CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“So, let me get this straight,” came Dana’s voice through the opaque shower curtain.

“Oh Lord.” Marcella, soaking in the bathtub at her temporary apartment over the offices of Shrew & Company, could imagine her perched on the counter with her eyes closed, rubbing the bridge of her nose. Perhaps the circumstances were a bit unorthodox—her debriefing Marcella while she was in a bathtub—but there was nothing orthodox about the way Shrews did things.

Marcella had proven that when she’d had the bright idea to drop Wes in the same way she’d dropped a certain Romanian Bear. Except, she hadn’t wanted to kill Wes. She’d only wanted to knock him out a little.

And she had. Wes was at the hospital on a ventilator with his ankles shackled to his bed. He wasn’t going anywhere when he got up because Kim hadn’t been bluffing. She’d had plenty of dirt on him thanks to her actually-not-stupid contact at CarrHealth, and Barry had hit send. Dana and Sara still needed to make arrangements to get the guy transferred to their custody because the worst of his crimes weren’t the ones known to the public.

The Shrews would ensure that every i was dotted and every t crossed, so if there were more groups like the Georgia Bears scattered and in need of guidance, they’d find them. If they had to squeeze Wes by the neck until his eyes bulged to get the information, they would. No one would be running to his rescue.

“You don’t remember getting home?” Dana asked.

“No.”

“What do you remember? I’m trying to figure out if you’re wily or just crazy.”

Marcella sighed and slipped lower in the water. She was having such a hard time getting warm. “I remember receding from Wes and directing myself back to the shed. I must have gotten there and pulled myself back together.”

“Scaring the hell out of Bobby in the process. You rose up out of the floor drain like the Lady of the Lake and promptly collapsed.”

Marcella sighed again. “Nude, because I didn’t want to risk getting my clothes wet.”

“Yep.”

“Poor Bobby. He’s probably scarred for life.”

“Oh, don’t worry about Bobby. Bobby’s so geeky that he’s probably having wet dreams about it—no pun intended.”

Dana nudged the side of the curtain back and gave Marcella a pointed look. “Why didn’t you tell us? You could have at least told Maria. We need to know these things so we can take care of each other better. We can’t watch your back if we don’t know your weaknesses.”

“I’m too used to working alone, I suppose. And besides, the entire point of a job interview is to demonstrate that you don’t have any weakness. If anything, my abilities aren’t anything to brag about. At times, they make me a liability.”

Dana gave her head a slow shake. “No. Unlike the rest of us, you have a natural ability that, while unfocused, puts you at a hell of an advantage over your opponents. Even if you never purposefully take your fluid shape again, you have a powerful psychic ability. And you know more about witchcraft than anyone at the company.”

“That almost sounds like a compliment.”

“It is one, and trust me—I don’t give them away lightly.” Dana let the curtain fall back into place. “If you want to do this, we’ll find someone to give you the training you need, even if we have to look under every rock on this planet to locate them.”

Marcella slumped even more deeply into the water and murmured, “Even if you have to consult with an Ursu.”

“Hey, I’d say Joseph owes me a pretty freakin’ big favor right now. I don’t take kindly to him distracting one of my girls while she’s working. The least he can do to repay me is to flex his network muscles and find me an expert.”

“If he doesn’t, I will.”

At the sound of the newcomer’s deep, flat voice, Marcella cringed and wished that if she slipped down a bit farther, that she could breathe in a nice glut of water and attempt to drown herself. She probably wouldn’t succeed, but she’d make a good distraction.

“Nice timing,” Dana said. “Did Sarah finish debriefing you?”

He grunted. “Everything’s on record. Every embarrassing detail. I’m sorry, Dana. If I’d known how sideways that job was going to go—”

“Oh, shush. Shit happens. We all have messy gigs, sometimes. We just don’t go around blabbing about them. I found out only this morning that the last time Fabian was in the field, he accidentally let a little kid see him materialize out of thin air. Had to hire a psychic to chase the boy down to make him forget what he saw.”

“The story was all over the newspapers,” Marcella murmured. “About Wes.”

Dana pulled the curtain back again. “That, what? Some deranged lunatic had a heart attack while he was waving a gun around at a sweet young woman and a stand-up comedian at a wildlife rehabilitation center?”

Put like that, the yarn didn’t sound so bad.

“So, you helped the local press sell a few newspapers,” Dana said, shrugging. “We’ll chalk the mess up to experience. We’ll revel in the fact that we came away with a heap more information than we had before, and that CarrHealth is tripping over itself to cooperate with us now.”

“We should have pegged Kim better,” Soren said.

“Why would you have?” Dana turned to him and dropped the curtain edge.

Marcella sat up so she could peek around it and see him. She’d been trying not to see him for the past twenty-four hours. She’d been trying not to pay attention to anything happening downstairs in the agency’s office. She’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop—for Dana to jog upstairs and tell her, “It’s not going to work out, I guess.”

But that hadn’t happened. The Shrews acted as if the way the case resolved was normal for them, and there was a stack of employment paperwork half an inch thick for Marcella to fill out and get back to Drea.

Marcella had a job, apparently.

A job and a damned good reason to stay put.

“We underestimated her,” Soren said. “We didn’t explore all potential motives.”

“You didn’t have time to. This wasn’t a case you’d been doing surveillance on for weeks or months. You guys hit the ground, found the local players fast, and got right to business. There was no way in hell you were going to be able to profile every auxiliary player in the mix. Think about it. If you’d run into Barry first and not Pamela, you may not have had the same issue because he has no local family, but you also might not have had quick success.”

Soren didn’t look convinced.

Marcella was in perfect unity with his misery. She hated feeling like she hadn’t given a hundred percent of her effort to a task.

Dana let out a breath and propped her fists onto her hips. “Take a few days off to mope and then get back to work. You’ll feel better after a couple of nights’ sleep. Y’all act like the shit is a bigger deal than it is. Trust me. I was a police detective. Most of the time, we were just happy to get our cases solved. Didn’t matter that things rarely went by the book.”

“I’ll try to take that to heart,” Marcella said.

“Good. Now if you’d excuse me, I have a can of room temperature ginger ale and a pack of stale crackers calling my name. I hope the next five months aren’t like this. I feel like hell.”

She took her leave.

There were several awkward seconds of Marcella staring at the door where Dana had been standing. She tried to ignore the looming figure standing nearby. She wanted to close the curtain again and slump into the water again, being alone with her discomfort. She cared less when she was in a liquid state. She didn’t have a heart to get trampled or a brain to fixate on everything she’d done wrong and couldn’t fix.

The apartment door slammed shut behind Dana.

Truly alone now.

Marcella fidgeted with the corner of the curtain, willing herself to do the tug, but her hand and arm betrayed her. They remained still, and her gaze flitted to Soren.

He ground his teeth and drummed his fingertips against the sides of his biceps.

She slid lower into the water and made bubbles with her sigh.

He grunted.

“Sighs and grunts. An interesting duet, we’ll make,” Marcella murmured.

“Perhaps I’m simply trying to discern if I should state the obvious. With you, one can never be sure.”

“Perhaps you’re right.”

“Come out of there so we can have a civilized conversation.”

“There’s nothing civilized about either of us.”

“Quite wrong. Civilization means that there’s order to things and that we abide by that order, for the most part. We’re capable of doing so. We know there’s structure to abide by even if we choose to subvert it. Even if we choose to go our own ways and frustrate the ever-loving hell out of the people we’re supposed to be letting help us.”

“I shouldn’t have to run my every action past you. In case you haven’t noticed, you’re not my father. Furthermore, my father knows better than to loom so threateningly over me.”

“I’m not looming.” Soren nudged the curtain back, reached between her feet, and found the drain plug. “Nor am I threatening. Perhaps you’re not used to men engaging you as an equal and trying to facilitate constructive conversations with you.”

“Is that what you see me as?”

He grabbed a towel from the rack and opened it, waiting.

“Do you?”

“My equal?” He scoffed. “No, you’re far too good for me.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. The statement seemed so outlandish that there probably was no satisfactory answer.

“Please.” He shook the towel a bit and tipped his chin toward her.

She reached for the handrail and heaved herself out of the welcoming embrace of the water.

They couldn’t have a conversation like that, and they did need to have one if only to let each other off the hook.

He wrapped the towel around her, pausing to thumb the end of one of her locs. “It’s wet. Wasn’t wet last time.” His jaw took on a grim set. He smoothed his big hands up and down her back, chafing the toweling against her. “I don’t imagine you’ll allow me to forbid you from doing what you did again.”

She let out a breath and darted around him, down the hall, and into the plain bedroom. The space had never been decorated. The upstairs apartment was merely a launch pad—a just-in-case dwelling for any company employee in need of a residence for a short time. Calling it Spartan would have been indulgent, but Marcella was used to the circumstances. She was used to having a lack of personalization in the spaces she inhabited because she wasn’t going to be there for long.

She was tired of having nothing of her own. Tired of having no place to make a gratifying mess and not worry about cleaning it up because no one else had a say in how she lived.

Soren looped an arm around her waist and pulled her toward the bed with him. Depositing her on his lap, he tucked his chin over her shoulder and laced his fingers together in front of her belly. “I don’t scare easily,” he said. “I’ve had the luxury of never encountering an opponent scary enough or unpredictable enough to make me doubt I’ll be the victor, but you scare me.”

She furrowed her brow. “Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“Why?”

“Because you make me feel like too many things are beyond my control, and if I can’t control things, I can’t manage outcomes. If anything were to happen to you—”

“Things are going to happen to me,” she interjected and traced the tattoo on his wrist. “That’s the nature of my job. Hell, that’s the nature of who I am in general. Sometimes, I’ll find myself in trouble, and I’ll do what’s necessary to get myself out of it. I’ve been working solo since I was nineteen.”

“Don’t you get tired of being a lone wolf?”

She traced some more, considering her words. Considering the truth. A week prior, she might have quickly said no and pushed Soren away, already done with the tedious conversation, because how dare he try to run her life? How dare he opine over how she should comport herself?

But there was something lovely about having someone care so much for her that he’d risk her annoyance to tell her how stupid she was being. She didn’t have to risk her life to prove that she was capable. She’d done that because she hadn’t wanted to share her victory with anyone.

Sharing was harder than solitude. The Shrews probably knew that. They had to know what it felt like to have to let someone pull back a corner of their independence just enough to let daylight in.

Soren had taught Marcella a hell of a lesson, whether he’d intended to or not.

“Yes,” she whispered.

That was all.

She didn’t know what else to say because she’d never had to say those placating things. She’d never had to live in anyone else’s feelings, and rarely did anyone show real concern for hers.

“Thank you for doing what you did,” he murmured. “I’m not pleased with my parents for getting you involved in the mess, but you’ve made Peter and Tamara and me safer here. You’ve made the Bears in Romania safer, too.”

“If you’d asked me, I would have done the hit. I told you before that I would help you.”

“Even if I’d wanted to indulge my parents, I didn’t want you to have the act on your conscience. He wasn’t your problem.”

“But that’s the thing.” She turned on his lap so she could see his eyes. “I don’t feel remorse about what I did. When you’re a creature like me, and you pour yourself into someone, you learn a lot about what kind of person they are. I assure you, nothing was redeeming about him, which is sad. I pity his daughters, but perhaps they’re better off without him. If I’d thought there was anything at all worth saving him for, I could have pulled back. I suppose I’m fortunate that my gifts work together the way they do.”

His nod came slowly as if he’d had to chew on the words. Admittedly, it was a lot to process.

She smoothed down the patch of hair under his lip and put her head on his shoulder. “Next time, I’ll… I’ll tell you. So you understand.”

“I think we’d get along much better if we understood each other and what we can do. You should have told me.”

“I don’t tell people things. I’ve guarded my secrets for this long, and don’t know how to give them up anymore.”

“You don’t have to tell them all to me. Tell your sister. Tell someone, so I don’t have to feel like my heart will explode from the unpredictability of you. I want there to be at least one person who can assess risks. At least one person who’ll know if what you’re doing might harm you.”

“I’ll tell you,” she whispered in a rush because she had to get the words out before she clammed up and threw her protective walls back up again.

There were people nearby who she could trust and who wanted to trust her.

People nearby who wanted to love her. Sister. Friends.

Soren.

“I’ve never had a boyfriend before,” she murmured. “I’ve never felt any shame about that. That’s the way things are. I don’t form attachments because being free has always been easiest. You don’t have to break things off if you don’t make any connections in the first place.”

“I know what that’s like.” He gave her a squeeze and danced his fingertips across the bottom edge of the towel, tickling her thigh. “If calling me your boyfriend makes you uncomfortable, I won’t press you. You can call me whatever you like or nothing at all. We won’t discuss it. But I’m not going anywhere. I don’t run from fights.”

“Is that what I am? A fight?”

“For now, you are. We’re currently engaging in a struggle where I have to pin you down and convince you that I love you and that we’re more powerful together than apart. We make sense together, even if we’re a mess.”

She let out a strained laugh. “We’re definitely a mess.”

He laughed, too. “And we’re not going to stop being a mess. Being messy is in our constitution, but we’ll be a functional mess, at least.”

“That may be the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

She’d meant the words as a joke, but the sting of her own truth had her lungs seizing and eyes burning with unshed tears.

“No, no, no,” he cooed, pressing his lips against her cheek and squeezing her tightly as he rocked her gently side to side. “Don’t fall apart on me now. I wanted to take you to dinner. Anywhere you want. I can’t show you off if you’re in a bucket.”

“I’m not going to fall apart.” She sniffled and wiped her face on a corner of the towel. “At least, not in that way. I’ll be limiting how much I take my water form until we can figure out how much I harm myself by doing it. Perhaps that’ll make my job harder for now, but—”

“But you have a partner, and there’s no need for you to stand out on a limb when we can cooperate. I won’t keep score about who does what. Just let me be there.”

“I can promise that.”

“Good.” He kissed her cheek and set her on her feet, looking shyly up at her.

He was utterly adorable, and he was hers.

Her very own Bear.

And she didn’t trust that cunning expression of his one bit. “What?” she asked.

He grinned. “Can I beg you for one small favor? Please?”

“What?”

“Sibling rivalry isn’t something you’re all that familiar with, but could you just…” He wrested his phone out of his jeans pocket and held it up to her. “Could you just…take a picture with me? Peter and I are having a Facebook war.”

Sighing, she took the phone.

“Cuddle closer and stare adoringly at me if you can do it without laughing.” He held the phone at arm’s length and focused the camera on them, wearing his smuggest possible expression.

She guffawed.

“Hey. Don’t tease me. I’m going for a certain look here. The Bears eat that shit up online. Within thirty minutes, someone will try to top it, and I know Peter. It’ll be him. Same pose, but maybe they’ll be leaning against a Lamborghini. Best to start simple. We might have to borrow someone’s private jet by the end of the week to put an end to the thread.”

“Soren.”

He shrugged and focused the camera again. “You’re so pretty. Pout for me, baby.”

“Oh Lord.” She wrapped her arm around his back and put the side of her face against his chest as she made her best effort at looking head over heels and love-struck.

She actually didn’t have to pretend.

“I guess this is the least I can do. You basically volunteered to carry me around in a bucket when I fall apart,” Marcella said. “If that kind of commitment isn’t love, I don’t know what is.”