Two mornings later, as the sun rose over the mountains, Danil sweated like an ice water glass on a summer’s day. He gritted his teeth and picked up his pace. It was the last hill before home and he was going to sprint up it if it fucking killed him. Which it might. He’d run over forty miles in the last three days and still his body raced toward a finish line he couldn’t reach.

Why hadn’t he fucked her? It was a question he’d asked himself a hundred times in the last days. Yeah, yeah. The vulnerable look in her eyes. Of course. But currently, Danil was at war with the side of himself that hadn’t just taken what he’d so badly wanted. Maybe he wouldn’t have tossed and turned in his bed for the last two nights if he’d just done what his body had screamed for.

He knew it wasn’t just his honorable side that had kept him from having sex with her. It was something more than that. Since he’d broken down and talked to her outside of the coffee shop, he’d broken down all the way and done an incredible amount of research on her. She’d been right when she’d said he’d had a Google party. He’d spent a lot longer than he’d care to admit on Google images. She’d always been beautiful. Breathtakingly so. But that wasn’t what had really gotten him. It was her writing.

There were tons of it that could be found online and in a matter of basically an entire day in front of the computer screen, he thought he’d read everything she’d ever written. Every article was so filled with passion and inexhaustible amounts of research. She wrote with heart, humor, and damn near the steadiest hand he’d ever seen. Her viewpoints did not waver. They were carved out of facts. Frustratingly so. In her investigative pieces, her op-eds, even a few personal essays he’d been able to track down, she brought the reader on a journey, with her as his only companion. She was a truly exceptional talent.

She would have made a hell of a lawyer.

But she was a writer. Only to have up and quit four years ago. Just like that. Disappeared from the writing world. From the internet. From the face of the earth for all he could tell. And she’d turned those apples in her hands in the supermarket. And handed him coffee. And when she’d told him that he was the only person she really knew in Spokane, he’d gotten the feeling that she really meant the world.

So, he could have fucked her in that car, like her body was begging for him to do. But she deserved more than that. More than a few angry, stolen moments in a cramped backseat with his brother’s crumbs littered around.

He could have.

But he hadn’t. So here he was, ripping his carcass up a hill like a mountain goat. He had a few rare hours before he had to be in for work.

“Why in god’s good name do you do this?”

Danil bit back a growl of frustration when he heard Emin’s voice coming from beside him. His brother rolled down the passenger window of his car and coasted alongside Danil, following him up the hill.

Danil didn’t answer. Partly because there simply wasn’t enough air in the world right now. But also because his brother could go fuck himself.

“You run as a man when you could be running as bear. I do not understand you, Danishka.”

Still, Danil ignored him. His annoyed rage was enough to give him a final spurt of energy and he gunned it up the rest of the hill. Danil skidded to a stop and almost keeled over. He planted his hands on his knees and watched his brother park his car in the driveway of Danil’s house.

Great, apparently he had a breakfast date. Emin, a genius with a paintbrush, was notorious for burning water. The man couldn’t butter toast. So he bounced from his mother’s house to his brothers’ houses for whatever meal of the day he was hungry for.

Danil leaned down to stretch out his back and legs. He ignored Emin even as he saw his scuffed boots walk up next to him.

“I ask again. Why would you run as man when you could bound and gallop as bear?” Emin asked.

Danil understood the question. Running was awkward and slow as a human when you compared it to how it felt to run as a bear. But they served different purposes.

“Unless you want to sweat as human. Because you need your human heart to race,” Emin posed philosophically. “Because your human body is not getting its poor little needs met, huh?”

Danil knew where he was going with this and completely ignored his brother, straightening up and walking up his driveway. Emin followed behind, showing no insult at being ignored.

“I am thinking that if you are choosing to race and sweat as a human then it is because you wish you were racing and sweating in a different way. I am thinking it means that the sexy journalist is not letting you race and sweat on top of her.”

Now, Danil had heard enough from his loudmouth brother. He opened his front door and slid in, attempting to slam the door on Emin. But Emin was fast, always had been, and was standing in Danil’s living room before the door even closed.

“Ah. I see I’ve hit nail on skull.”

“On the head, Emin. You’ve hit the nail on the head,” Danil corrected, unable to ignore it.

Emin followed his brother up the stairs of his house, completely at home. Even though Danil was the youngest, he had been the first of the brothers to own his own home and all of them were proud of him. Even though Emil owned his own little cabin up the mountain now, he still liked to spend time at Danil’s.

The neat little two-storey with its matching furniture and photos on the walls was perfectly Danil. Even all the plates matched, Emin thought as he pulled out two and started setting the table. He did the one other thing that he was equipped to do in a kitchen and put the coffee on.

A few minutes later Danil stomped into the kitchen, his hair damp from the shower and his undershirt tucked into his suit pants. He sniffed the air appreciatively as the first drips of coffee wafted through the kitchen.

“You need art in here,” Emin said as he surveyed the kitchen.

Danil dug in the fridge for eggs and bacon, an American breakfast the brothers had all taken to quite fast when they’d first moved from Belarus. “I’ve been telling you this for years. But all your paintings go to Maciaryszki. Or straight to your clients.”

“I’ve got one that I’ll bring over here. None of my clients like it very much. It’s very… tame.”

Danil raised a sardonic eyebrow at his brother’s tone as he cracked eggs into a hot pan. He wasn’t going to dignify that with a response.

“Don’t give me that look,” Emin said, biting back his smile. “You’ll like it very much. The side of you that jogs as a man instead of as bear. Your domesticated side.” He smiled even more when Danil bristled at his choice of words, flipping the eggs. “The painting is of our mountain, behind Papa’s house. All in blues. It’s just your style. Everything is in its right place.”

Danil’s eyebrow raised even further as he flipped the bacon in a second pan. Emin crossed the kitchen, poured them both a cup of coffee before the machine was done and got a small satisfaction out of watching the drips burn as they fell onto the hot tray. He ignored Danil’s annoyed noise and put the coffee pot back into its place, slid Danil’s coffee cup across the counter.

“You might as well just get to your point, Emin,” Danil said, taking an irritated swig of coffee and cursing when it burned his tongue. He could tell that his brother was circling around something here and he just did not have the patience to wait while he landed the plane.

“My point is that I think you sweat up a hill at 5 am because your woman is not in the right place. Not in her life or in yours.”

“Excuse me?” Danil tossed three eggs on a plate for his brother and then for himself. He mounded another plate with the still-sizzling bacon and tossed it all on his kitchen table. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

The men sat and Emin watched Danil with a discerning eye. “It means that she is somewhere sleeping across town in a shitty hotel rather than upstairs in your bed.”

Danil tried to say nothing but his brother was annoying the shit out of him this morning. “It’s not like that, Emin. I’m not trying to bed her.”

Emin nodded, saw something flash on Danil’s face that he’d never seen before. Interesting, he thought. Very interesting.

“Fine, well, that’s your own delusion. But as for her place in her own life, well, she’s not right there either.”

Danil took a huge bite of breakfast, as if to show that he had very little interest in this conversation, but Emin knew better.

“I caught her scent in the woods last night. Back behind Mama and Papa’s house,” Emin said.

Danil stopped chewing. He leaned back in the chair and eyed his brother more like a wolf than a bear. “Was the scent fresh?”

Emin nodded. “She’d been there not twenty minutes before Anton and I came back down the mountain.”

“God damn it,” Danil cursed, tracing a hand through his wet hair. “In the fucking wilderness in the dead of the night again.” He stood. “Finish your breakfast. We’ve got someplace to go before I have to go to work today.”

Half an hour later, the two brothers pulled up to the spot where Danil had tasted heaven a few mornings ago. He parked his car in the same place as before and got out, walked over to where Dora’s car had been parked. Sniffing the air, he growled in frustration and started stripping out of his clothes.

As bear shifters, they all had very attuned senses of smell when in their human forms. But her scent had waned so much over the last few days that he’d need to be in his bear form to be able to track her path now.

Emin followed suit, stripping down and shifting before they ambled into the woods side by side. In their bear forms, the two brothers picked up her scent easily. Their thoughts invaded one another’s in a way they’d become extremely accustomed to over their lives together.

“She came here in the night?” Emin asked Danil.

“Yes, a few nights ago. She was arrested for trespassing.”

“She is a writer, you know. An investigator.”

“Yes, of course I know that. How did you know that?” Danil snapped at his brother. He didn’t like how much of an interest his brother was taking in Dora. In fact, it irritated the crap out of him.

“I googled her,” Emin replied matter-of-factly as he sniffed an old mossy pine, picking up her scent again.

Danil stopped in his tracks and turned to stare at his brother in his sleek dark form. He pictured Emin’s rustic cabin up the mountain, covered in half-painted canvasses, electric lights he never bothered to turn on in lieu of candles. “Excuse me?”

“What?” Emin looked up, his dark furry face cocked to one side in mild insult. “I’m not a caveman. I google.”

Danil shrugged his massive shoulders and kept on his way through the woods. It was a few miles further before they came upon a ten-foot, chain-link fence. He could smell where her hands had touched each link. Rearing up on his back feet, he found a little patch of denim that must have ripped off her jeans. It smelled good. Like her skin.

Neither of the brothers was willing to shift back to human form to scale the fence, so they traveled on the outside, tracking her path along it. It was only a few minutes before they came upon the outbuilding. Her scent gathered here, as if she’d spent a while there.

Something skittered up Danil’s spine and his brother’s low curse confirmed he felt it too.

“Do you smell that?” Danil asked.

“Fear,” Emin confirmed. The place reeked of the sticky, metallic scent of fear. It had staled, by maybe a year, but it was there. Forever clinging to the building. To the entire area.

“Danil,” Emin called to his brother and the men came upon a tear in the fence. Danil used his mighty paws to hold back the chain link for his brother and Emin did the same on the other side.

They padded through and once around the building. A sick feeling washed over Danil. The scent intensified. There was animal fear and human fear clinging to the building. And pain. So much pain. They reared up on their back feet to look in the window and Danil caught Dora’s scent. He realized she must have looked in the same way.

Emin was cursing again when they saw what lay inside the building. A testing site. There was fur and surgical instruments and chemicals in syringes. Danil’s shoulders bunched with rage. He knew the smells of those chemicals. It was the same way that Anton had smelled when…

He bit off the thought, hating to be reminded of that time in their lives, but the look in Emin’s eyes confirmed that he’d made the connection too. This was bad. This was a dangerous place.

A white hot streak of rage lanced through Danil. What the hell had she been doing here? Alone? What had she been thinking? Did the woman have a death wish? How could she have been this reckless? Endangered herself this way?

“Where is she staying?” Danil bit the question out as if it were made of knives. He hated that he had to ask his brother that question. Hated that his brother knew the answer before he did.

“I tracked her back toward the other side of town the other night. That little motel off the highway with the broken sign.”

Now the rage was actually blurring Danil’s vision. He confirmed that the woman really did have a death wish. She’d die of tetanus in a place like that.

Danil turned. He was bounding back toward the fence when the wind shifted. Both brothers froze. They scented the breeze. There was another animal in the woods with them. It wasn’t far but it was getting farther. Fast.

“Have you ever smelled anything like that?” Emin asked, the fur on his spine rising up.

“Not outside of a zoo,” Danil answered, his head cocked curiously. There was only one animal that smelled like that and there was no way that it was living in the woods of Spokane.

He shook his head, not his problem right now. He only had one problem. And she was sleeping in a crappy motel across town. The two of them slid through the fence and started in opposite directions. They paused, looked back at one another.

“I’m going to her,” Danil growled.

Emin nodded, wisely hiding the smug look on his face. “Fine. I’ll find my own way back.”

Danil took a step away and then looked back at his brother. “You’re following that scent?” The mysterious scent was still wafting on the air.

Emin nodded. “I have to find out what it is.”

“Be careful,” Danil said. “They scratch.”

The two brothers grinned at one another for a moment before bounding away in opposite directions. Both racing toward something they couldn’t help but chase.