore. I beat him back down. As tempting as it is to get drunk before noon, I didn’t break out of the prison lab to waste my days.

“No. Drink it outside. Or better yet, use it to kill the grass in the driveway.”

“Right ya are, sir.” The black-haired man throws off a mock salute. “You’re the alpha.”

“I’m not your alpha,” I call as I head to the kitchen. Breakfast. Food. Normalcy. Go through the motions, even if normal is a foreign country I’ll never visit again.

“You’re the king of the beasts, aren’t ya now? If you’re in a pack, you’ll be at the lead.”

“We’re not a pack.” I open the fridge and grab the first thing that looks good—a container of milk. I tip it up and drink straight out of the carton, ignoring Parker leaning in the door.

“Ready for the big fight?”

I grunt.

“Another grizzly shifter. This one from Saskatchewan or some Godforsaken place. I swear all they do in the lumber yards is fight.”

“Good.” Less chance my lion will kill them.

“Betting’s pretty evenly split,” Parker muses. “The bruins are the only ones who can take you.”

A plastic container filled with some sort of homemade biscuits sits on my counter. I tap it. “What’s this?”

“Scones. Laurie made them.” As soon as he says it I smell the feathery scent of the owl shifter along with the sharp sugary tang of the baked good. I open the container and take two.

My pocket vibrates and pull out my phone. A text from an unknown number.

Layne and I are driving over. We have intel for you.

I type back, I’ll be at The Pit. And because I can’t stop myself. What intel?

Kylie got a hit on a woman living in Temecula. Going to confirm now, but we think it’s Denali.

Denali.

Red. Black. The cell door opens, I stand at ready. The guards come in, weapons trained on me. I expect them.

I don’t expect her. The scent of cinnamon fills the air. Cinnamon… and arousal.

“Nash? Nash?”

The memory goes dark, and ebbs away, leaving Parker’s worried face. Behind him, Declan and Laurie stand at the door, staring at me.

The world tints red for a second. My lion trying to take hold. These flashbacks are unmanageable. I’m barely sane on a good day. What will happen if it is Denali?

“I gotta go.” Two steps to the door, and I reverse, grabbing another scone and holding it up for the tall man to see. “Thanks. These are good.”

The owl shifter blinks at me from behind his Coke-bottle glasses.

I leave out the back door.