KIKO (MC Bear Mates Book 3) by Becca Fanning (1)

Chapter One

Mischa Abromavitch wrinkled her nose at the sight before her. 

These American women and their shops. It was obscene the way they darted about, rushing into them as though they were addicted to handing their hard-earned money over for items they didn’t particularly need. She’d never seen anything like it. The way some of them were handling the clothes, it was like they were starved! 

Of course, in the larger cities in Ukraine, with some of the wealthier people as patrons, there were shopping centers such as these. But where she lived, there had been nothing like this. And the truth was, she wasn’t too sad about that fact. These malls were exactly what Marx had foreseen. Not shopping centers per se, but monuments to capitalism. Places that persuaded people to part with money they didn’t have for things they didn’t need. The vicious cycle was something she’d only read about, but now—seeing it in the flesh—she was truly astonished. 

Having grown up poor, Mischa should have been enamored by the sight of such affluence, but she wasn’t. She saw it for what it was—a credit card company’s Utopia. 

Sasha, her friend and fellow newbie to a shopaholic’s paradise, clapped her hands together in wonder. “I can’t believe this is a place to shop. It’s so big—and luxurious! Isn’t it beautiful, Mischa?”

Wanting to gawk at her and ask when the other woman had become a slut to consumerism, Mischa settled for grumbling, “That isn’t what I’d call it.” Granted, it was fancy. But it had to be, didn’t it? No one would shop here if it was a dump. 

“Don’t be a spoilsport,” the other woman teased, nudging her with her elbow. 

“I’m not. It’s just... this isn’t my idea of fun.”

“No, I suppose not, considering you came from Azovske.” She wiggled her hips like an excited puppy and winked at her. “But still, just because you’re not used to it doesn’t mean you can’t get used to it, eh? I certainly won’t mind having places like these on my doorstep.”

They’d just been saved from indentured servitude—which would have probably had them all on their backs earning their ‘living’ with their legs spread—and Sasha wasn’t so opposed to that she could think about buying some clothes?

Biting her tongue to stop herself from snarling at the stupid woman beside her, someone she did consider a friend, Mischa followed with a deep, calming breath. Instead of sniping at her, she questioned softly, “Get used to it on what doorstep, Sasha? We’re illegal immigrants, for God’s sake. It isn’t like we can get decent jobs and dream of making a better life for ourselves. And you know what it’s like over here. Even the people who are legal, who had good professions in the Ukraine, they’re mopping floors and cleaning up other people’s homes. So, what are you going to buy here? What use is it to us to have these places on our doorstep?”

“You’re so negative!” In her umbrage, she shook her head, but Sasha’s hair swished about her shoulders, sending a little breeze Mischa’s way because Sasha’s locks were thick, heavy, and long—down to her butt long. It made Mischa wonder if that was all Sasha had between her ears. 

Air. 

Because she was being a realist, not a dreamer, and if that made her negative, well, then that was her label of choice.

The truth hurt. And this truth, though it stung and stunk, was their lot now. 

“I have my feet on the ground,” she countered, glowering at her coat sleeve which had a few wayward strands of Sasha’s dark hair draped it over it. Granted, it was her friend’s crowning glory, but she shed it worse than a dog. “That isn’t a bad place to have them. Unless Prince Charming is around the corner, we have about as much chance of being able to shop here on a regular basis as...” She spluttered, unable to come up with a comparison, because there was no comparison. 

This would never be a place where they could comfortably part ways with their wages. To believe anything else was just setting them up for a fall. 

She knew the Motorcycle Club, The Nomads, who were acting as their escorts had good hearts, and this trip was supposed to be a kindness, but to Mischa, it showed her everything she’d never have. 

It didn’t matter that she didn’t want to be a shopaholic. She would never be able to be one, nor a thousand other things. For herself, that wasn’t an issue. She’d weathered tougher times than the inability to buy crap she didn’t need, but it gave idiots like Sasha ideas. 

Ideas were always dangerous in the wrong hands. 

With a glum sigh that had Sasha rolling her eyes and wandering off to talk to one of the others in their group—one who was more interesting, less gloomy, and very excited about the whole shopping trip—Mischa was left alone. 

Truth was, she preferred it that way. Only, in a group of fourteen, alone wasn’t that easy a task to accomplish. Annette, another new friend of hers and the girlfriend of the leader of the MC who had saved her from a cartel’s clutches, swooped down on her and laughed when she happened to catch sight of her. As far as Mischa had been able to sense, Annette was a sensible woman, a learned one with a good job at an important newspaper, and yet, she too was befuddled by the need to shop. 

Hadn’t she declared, “Let’s shop ‘til we drop, ladies!” when the car that had taken them from the clubhouse had arrived at this mall?

Mischa would have liked to ask her what the thrill was exactly, but Annette didn’t know she spoke English, and Dickie, the man who could speak Ukrainian, was busy helping one of the other women. So, talking was out if she wanted to keep her knowledge of English a secret. 

Instead of discussing the madness that had seized hold of all the women within these grand walls, Mischa looked about and took stock of her surroundings once more. Each step revealed different stores, different restaurants, different stands. There were fountains and trees inside; it beggared belief. 

The amount of money that passed hands here was incredible. She doubted her small Ukrainian village earned in a year what was spent here in a day! She had come from one of the poorest regions in Eastern Ukraine, an area close to the Russian border but far away enough not to have fallen foul of the recent issues in Crimea, but still, even in some of the richer towns, such spending would have been considered utterly frivolous. Wasteful, even. 

The mentality in America was alien to her, but now, Ukraine was too. 

When her grandfather, her sole living relative, had passed on, she’d been left alone. Without her family, the home she’d lived in since she was a child had become nothing more than bricks and mortar. Though she had shelter, she had no home anymore, so Mischa had used the small inheritance her grandfather, her Gidoo, had left her to purchase a ‘pass’ to the United States. 

She’d been promised dreams, a golden future, but instead, she and dozens of other women like her had been herded like cattle, shipped across the Atlantic in crates, and handled as though they were beasts not humans. 

It was hard to deal with those memories in the face of what she was seeing at this moment. 

Here she was, in a proper American mall with legal citizens, all of them wasting their hours in the folly of a hunt for clothes they didn’t need and undoubtedly wouldn’t wear more than once before shopping for something different. Yet three months ago, she’d been in a shipping crate, crapping in a bucket that sloshed over the slides in rough weather, and wishing to God she’d never had the stupid idea of travelling to America. 

Then and now were so disparate, it hurt her head to think of the differences. 

It wasn’t that she wasn’t grateful to be here in this luxurious mall, it was that it was difficult to accept. 

Why hadn’t she realized the men who had helped her hadn’t done it out of the kindness of their own hearts? She’d paid a fortune to them, but she should have known it wasn’t enough. 

Only when they packed her into the shipping crate that made a tin of sardines look roomy had she seen the error of her ways. Only then had she seen what a fool she’d been. 

Now, safely in the US with a group of bikers protecting her, she could state that things had worked out for the best possible way—as insane as that seemed! 

But it had. 

Undoubtedly, the Ukrainian mob would have had her selling her body from sun up to sun down. Yet here she was, shopping, even if she didn’t want to shop. She had the luxury of free time, when her future would have been... She shook her head, unable to think about how her life could have turned out if not for the fact she’d been rescued by The Nomads. 

Wrinkling her nose at the bizarre smells coming from something Annette called a ‘Food Court,’ where the stench was mostly of grease and hot, sickly sugar, she dragged her heels. There were three bikers along with the group—not to herd them or to make sure no one ran off, but to protect them. 

Normally, she liked the idea of that. Protection came at a premium in her country. But when no one noticed she’d gone, she rifled in her purse for the money the biker called Kiko had given her that morning. She didn’t know why he had done it. He hadn’t given the other girls any money, but in slow English, he’d urged her to, “Buy something pretty, Mischa.” She didn’t want something pretty. What she wanted was to be back at the clubhouse, and that was how she was going to use the money he’d given her. 

He didn’t know she could speak English. No one in the group did. She’d pretended not to. They weren’t to know her grandfather had been a scholar of languages. They’d been poor, but intelligence and knowledge didn’t cost anything. She’d been fluent in English since adolescence. American English did present some problems. There was so much slang, and the bikers all seemed to have their own language. Because they believed she couldn’t understand them, they had loose lips, so she was privy to words like Clans and Shifting and talk of Blood Sacrifices. 

Truth was, the words she’d come across had filled her with foreboding. Blood sacrifices? She’d just left the continent of Dracula! She hadn’t realized coming to the so-called Free World had its own freaky rituals too. And some of these phrases didn’t translate well when, on the rare occasions she had access to the internet, she searched for them in an online dictionary.

If they knew she could speak English, Mischa felt certain it would draw attention to her, and that was the last thing she wanted. 

The Ukrainian mafia, who had been the ones to transport Mischa and the other girls in her crate, had sold them to a cartel in the States. The bikers had rescued them from that cartel. But like many of the women she had traveled with, Mischa had intended to run off—to find freedom on her own. So, keeping a low profile had been imperative. However, each time she’d tried to go, that man with the strange name, Kiko, had made her stay. 

Oh, not with words.

He hadn’t encouraged her to stay. He rarely said anything to her. He just looked at her… the way a man looks at a woman he wants.

It wasn’t the first time a man had looked at her that way, nor would it be the last. But what was a first, was the way she’d felt. 

Ever since her fourteenth year, when Mischa had been raped by one of the local gangs, she’d repressed all her desires and did nothing to encourage the opposite sex. She wore baggy clothes, her hair was a mess, and she never wore makeup. She did everything she could to appear unattractive. Back home, she’d even taken to not wearing deodorant as a precaution. It seemed extreme, but so was being raped by six men. The thought had her insides tensing. Memories tried to push at her, break into her concentration. She forced them away, slammed the mental door she’d spent a decade constructing, and breathed a sigh of relief when it held. 

Ten years she’d spent trying to control those thoughts, and it didn’t always work. But here, it was working more and more. She didn’t know why. In fact, she was perplexed as to why. 

All her little defensive maneuvers didn’t work here. She found she couldn’t maintain them. 

Because of Kiko—the strange man who wanted her to buy something pretty. Who stared at her with such need, with such desperate hunger, and yet hadn’t approached her once with anything other than his heart in his eyes… 

He was a handsome man. He made her heart go flutter in her chest. 

One night, when the next day she’d been intending to leave the biker’s compound—or, as they called it, the ‘clubhouse’—she’d caught sight of him in the yard. He was tall. A foot taller than her five-five, and among the big bikers, he was one of the biggest. He stood at least a head higher than some of the tallest, so she’d seen him easily in the courtyard. He wore beaten up boots, navy jeans, a white sleeveless shirt, and a leather jacket the bikers called a ‘cut’. He seemed to wear this outfit every day. Well, not the same items of clothing—she hoped not, anyway—but the same style. Come rain or wind, sun or sleet, he never covered his arms, always bearing the ink he had adorned his biceps with—beautiful portraits of bears with their maws wide, claws outstretched. She’d studied his tawny hair, his eyes the color of treacle, and known she couldn’t leave. 

She didn’t want him, didn’t want what he represented, but she couldn’t leave him. 

Weeks later, when only a handful of the shipment of girls remained, she still couldn’t. And she’d tried to leave. Twice. She’d only made it to a small diner down the road every time, because with each step, something inside her had wept. For Kiko. 

The memory of the ache had her rubbing at her chest as she made it to outside the mall. There was a taxi deck, and she decided she’d prefer to go back to the clubhouse rather than waste her time in the mall. The clothes were pretty, but she didn’t want them. She didn’t want to be pretty. She just wanted to survive. 

She wanted to fill her belly, do the chores she felt certain eased the men’s lives—enough to earn her keep—and sleep in a warm, safe bed at night. 

Kiko had given her more money than she’d paid for transportation over to the States, an amount that had taken an ungodly length of time to save. He’d given her it with ease though, had shoved it back into her hands when she’d refused and pushed it back at him. Then, he had tucked it in her bag when she’d refused again. 

She was going to put it to use. She was going back to the clubhouse to do her chores. Her place wasn’t at the mall, enjoying herself. The other girls were fools if they imagined their lives were going to be one long round of shopping and free time. 

The American dream came with a price, and it was a high one. 

She would be wise to dismiss thoughts of an easier life. 

She felt bad about not telling Annette she was sneaking off, but she was the leader of the gang’s old lady. This was another phrase Mischa found confusing because Annette was very young—not old at all. In fact, Mischa was certain the oldest she could be was thirty! She knew Americans thought highly of youth and looking forever young, but discarding Annette as old seemed very unfair.

Annette was very nice, very friendly, but she could be bossy and insistent, and Mischa knew if she went to her and told her she wanted to return to the clubhouse, Annette would cajole and pester her into staying. 

This way, what the other woman didn’t know wouldn’t harm her. At least, she figured as much. 

She squinted a little as the hot, low sun glowed brightly into her eyes. Ukraine never seemed to be so warm, at least not to her. She always ran on the colder side of the temperature scale, even in summer. She’d experienced winter and spring here, and she highly doubted summer here would prove to be chilly. She’d undoubtedly melt. For once, she might be warm without needing a hot water bottle in the height of August. 

Texas was a strange place. So dry and so dusty, yet wide open, with an incredible amount of space in between highly built up areas. When she’d seen one of the highways in Houston for the first time, she’d found it incredible that so much land was given over to driving. In her village, this would have been farmland! But that aside, the roads had been crazy—like a bowl of noodles or some kind of labyrinth that everyone native to this area seemed quite at ease with.

Raising an arm, she hailed a cab. When one pulled up beside her, she climbed in and gave the address.

As the taxi took her back to the clubhouse, she kept her eyes pinned on the view outside and ignored the driver who kept flashing glances back at her. She didn’t like the look buried in his gaze, so she sat primly, drew no attention to herself, and watched the world pass by. She marveled at the wacky races that were going on around her as they crossed over to Channelview. 

“Did you buy anything nice?”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

“At the mall. Did you buy anything nice?” He stared at her through the rear-view mirror, that banked heat in his eyes that she’d seen so often before. Why was it men looked at her that way? Why didn’t she get looks of respect or warmth? 

It wasn’t fair. She hated feeling like prey. 

“No.” She kept her answer curt, turning back to the road to discourage further conversation. 

“You don’t have many bags,” the man persisted. 

“Because I didn’t go there to shop.” She clenched her hands tightly together in her lap. 

“Did you go to meet friends? Was it your boyfriend?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business.” Her words were sharper than she’d have liked, a little more defensive too. As she caught sight of a landmark she recognized, she realized they’d made it to the small township where the clubhouse sat on the outskirts, and unease hit her at how isolated she was now with the driver. She cleared her throat and said, “You take the next left here.”

She looked at him cautiously, hating the fact she was alone with him. Why hadn’t she realized she’d be alone with a man on this drive? On roads that were solitary, where a man could easily overpower a woman.

Mischa felt her heart start to pound and her stomach began to churn with terror. God, she was sick of viewing each and every man as a potential rapist, but with her past, it was a belief that was hard to overcome. 

She’d known her attackers. They’d known her. That hadn’t stopped them. Why wouldn’t a stranger attack her when they felt no connection to her at all? 

But just when she could feel sweat start to make her face clammy, she realized the tables had turned, yet she wasn’t sure why. He was the uneasy one. Tension filled him to the point that she could see the hairs on the back of his neck standing at attention. She peered around the road, seeing no reason other than the clubhouse in the distance. The side wall was scrawled with graffiti, but she was used to seeing it by now and didn’t think anything of it. She realized he must know the name merged into the designs. The club name, The Nomads, was part of a large pattern involving fiery blazes and bears, of all things. They all had a thing for bears though. 

Kiko had them on his arms, and most of the brothers had a paw print or some variation on their bodies—not that she’d been looking or anything. 

Knowing the shoe was on the other foot now, she could relax a little. She could enjoy his discomfort, as horrible as that sounded. 

There was definitely a perk to lodging with people most of society was terrified of. And the irony was, those people, these so-called outlaws, had been utterly kind to her and the women she’d been trafficked with. 

The car swerved around a bend, shooting up a spray of dust. The land was one big puddle of dust around here. As they drove down the road carved out over years of bikes riding on it, huge clouds of it rained down over the car, making it hard to see through the fine silty layer that covered the windshield. 

By the time they’d made it to the gates of the clubhouse, the driver looked more anxious than ever. She studied him, curious as to why he was so nervous, but she felt his relief when he braked to a halt and told her how much the fare was. 

The distance back was a little longer than she’d anticipated, and she handed over a chunk of the notes Kiko had given her with a guilty smile. It had been an expensive rebellion, but it was worth it. 

Mischa wanted her feet planted firmly on the ground. 

Girls in her village had imagined life in America to be one long round of parties, shopping, and getting their hair and nails done in beauty salons. 

It wasn’t like that at all. 

Jobs weren’t difficult to find—if you had papers and didn’t mind doing the jobs Americans didn’t want to do. Only trouble was, Mischa had no papers. Nor did any of the other girls. So, menial jobs were all that were available to her, and on the predictably low wages, she could probably afford to get one hand’s worth of nails manicured. If she was lucky, and if she didn’t mind walking around with one set of gel nails on the right and a bare hand on the left. 

The gate to the clubhouse was wide, but there was a smaller gate that opened if you had a key—something Kiko had given her a while back. As she peered back at the desolate land around her, Mischa chuckled to herself at the speed in which the taxi was driving back toward civilization. 

The speed confirmed her belief that he knew of the biker gang, and he must have been frightened by their reputation. Though the MC members had been nothing but kind to the women in their care, they were big, and they looked rough. Violent. Even Kiko, who treated her like spun glass, looked rough around the edges, more comfortable in a bar brawl than the bar itself. 

Still smirking to herself, enjoying the man’s fear, she opened the gate and slipped inside. The front courtyard was empty, which had her lifting her brows in surprise. 

Normally, the men parked their bikes out here, and most of the riders spent hours tinkering with them, cleaning them up or fixing parts that as far as she could see—she’d repaired farm machinery a time or two—had nothing wrong with them. Because of this tinkering habit, there were usually more men outside than in during the day. At night, they came in, congregating in an area that had a bar and a pool table, as well as dozens of tables and chairs. 

Now, however, the bikes were here, but the men were not.

In fact, this side of the house, facing north, was quiet—so quiet that as she peered around, she was a little spooked out by it. Had the cartel been here and attacked while they were out? Had the trip to the mall been for a reason?

No. Of course the cartel hadn’t attacked. The bikes wouldn’t be here if something had happened. The men would be out riding to God knew where, not here like sitting ducks. 

They’d be taking action, not waiting for something to happen. 

Regardless of her reasoning, she was perturbed by the quiet. And then she heard a roar. It wasn’t the roar of a crowd or even a man’s bellow of rage or satisfaction. It belonged to an animal, and it had her rearing back in stunned surprise. 

Then came another roar, and she heard a slight deviation to it. It was huskier, deeper... a different bellow belonging to another animal. 

Two roaring animals in the backyard?

Was that possible? 

Well, she’d learned that anything was possible in America, but whether it was likely was another matter entirely. 

Another roar came and another. Mischa realized she had to find out what the source was. Were the men doing what some of the guys in her village had done—put two males together and let them tear each other to pieces? She’d seen that happen with dogs, cocks, and when two poor bears had been caught, they’d been put out to fight too. 

Shuddering in disgust, she peered up at the clubhouse, wondering if the best way to look out at the yard was to go inside. But if someone saw her standing at a window, they’d know she was watching. The men had obviously gone out of their way to get the women off the premises, and though Mischa was grateful to the MC for all they’d done to her, she didn’t trust those noises. They were up to something. So, once she’d decided that staring out the window would make her too visible, she decided instead to head for a passageway down the side of the building. Parched grass lined the walkway, but down the center, there was a well-trodden, half muddy, half sandy path. 

As she approached the backyard, she stopped a step or two back, and then, clinging to the wall, she peered around the side, making herself as small as she could. 

She blinked at the sight before her, then blinked again. 

And when no amount of blinking made a blind bit of difference, and she still saw what had to be thirty or bears clambering around the backyard, she could contain emotion no longer. 

She screamed. 

And she screamed. 

And she screamed. 

***

Kiko rubbed his ass against the dry, spiky grass, loving how the texture dragged at his fur. Christ, it felt good, like one big scratch that went to the root. Nothing was more satisfying… well, that was because his mate hadn’t gotten her hands on him yet. Until that day, this was as satisfying as his life got. 

He felt like groaning at the idea of his mate’s small fingers grabbing a firm hold on his cock. Those limpid eyes of hers, so soft and sultry in their hazel coloring, yet capable of such sharp intelligence, made his level of horniness shoot through the roof. He started to picture her jacking him off, lowering herself to her knees to take him in her mouth, and then decided to stop killing himself. 

It was a slow torture being with her yet not being with her, and this was his moment to be his base self. Thoughts of his mate were always wonderful, but they were also painful. In his bear form, he couldn’t handle the pain so well. It tended to make him aggressive, which wasn’t good because it had been too long since he’d shifted—far too long. In fact, it had been a few weeks before they’d saved the women from the cartel’s clutches, and boy, had he regretted that when they’d brought the party of terrified females back to the clubhouse.

They’d been scared enough of the men in their skins, only Christ knew what their reactions would be if they’d seen them in their furs. 

It wasn’t that humans didn’t know Shifters existed. On the contrary, humans were well aware they did. Without their contribution to the Second World War, a time when Shifters revealed themselves and their strengths to the Allied commands, the world today might be a very different place. 

Kiko had been one of the few in the club to fight on the front lines back in the day. Some of the guys had been around back then—most of them were well into their early hundreds around here—but hardly any had chosen to fight. 

Though those days were when the Shifter community had revealed themselves to the world at large, many had refused to fight in the human war, not out of cowardice, but out of fear of revealing themselves to be different. 

And they’d been right. 

If he could do it all again, he wouldn’t have signed himself up for battle. No fucking way. 

He remembered the carnage, the hell of battle.

He’d have to be insane to volunteer for that again, especially as humans always had such a unique way of showing their appreciation, cutting them up and experimenting on them as part of their ‘tactics’. 

He shuddered at the thought, trying to force his mind down other, less gruesome paths. He’d been spared from the experiments by an explosion near the base he’d been on. If that bomb hadn’t landed at that precise moment, Kiko didn’t know if he’d even be around to wriggle joyfully on the grass. 

It was fucking shit when an American had to give thanks to the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, for saving his ass. 

It had never set well with Kiko, and as a result, he was more cautious about their dual identities than most. His presence on the Council had been instrumental in insuring the Ukrainian females were kept fully in the dark as to their abilities. Mars wasn’t as anal about it as he was. All Shifters were wary, but he was uber cautious. 

And who could fucking blame him?

When the war had taken a turning point, when it looked like the Nazis were going to win, he’d stepped forward to help out. When many had gone to ground, he hadn’t. And for his thanks, he was locked up and used as a fucking lab rat. 

Letting out a huge roar, one that released his anger and tension into the air rather than letting it build up inside, he clambered onto his feet before rocking back onto his butt once more and wriggling around like a happy cub. 

His bear was feeling playful today, mostly because its world was starting to go right for once. 

His mate, while not here at the moment, was known to him. Even the beast understood why Kiko was taking their courtship of her slow. The bear recognized the trauma Mischa had been through because it too had been traumatized. 

As long as she didn’t leave the clubhouse like some of the other women had, running as though the bikers would change their minds and decide to use them as the cartel had intended, he was fine. His animal could keep on the downlow, and as far as Kiko was aware, Mischa was the most settled of all the women, so he didn’t have to fear she’d run off. 

A part of him hoped that it was because of his presence. She might not have known she was his mate, might have been too scared to even let her soul open up and acknowledge the fact she had found her other half, but deep down inside, she could at least feel more at ease, comfortable in the knowledge that she was safe. 

Because she was.

Kiko would kill to protect her. Hell, any of the men would kill to protect any of the females at the clubhouse. 

Shifters, Bears, in particular, could never understand why human males treated their females like shit. Females were rare in their culture, and the mate bond was revered. Even the old ladies, the women who stayed at the clubhouse and, to be frank, earned their keep on their backs, were treated with decency. 

Mars had recently turfed a lot of them out, not because he was a dick, but because the Prez before Mars, the real dick called Jackson, had been using them as spies—using the guys’ pillow talk to his own advantage. 

He was glad Jackson was dead. He only wished it had been by his hand and not Mars’s. Although, Mars had deserved the kill. Jackson had put Mars’s mate in danger. Annette had almost died thanks to round after round of bad business decisions that had put the club not only in troubled waters financially, but had put them in danger too. 

Well, no more. Mars was running the club, was keeping it as straight and narrow as a biker gang could possibly be when they were at war with a cartel and had enemies left, right, and center. 

When his bear wriggled at the thought of his mate being in danger, rage starting to flood him at the notion that one of those South American bastards might go after his mate, and he could feel himself start to bristle. But before he could get mad and challenge one of the other men to a fight to burn off his wrath, a scream sounded.

It was loud and piercing, enough to make his bear wince at the sharp pitch of it. All the bears, close to three dozen, sought out the noise, and it was the worst thing they could have done. Hell, he’d have screamed if he’d been at the center of thirty-odd bears’ attention. 

Then, when he saw who was doing the screaming, catching sight of a sliver of white blond hair that glinted and gleamed in the low sun and those sparkling hazel eyes that made his heart skip a beat, he winced. 

There was no nice way to do this, no easy way to prepare her. 

He shifted. 

The instant the magic held and he stood there in his skin, quiet reigned. Mischa stepped out from the side of the clubhouse and headed toward him. She babbled some shit in Ukrainian, her voice becoming louder and louder as she raged at him. He didn’t have a clue what she was saying, and for the first time since he’d met her, was fucking glad for the language barrier. 

He didn’t want to understand her calling him all kinds of shit because she was mad at him for withholding this secret from her, from all the women. 

Kiko was quite content just to have shit hurled at his head. Sticks and stones, and all that. 

Though he did find it curious that she was pissed at him, and only him, when there were other bears in the yard, some of whom had shifted after he had. 

But they were as naked as he, so Kiko was damn glad her attention was wholly on him. If she’d started gawking at another guy’s junk, his bear would have had a lot to say about it. 

He watched as his mate’s glorious cream silk skin grew pink with her fury. It was the first time he’d seen her anything other than composed. She wore her self-control like Tony Stark did his Ironman costume. It was her shield from everything and everyone, but not now. Not with him. 

He could feel his cock harden at the thought of her looking like this in the throes of passion. Then, he realized he was naked, and she could see his erection. 

Almost as though they were on the same wavelength, her gaze dropped down below his waist. Her eyes grew huge, into enormous saucers, and she let out a whimper. 

She sounded almost scared, but he recognized the hot flush that spread across her cheeks and knew it was lust, not fright. Still, when she took a step back, he let her. 

“You’re beautiful,” he told her, safe in the knowledge that she didn’t understand him. How he wished she knew what he was saying, that his words of love were known to her, but that wasn’t to be. “So very beautiful. When you’re mad or bored or amused, it doesn’t matter which. Inside and out, mate.” He let out a sigh, wishing he had the right to go to her, cup the back of her head, and pull her to him. 

He’d kiss her out of her mad then drag her upstairs until she couldn’t remember her name, never mind what had made her so angry. His lips twitched at the thought, and her eyes narrowed at him. He’d known she wouldn’t understand him, but he had hoped his tone, which had been gentle and soft, would have placated her. 

Yeah… not from the look she was giving him now.

Christ, talk about shooting daggers. He felt the stabbing wound of each and every hit.

She glowered at him some more then spun on her heel and stalked off. 

As she went, he couldn’t help but study her ass. Christ, he couldn’t wait until he had the right to hold those cheeks and use them to pull her close to him or to urge her into riding him harder. 

He groaned, his cock hardening at the thought. Running a hand through his hair, he contemplated shifting once more, but his hard-on was too insistent. He needed to come more than he needed to be a bear at that moment. 

He didn’t follow her path but instead went in through one of the patio doors at the front of the clubhouse. The wall was lined with glass doors that opened onto the compounds miles’ long yard. It had been constructed that way in the vain hope that the bears who lived within them would appreciate the openness of their living environments, and it worked. All of the bears appreciated the open, if barren, view of the space they had to play with. He knew because he shared the sentiment, and though it didn’t make up for acres of forest or woods, it was a pleasing alternative—one they’d all missed thanks to the presence of the Ukrainian females on the base. 

Thoughts of a particular Ukrainian, one whose stubbornness made his cock all the harder, had him dashing through the bar, down the hall, up the stairs, and to the quarters he’d been given recently thanks to discovering Mischa was his mate. 

After Mars’s inauguration as Prez, when mates had started appearing for some of the Bears, there were now mated sections and unmated sections. During Jackson’s reign, it had been a matter of hierarchy. And though that still worked within the two sections—Mars had the biggest set of rooms for example—there was no way mated females would want to be anywhere near the unmated males. 

Hell, as a mated male, he didn’t want the others near his woman either. 

His bear grumbled at the thought, and he soothed it by patting his chest—a motion the bear would have preferred Mischa to have made—then hurried to his room. Ignoring the bedroom and the seating area, he went straight to the bathroom. Standing over the toilet, he grabbed hold of his shaft and quickly started jerking himself off. 

He imagined, as he always did of late, Mischa on her knees in front of him again, that composed face of hers staring up at him, her solemn features softened with the love she felt for him, but the fire within her eyes burning him up so ferociously that he’d never get over the heat of it. She’d scorch him forever. 

She wore a mask most days. He knew that. But her eyes told the real story, and he knew that he’d have to get used to looking there, not at her face and her features, for the real tale of what she was feeling. 

He liked that though. 

He liked her self-assurance, her control. He just hoped that at some point in the future, when they were mated and she knew she could trust him to keep her safe and to never harm her, that she’d lower those walls around him. Because the truth was, walls like those were only constructed by victims. He knew she’d been hurt, and knew he’d have to work doubly hard to make her feel safe. 

It wasn’t much of a sacrifice on his part. Hell, he’d walk through fire if it meant getting her to open up to him, getting her to accept she was his. 

His. 

He groaned at the thought, and then images of her opening her mouth and sucking his cock deep, of lathing the tip with her tongue, of swirling it around the small hole at the glans, filled his mind. He hoped to hell she’d grab hold of his balls, massage them in her palm, maybe even trickle her fingers along his perineum and explore him there… Kiko fully believed in hedonism. There was nothing right or wrong where the body concerned. If it pleased him and his partner, that was all that counted. 

He imagined those long, slender fingers of hers... so delicate, almost seeming to have been made to play the piano... slicked with saliva as she burrowed a finger into his ass, seeking and finding his prostate. 

Long spurts of cum shot from his dick at the image of her eyes flashing at him, success and smug female pride combining, as she stroked his prostate and gave him an orgasm to end all orgasms. Each touch, each glance, and each taste, all were loaded with possessiveness. Every caress was a claiming of him. Every move she made was done to torture him, to drive him insane, to remind him of who he was and how he belonged to her and her alone.

A low groan escaped him as he milked his shaft. The ache didn’t go away even as his erection settled down. It wouldn’t go away until he claimed her, and he had no idea when that would be, or if it would be sooner rather than later. 

It was the not knowing that was driving him insane, but there were so many things he had to go up against. The language barrier for one. He couldn’t explain shit to her without having a fucking brother there to translate. The last thing he wanted was to tell Mischa he adored her secondhand. He wanted her to hear it from his lips, wanted her to know from the sincerity in his voice that she was his, only his, and he was hers. 

On top of that was her wariness around men. 

Her defenses, as well as the way she scurried around, told him that her wariness wasn’t new. And though he hated it, she was beautiful enough that he knew men would target her. He hated to think of her in danger simply because of her face and body, but he knew men. And he’d seen human males. Their control was pathetic, measly. 

Kiko and his brothers were predators—all shifters were. They shared their souls with animals, for Christ’s sake. But they weren’t cruel. Every now and then, an aberration occurred, an abomination, and they were culled from the Clan—as had been the case with Jackson, the old Prez. But humans seemed to let their version of predators roam free. 

From the way she flinched at certain noises or winced and shuddered when a man accidentally touched her, even in all innocence like when Mundo had once handed her a bottle of beer and their palms had rubbed, he knew she’d been prey before. 

He wanted to rip out the throat of the bastard who had made her scared of men. But then, he couldn’t kill the whole male population, could he? The cartel had wanted to victimize her. And if she left the clubhouse, sneaked off to go and lead her life her own way, God only knew what would happen to her. With no papers, only capable of finding a menial job...?

He groaned, his erection willed away by his thoughts, ones that painted a very bleak picture of the woman who was his queen’s future. 

After he cleaned himself up, he turned back to his room, intent on returning to the yard to Shift once more. Annette, Mars’s mate, had taken the women out on a shopping trip, and Kiko intended to take full advantage of their absence. His sojourn outside had been broken up by his mate, a fact he would never complain about, but he wanted to be back in his furs for as long as he could. He had no idea when he’d be able to shift again. 

Kiko wasn’t sure why Mischa had returned, but he could guess. She wasn’t the frivolous sort, and even though he’d given her ample money to buy whatever she wanted, it wasn’t her way. 

The others had been giddy at the prospect of going to a mall and shopping ‘American’ style, whereas Mischa had looked as if she’d have preferred to be scrubbing the toilets rather than spending time with the other women. 

His lips twitched, amused by her as he usually was, but as he turned back to the bedroom, he stilled. 

Eyes the color of tiger’s eye stared back at him, glassily gawking at his nude body. She’d watched him jack off. He could tell by the hectic flush on her cheeks. Her breasts were bobbing up and down as her chest heaved in reaction to the stimulus of watching him masturbate. 

Truth was, he was glad of her presence. At least now he could see that the situation wasn’t hopeless. 

She wanted him. She was just fighting that desire.

He didn’t blame her, but he didn’t have to like it. 

He took a step toward her, and Mischa took an immediate step back. 

“I mean you no harm,” he crooned to her, hoping she’d hear from his tone alone that she was safe. Even though she’d caught him in a compromising position, a position that a human male might have taken full advantage of, she now knew he wasn’t a human male. He was a Shifter, and everyone knew they worked to their own codes. 

Maybe now, she’d realize she could trust him. Because she could. He would protect her until he took his final breath, and he would never stop loving her—not even when the Goddesses made them part ways. 

He was hers for her eternity. 

Now, he just needed her to realize she was his forever too.

Chapter Two

Mischa couldn’t breathe. 

Well, she could, but her lungs were burning, and her heart was pumping like mad. Her stomach was in an agitated state of churning while feeling like a million butterflies had taken root there. Her gaze was glued where it shouldn’t be glued, and her feet wouldn’t move. 

Until he took a step toward her, then she remembered how to walk.

Even then, she couldn’t move far away. She couldn’t. 

He’d called her mate. 

Was that why she had those odd reactions to him? Was that why she couldn’t leave this place no matter how hard she tried?

Was he what connected her to this place? 

The thought terrified her. 

She knew about Shifters. During the War, huge battalions of them had been based on the Eastern Front. Some of them had been in the town nearest her village. 

Their reputations were good, unlike some of the other soldiers—Allied or Axis alike. 

It was well known that Shifters worked to their own rules, to their own belief systems, because they were not of the same world as humans, so why would they follow human ways?

Mischa sucked her bottom lip into her mouth and nibbled at the bit that slipped between her teeth. 

She had to process this—quickly. But it all kept coming back to the fact he’d called her mate. 

Shifters lived for the day they found their mates. Everyone knew that. There was a huge market, even in Ukraine, for romance books with Shifters as the main heroes, recounting the moment when a human female realized they were the mate of a usually powerful, Alpha male. She could even admit to having read a few a time or two. 

Back home, tales of some of the locals being taken back to America with their GI mates were often discussed—especially when there was contact between them and the family they’d left behind. Mischa’s grandmother, her Baba, had told her once how handsome all the Shifters had been. They’d worn a different uniform than the regular soldiers, so all the locals had known how to differentiate between battalions. Her grandmama had told her the women had flocked to them, astonished rather than terrified at the news that creatures like them existed. 

Baba had said that the people had embraced this new type of person because the Nazis they’d come across had been animals in human skin, whereas the Shifters at least turned into a baser creature, one who existed not with evilness at their hearts, but with magic in their souls. 

The German Army had committed so many atrocities in Eastern Europe that they’d been feared more than this new ‘species’ of humanity which had appeared out of nowhere. And throw in the fact that the Shifters didn’t actually work according to country but as a species, and each of them, German, Italian, British, and American alike had come together to fight Hitler’s army. And well, that had only increased their popularity. 

Baba had said that even she’d been interested and hopeful in finding a mate until she’d met Mischa’s grandpapa. 

And now here Mischa was, a naked Bear shifter before her—a male the women of her grandmother’s generation would have loved to have before them. 

A smile longed to beam through the frozen rickshaw of her mouth at the vagaries of fate, but she was still in shock. 

His hand had been cupping his shaft moments before, and as cum had spilled from his body, her name had been on his lips. 

Her name. 

It seemed incredible. 

She was his mate. 

Mischa shook her head at the very idea because the first notion that came to her wasn’t a charitable one. 

Nor was it fair to a man as attractive as Kiko.

But if she was his mate, then that meant she was safe. 

Forever. 

She knew the stories, stories Baba hadn’t shared with her small granddaughter, the tales of Shifters who loved their mates, who protected them above all else, who would kill to keep them safe. 

She could have that. 

She could be protected. 

The thought had Mischa gulping back tears. 

It was stupid to cry, but the idea was so wonderful, so heartwarming that the tears were impossible to stem. 

Her eyes started to burn with the heat of them, and she saw Kiko had noticed them because panic had his own eyes widening. 

He held up his hand, and in slow, careful English, in a tone that was meant to soothe—the tone he always used with her, she realized—he murmured, “I will never hurt you. You are safe with me. Always.”

He meant it for a reason different than the one flushing through her mind, but it was ironic that their minds were on similar paths. 

He thought she feared he’d touch her, come on to her forcefully because she’d walked into his private quarters and watched him do something that any polite person would have walked away from. 

But she wasn’t scared of him. Some of the bikers here did scare her a little. They were so damn big! In her heart though, she’d known they’d never hurt her. She knew that if they did, the others would hurt them in retaliation. Badly. 

But even though Kiko was one of the biggest, one of the brawniest, she wasn’t scared of him and never had been. 

Her heart had recognized what her head hadn’t. For some reason, that warmed her through, took away some of her astonishment.

“I know you would never hurt me, Kiko,” she whispered, her English careful and slow, because since she’d come here she hadn’t spoken a word of it. 

At her words, he blinked. Then he shook his head. His tawny gold locks fluttered about his shoulders as he tried to process the fact she could speak English. Despite the gravity of the situation, she had to withhold a smile. The way he was shaking his head reminded her of the dog she’d had when she was a small girl. Tatiana had been a Labrador/Sheepdog cross, and whenever she’d gotten wet, she’d wriggled and writhed until the excess water had flown off her, usually onto Mischa, a fact that had often angered her mama. 

Then, he brought her back from her memories with a bang when he bit off, “Why?”

She swallowed down her fear. It was the first time he’d used anything other than that gentle tone with her, and even though she deserved it—it had been wrong of her to hide her language skills when they could have been of some use to the other women who had been crated up with her—she didn’t have to like it. 

“I was frightened,” she told him, straightening her shoulders and spine, intent on letting him see that she wasn’t scared of him. 

Deep down, she knew she didn’t have to do that, but it was as intrinsic as trying to cover her face with her hair like her mother had taught her to do since her breasts had grown when she was thirteen, not that that had worked as a tactic.

“Frightened of me?” he asked, his voice hoarse now, his anger gone. She could tell he was horrified by the prospect of her being scared of him, and that had her relaxing. 

She stopped trying to make herself look taller and told him, “No. Not of you. But I didn’t want to stand out from the crowd. If you’d known I spoke English, it would have drawn attention to me, attention I didn’t want.”

“We would never have hurt you.”

She hated that he sounded so wounded, like her deviousness had personally hurt him. Mischa let out a sigh. “I didn’t know that. Especially not at the start.”

“No, but surely you saw that we would never hurt you once you came to know us?”

“Fear is a strange thing,” she told him softly. “I have been safe before, and yet men will always be men. Here, there is nothing but men. All over the place. And not just regular-sized ones, either. You’re all huge. Now I know why, but before, I didn’t. I just knew you were all massive, and if you wanted to overpower me, or any of us, you could.”

“Someone hurt you.” His words were a statement rather than a question, and she answered by nodding at him. It was too painful to speak of. She couldn’t share memories of the past, not when they were so difficult to contemplate. But it was why the prospect of a man like Kiko, one who was bound to her with the magic that was intrinsic to his culture, one who would forever protect her and keep her safe, was such a wonderful prospect. 

She didn’t care that it might lead to her becoming a legal citizen in the States. She didn’t care that it meant she’d have a rightful place in the clubhouse and would take her place in the gang’s hierarchy of women. 

None of that mattered. Nothing but her safety mattered. 

She wanted to sag with relief. It sang through her veins, made her limbs feel lax. 

“I’d hunt them down if I could, Mischa,” he told her, baring his teeth in a way that told her his bear was fully enamored with the idea of hunting down anyone who had hurt her and would take great relish in causing them equal pain. 

She should have been frightened by his show of aggression, but as it was a show of his strength, his feeling, and his intent to keep her safe, instead, she felt like floating. 

“Thank you,” she told him primly, folding her arms over her stomach because she wasn’t sure what else to do with her hands. They wanted to creep forward, to touch the bare expanses of flesh that were on display. His body called to hers with a song that was unique to them, but her body and mind were two different entities. What one wanted with utter certainty, the other was still trying to process. “But that isn’t necessary. They are a long way away from me now. Those men can no longer hurt me.” 

The men who had attacked her still lived in the village she’d left behind. Sometimes, she saw them. A few would smirk at her, and others would duck their heads in shame or avoidance of what they’d done to her. Their presence in her world was one of the reasons she’d found it so easy to leave behind all she’d known. 

With her grandfather gone, there had been no ties to her home anymore—a home where she wasn’t safe. A home where she’d feared the men who smirked at her, totally unashamed of what they’d done all those years ago, would break into her house at night and do it again once she was alone. 

She thought he sensed her memories had taken her down a lane she never wished to travel, because he sucked in a deep breath, his nostrils pinching with the force of it. “That doesn’t appease my Bear,” he told her, his voice a growl, but then he asked, “What’s changed, Mischa? Why are you willing to speak English to me now?”

She hesitated about what to tell him. Though she sensed his protective streak would like the fact she wanted him to keep her safe, no man wanted to be thought of as a bodyguard and nothing else. 

Though she knew he would defend her with his life, the fact she was his mate came with other responsibilities—ones that would be very difficult for her to fulfill. 

She did not see him as a man or as a lover. Not at the moment, anyway. She saw his animal. A beautiful bear who could kill with his paws and whose soul was aligned with hers in a way that would urge him to forever protect her. 

When she was little, the idea of being mated to such a creature would have made her foolish heart flutter with wonder. She ached for the innocence of that girl, because now she felt none of that. At least, she didn’t yet. Maybe she wouldn’t until the notion that she was mated settled fully in her mind. 

“You called me mate. Outside, in the yard.” She bit her lip, hoping to hell her English hadn’t been wonky at that moment. She knew mate also meant friend, and suddenly fear prickled along her nerve endings. She didn’t want to be a friend. 

He would defend a friend, but maybe not with his life. 

Before terror could make her knees knock, his very naked self stepped forward, and he took hold of her hands. Her fingers were tiny in comparison to his big paws; they swallowed hers whole. 

Mischa liked the sight of it, enjoyed the contrast of their sizes.

“You know what a mate means? Your English is astonishing, but I know some terms might not translate well.”

She shook her head. “Mate is partner, yes?”

He let out a deep sigh. “Yes. But not just any partner.” He took their joined hands and tapped them to the center of his chest. “A heart partner. A soul partner.” 

She gulped, spotting the earnestness in his gaze as well as the hope. 

It felt silly to think it, but she realized she was the culmination of all his hopes and desires. Baba had told her that Shifters lived for the day they found their mates, and she could believe that from the way he was looking at her. 

It was like she was a princess from a fairy tale. 

Despite herself, Mischa felt her cheeks turn pink at the strength of the emotions that were beaming her way in those gorgeous seafoam eyes of his. 

“You understand?” he asked, breaking into her reverie. 

She nodded. “Yes. I understand. Not just a boyfriend or even a husband. Our souls are connected.”

He nodded, a relieved gust of air sighing from his lips at her comprehension. 

“God, your English is good,” he praised. “I’ve been terrified about this conversation. Wondering how the hell I was going to be able to tell you any of this.” He shook his head, less severely this time. His tousled locks were only ruffled; they didn’t whip from side to side. “I’m too relieved to be mad that you were playing us for fools all this time!”

She frowned at his wording and pulled her hands away from his. 

“My intention wasn’t to treat you like fools. I was protecting myself,” she told him stiffly, and in her annoyance, heard the thickness of her accent. 

Mischa knew her grandfather would wince at the sound. He’d always taught her to enunciate words carefully, and she’d been an apt student. 

To hear the sudden appearance of her accent made her realize how mad he’d made her, and Mischa hadn’t felt anger for a very long time. Anger was an emotion she couldn’t afford. If she let it take hold, only God knew what that would do to her.

But now, it burned through her like a fire, razing a lot of her emotions in its path. It didn’t destroy those feelings and remembered hurts. Instead, it seemed to gather them up like an emotional storm, building and intensifying until she felt she could contain it no longer. 

She’d spent years hiding behind a mask of composure, years of hiding because her face and form were put together in such a way that men turned into animals around her. Years of being scared, of never feeling safe just because she looked a certain way, and he thought she’d hidden among the crowd to play games? 

To be duplicitous for the sake of being devious? 

When he tried to reach for her hands again, she shook her head and took a step back. 

“Until you have lived in my shoes, you cannot understand the choices I have made. Do not presume to judge me,” she told him, her words snapping at him in a way she didn’t realize she was capable of. “I did what I did to survive, and I would do it again. In a heartbeat!”

He studied her a second then murmured, “I think that’s the first time I’ve heard you raise your voice. “

She glared at him and stomped her foot, uncaring of how childish the gesture was. “Do not listen to the volume. Listen to the words I say!”

“I am listening, and you’re right. I didn’t mean to sound judgmental, Mischa, but you have to understand. I’ve been scared too.”

That had her rearing back in stunned surprise. “You? You were scared? Of me?”

“Of course I was. How could I not be? I’ve been looking for you since I came of age. I’ve spent so many decades waiting for you, Mischa. Then I find you but think I can’t talk to you? Can you understand how hard that was for me? Not only could I not make you understand what you are to me, but you were terrified, and rightly so. You’d been treated abominably, still dealing with the aftermath of what had happened to you...” He clenched his eyes closed. “It’s been hell. And if I’m mad now that you can speak English, it’s only because I don’t like being scared. And I wouldn’t have needed to be if I’d known I could at least have made you aware of my feelings for you.”

For a second, she was stunned speechless. 

She wasn’t a fool. Technically, she knew everyone felt fear, be they old or young, little or large. And yet, it seemed incredible that this man, this behemoth had felt fear because of her. Shaking her head at the notion, she held out her hands and let him take them again. 

The way he gathered protective hold of her fingers was as if he were touching spun glass. She liked it, and even though what she liked most was the safety he represented, there were other things that pleased her enormously. He was fully aware of the difference in their sizes, and he treated her with care. He had a beautiful face, one a woman could look at for hours and see different nuances that would teach her an incredible amount about him. And his body? She had to bite her lip to remind herself it was rude to stare. But he was so naked, so bare, and so uncaring of that nudity. 

She supposed being naked was a person’s natural state, but the world wasn’t like that anymore. People were supposed to be more at ease in clothes than in their skin, and yet Kiko wasn’t like that. He could have been wearing a covering that hid every bit of him from her for all the distress he was showing at being in front of her in what she would have assumed was a vulnerable state, and yet she knew it wasn’t for him. 

Mischa licked her lips and said, “I will be your mate, Kiko. But I am not ready for all that entails.”

At her first sentence, his eyes had blazed with glory. At her second, his shoulders hunched. But the hold on her fingers didn’t change. There was no added pressure to the digits in an attempt to force her to change her will. Instead, he just sighed. 

“I didn’t start the day believing you’d know you were my mate by the end of it, so I should be grateful for small mercies.” He widened his eyes and blew out his cheeks. “It’s enough of a gift that there’s no language barrier between us.”

“You accept my choice so easily?” she asked, astonished that he wasn’t going to argue. 

“Of course. I don’t have to like it to understand it, Mischa.” He gritted his teeth. “I can wait. You might not believe this, Mischa, but know I would never lie to you... I know what it feels like to be treated like a piece of meat. I don’t want to talk about why, but understand that I have been subjugated as you were yourself, and I would never dream of doing that to my worst enemy, never mind the woman who owns the other half of my soul.”

Mischa blinked at him. She understood his meaning but not all the words. Later, she would have to look up the meaning of subjugated, because its definition couldn’t be what it seemed to mean, could it?

When he saw her look of disbelief, he shook his head. “It’s true. I will tell you someday, as I hope you will be able to share the secrets that keep you awake at night with me. It will be proof of the trust we have given one another.”

She liked the sound of that. Mischa didn’t know if she’d ever be able to tell him about what had happened to her in her small hometown, or once she’d stupidly put herself in the mafia’s hands, but she found herself curious about what had happened to him, and she knew it was only fair for him to share if she did too. 

But that would take time, and he was giving her the freedom to choose when she was ready. 

This man was highly unusual. 

The thought made her smile, and when he saw it, he seemed to light up in the face of her pleasure. 

The sight of it stunned her. Could her happiness mean so much to him?

Astonished and touched, she squeezed his fingers and said, “It might be difficult for you, so I will not mind if you say no, but I can stay with you in here, yes? There is no privacy in the rooms with the other women. You would mind if I share a room with you?” She cleared her throat and ducked her gaze. “The room but not the bed.” She glanced at the sofa and nodded at it. “I can sleep well there.”

“Nonsense. I’ll take the sofa. You’re welcome to the bed. It would be an honor to share these quarters with you.”

His formal words pleased her. She was being courted, she realized, and she liked it. 

But when she looked at him and then looked at the sofa, Mischa shook her head. “I will remain in the women’s quarters if you do not let me take the sofa. You are far too tall, and I would not be able to sleep knowing you were so uncomfortable.”

“I’ve slept in worse places,” he immediately argued, but then something about her stance must have made him realize she meant business. She didn’t know what he’d seen, but he took one look at her face and hunched his shoulders again, agreeing, “Okay, if that’s what you want.”

She beamed at him, pleased that he’d capitulated. “Good. I shall get my things and move in tonight, yes?” 

When he nodded, she squeezed his fingers. The day had started with little promise, but now, her world had been turned completely on its head. 

She’d endured many changes of late, had to deal with circumstances no one else could have endured, and yet, somehow, even though she was scared, she knew this man was her reward. And she would never be so churlish as to turn him away. 

Chapter Three

Searching for a particular brother, Mischa peered around the corner of the rec room, saw a crowd of men, all of them huge, and then slammed her shoulders back. She’d known she had nothing to fear before, rationally, at least. Now, she knew she was untouchable. 

The feeling was electric. Kiko was the second in command in this MC, but more than that, he was liked and well respected among his brethren. No one would touch her. She knew that and loved the security that blanketed her from the rest of the world simply because she was Kiko’s mate. 

Of course, it wasn’t fair or right that she needed a man to feel invincible, but that wasn’t the world they lived in. Or, that was to say, it hadn’t been. This was her world now. And here, she was invincible. 

She watched as Mundo slammed into a seat, shoulders rounded. He had a beer in front of him but was using one hand to rub the back of his neck. 

One of the other men, the one who had helped patch up her hand when she’d accidentally sliced her palm cooking, took a seat next to him. His name was an odd one, Major, but then, they all had odd names. Her mate had one of the strangest! She had always believed Major was a position in the army, but this wasn’t an army. And he didn’t have the bearing of a soldier, at least not that she could recognize. 

His words broke into her confusion, a state that wasn’t entirely uncommon with the weird way these people spoke. 

“How’s Christie?” Major asked, a concerned frown on his brow as he took a sip from a sweating beer bottle. 

Mundo let out a sigh. “Adapting.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“Because it is. She’s better now that we’re mated. At least her body isn’t working against her.”

Having seen that Kiko wasn’t in the rec room, she knew she should go and not listen in to what was obviously a private conversation, but Christie was Mundo’s new mate, and she was a mate too now, so his words intrigued her. She wanted to know more about this position she’d inadvertently found herself in. 

Major seemed to understand what Mundo was talking about because he nodded and slapped a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “I’m glad that’s sorted out. But, I get the feeling that just because her body is on track, her head isn’t?”

Mundo gulped down some beer. Once he’d swallowed, he rested the glass bottle on the table and ran his thumb over the lip. His fingers were clean, but there were traces of oil in the corner of one nail. All the men wore these tiny signs of their love of bikes, but that was all there was. It always astonished her how clean they were. Her father had loved to tinker with their old car, a battered Ford Zodiac that had been ancient before he’d bought it. Her mama had always complained when he turned up to the dinner table with dirty nails and oil grafted into his fingers.

A smile twitched across her lips at the memory before her curiosity was tweaked once more by the conversation in front of her.

“She had a couple of nightmares last night,” Mundo eventually admitted. “Nearly scared the shit out of me when she woke up screaming.”

“She was kidnapped, Mundo,” Major murmured, his tone soft. 

Mischa’s eyes widened. Kidnapped? But, Mundo was Christie’s mate? Hadn’t he just said that?

Feeling a little nauseated, Mischa rested her back against the wall but kept her ears open. 

“I know she was, Major,” Mundo snarled. “You don’t have to tell me that. I still want to go after that fucking gang and rip their heads off, but I can’t. So, I won’t. Doesn’t mean the urge to kill the motherfuckers isn’t there.”

“Do you agree with what Mars said?” Major asked, his voice low. “This no retaliation shit... it’s not going to go down well with the brothers.”

Mundo blew out a breath. “Because it was my mate, I want to say no. But I know he’s right. We’re changing, Major. Adapting. Evolving. We can’t be the same club we always used to be.”

“I’m all for evolving if it seems the smartest option, but evolution is a slow process. Mars is taking us right from Neanderthals to modern day man. Christ, a lot of the brothers don’t understand why the Prez is so opposed to violence. They get that he’s mated. They’re jealous, but they know how that changes a man, so they’re cutting him slack, but for how long will that go down?”

“You been hearing rumbles?” Mundo asked, worry puckering his brow. He peered around the rec room, scanning to see who was listening in. He didn’t see Mischa peering at them from the safety of the hall. 

“Rumbles isn’t the word I’d use. Like I said, they get that he’s mated. They understand that shit’s gotta change now we have mates in the building, not just old ladies, but still... A leopard doesn’t change his spots. We’ve had more attacks from the cartel, and we’re not doing anything other than defending our territory. Then this shit with Christie… It isn’t sitting well that we’re not retaliating, and though I get where Mars is coming from more than most, it doesn’t gel with me either.

“That isn’t our war, Major. You know that. They were after her because of her job, not because she’s my mate. That’s irrelevant, unlike the situation with the cartel.”

Major snorted. “Bullshit. It doesn’t matter that it ain’t our battle to fight, Mundo. That isn’t how we work, and don’t be slow, you know that as well as I do. If someone attacks one of our own, and Christie is more than that—she’s at fucking ‘exalted’ status because she’s a mate—then you know we’re all in for the kill.”

“The women don’t like violence.” Mundo sounded ill at ease.

“They’re humans. Of course, they don’t. They don’t understand our world. But what they don’t know doesn’t harm them.”

“They’ll find out,” Mundo’s words were glum. “They always find out. Just because you don’t have a mate doesn’t mean you don’t know how women work. When don’t they learn about shit you want to keep secret? And I can’t go to jail again, Major. County jail won’t be my next call if they haul my ass inside, and I refuse to do anything that would separate me from her. I had to deal with that shit for two weeks… It killed me before we were fully bound, and now? I don’t even think I could survive it.”

“We have men who would be willing to fight for your mate’s honor. You wouldn’t have to do shit.”

“That doesn’t set well with me.” Mundo shook his head when Major started to protest. “No, it doesn’t. Not only because I know Christie would hate that, but because it’s going against what Mars wanted, and as a Prez, I think he’s doing a good job.”

“I never said he isn’t. I think he’s doing a great job,” Major immediately countered. “But I think he’s taking things too fast. He’s not letting the guys adapt to these major changes. I know that’s dangerous. Especially when the truth of the matter is, not everyone hated Jackson. You know he had his supporters, and they’re making more waves than most.”

That had Mundo narrowing his eyes at his brother. “You mention anything to him about this?’

Major grimaced. “No. Not yet. Thought I’d run it past you first.”

“Why?” Mundo frowned. “I don’t have any say in shit like this.”

“’Course you do. We all know you have his ear. And if not Mars, then Kiko, at least.”

Mundo gawked at his brother for a second. “Are you shitting me?”

“No. Of course not. We all know you’re third in command.”

“I’m not!” Mundo wheezed, looking so astonished that it was almost comical to behold. “I’m just...”

Major snorted then slapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. I just... I just feel like we’re going too far too fast, and I like Mars. I respect him as Prez, and a lot of the guys do too. I wouldn’t want him to fail simply because he’s trying for too much too soon.”

“I-I could talk to him about it, I guess,” came the shaken retort. 

“I shouldn’t push this shit on you now, not when you’re newly mated and your mate was abducted yesterday.” Major huffed out a breath. “Talk about the worst timing ever.”

“No. If you figured it was important, then it’s important, Mundo. Christie will get used to the MC and its ways, and I’ll get used to the fact she’s a dentist with more connections than she realized.” He rolled his eyes. “It’s a learning curve. That’s what I’m coming to see, anyway.”

“Is she happy? Aside from the... well, you know.”

“Yeah. Unfortunately, I do. She’d be happier if I wasn’t in the MC, but that’s not going to happen. Now she knows we’re more than just bikers, we’re a clan, I think she’s starting to understand it more. When she thought our enemies were behind the abduction, it was worse. She was mad at me, and I don’t know if I’d have kept her at my side if I’d have chosen The Nomads over her.”

Major frowned, took another sip of his beer, and then asked, “Is it true what they say, Mundo?”

“Probably.” Mundo snickered. “The mate bond is a thousand times better and worse than I imagined. Did I ever think I’d dump my brothers for a chick? No. But for Christie—and it would kill me—I would. I’d have no choice.” He gulped. “Without getting touchy-fucking-feely, Major, she’s my happiness.”

“Too much info, bro,” Major retorted, smirking to show he was teasing.

Mundo flipped him the bird then grumbled, “Anyway, less talk of my feelings. How did Jaxon get on with that delivery last night? Was he...”

As their conversation trailed onto club business and far less interesting matters, Mischa’s attention broke off tangent and spitfired back to Christie and the fact she’d been abducted because of her job, not something the MC did. 

Mischa knew the MC was at war with the cartel who had held her and the other women. But from what the men had said, it wasn’t a bloody war. Both sides weren’t out and out at battle. She knew how that worked, had seen it on TV once. The American dramas managed to make everything seem so real, after all, and the last thing she wanted was Kiko involved in something of that nature. 

Crazy though it was, Mundo made sense. Now she that understood what connection was binding them together, Mischa could allow the links to strengthen between them. 

When it had just been attraction, faint and easily shelved, she could ignore it. She’d pushed it aside in favor of protecting the inner core of her that she had to defend at all costs. But now she knew he was a Shifter, that changed things. It changed them beyond recognition. 

This wasn’t just about sex. When Kiko looked at her, he wasn’t imagining her in bed for a quick fuck. He didn’t have one night on his mind, but a lifetime of nights. And to a woman like Mischa, that mattered. That mattered deeply. 

The crux of the issue was she had to feel safe with him, but how could she when he was affiliated with an MC that considered being at war with a cartel a regular state of play? 

Pondering the thought, she headed back to her bedroom. The other women had returned a short while ago, and she thought it was time for her to spill the beans to Annette. 

The Prez’s young-old lady had been trying so hard to understand what had happened during their time with the cartel. She’d had one of the men translate question after painstaking question for some editorial she wanted to write in the paper she worked for. 

Mischa wouldn’t lie and say she hadn’t felt guilty about hiding her ability to speak English, but self-preservation was all that counted. And as that thought crossed her mind, Mischa realized she was getting sick of being scared all the time. 

Those feelings she’d experienced earlier had highlighted how much of her life she’d spent frightened of something or someone. She’d been so brave as a child, so exuberant. But now, she was a fearful little mouse scared of her own shadow. 

Sickening. 

Pitiful. 

She sucked in a breath and sought out Annette in her small office on the second floor.

As she wended her way up the stairs, she passed brothers, but rather than keep her head ducked and shoulders hunched, hiding from them, she forced herself to straighten up, look dead ahead, and not cower beneath her bangs. 

It was hard. 

So hard. 

Even though she disliked the fact she wanted to hide, it didn’t make the habit any easier to break. She could feel cold sweat beading on her top lip and instinctively wanted to duck behind her fringe to escape notice, certain that the men would see her weakness and pounce on it. 

By the time she made it to the second floor, her lungs were burning, and her heart was pounding like she’d climbed the Empire State Building, not a couple of dozen of steps. 

Mischa pressed a hand to her chest, felt her heart fluttering away, and shook her head at her own folly. 

She didn’t like what she’d become. 

Knocking on the door to Annette’s office, she waited for the other woman to holler an invite in. When it was forthcoming, she opened the door and stepped inside. Rather than peering around it as she would have done before, she headed to the space in front of Annette’s desk and waited for her attention. 

Annette was looking down at some books she was reading and quickly glanced up then down again. When she realized it was Mischa, her head jerked up like she’d been slapped.

“Mischa? What are you doing here?”

Mischa only came upon request, and even then one of the brothers usually had to ‘remind’ her several times that Annette wanted to speak to her. They weren’t forceful; they just provided an escort. 

Annette made a move with her lips then grumbled, “Shit, I wonder where Dickie is.”

He was their translator.

Mischa sucked in a deep breath then murmured, “We don’t need Dickie. I wanted to talk to you about something important.”

Annette’s astonishment was as deep as Kiko’s. Her eyes bugged out, and her mouth worked as she realized Mischa had been hiding this secret for a very long time. 

She cleared her throat and replied, “I’d like to say I’m annoyed at you for keeping this a secret when it would have been very useful to have a translator, but I can understand.” She coughed. “I guess.”

“I had to protect myself.” Her words were simple and selfish, but she meant them regardless.

Annette nodded. “I know. I’ve been around enough victims of carnage to understand the mindset.” She rapped her fingers against the desk then eyed her like a detective cornering a murder suspect. “So, what changed?”

“When I sneaked back here this afternoon...”

Eyes narrowing, Annette groused, “Yes, thanks for scaring the hell out of us by just disappearing like that. We thought you’d left.” 

Mischa knew Annette didn’t mean ‘left the mall’ but ‘left the clubhouse’—left the MC for good, like so many of the other women Mischa had been huddled with for the hellishly long journey to the promised land. 

“You must have realized I wouldn’t. I’m mated to Kiko.”

Annette cocked a brow. “I know that, but I didn’t think you did.”

“When I came back, I saw him as a bear. Things came to a head.”

She grinned. “He claimed you?”

Mischa shook her head. “No. Not yet.”

“I guess that makes sense.” Annette’s grin disappeared, morphed into a wrinkled nose, and then she sighed. “Your circumstances aren’t the same as mine.” Her eyes turned dreamy. “Wait until he does claim you though. God, what a memory that will be.” 

“I wanted to ask you about the...”

“Claiming? Like I said, you’ll love every minute of it. One quick nip, and he’s yours and you’re his.”

One quick nip? Mischa frowned. Nip? She knew this word but she wasn’t sure how. Discarding the questions Annette’s statement brought forth, she asked, “No. Not the claiming. The MC.”

“The Nomads?” Annette looked puzzled. “What do you want to know?” 

 “Is it safe to be here?”

“You heard about Christie, I guess.” When Mischa nodded, Annette grimaced. “That was bad luck. But it wasn’t MC related. Truth is, the MC got her out and away from the guys that abducted her.” 

“What happened?” She placed her hands flat on Annette’s desk, trying to imbue with her posture how much this information meant to her. “I need to know, Annette. I need to know if I’m in danger by staying here.”

“Mars is trying to take the MC on to a more legal route. Mostly because of me, but also because... well, me again, I guess. He doesn’t want to go to jail, doesn’t want us to be separated. But also, I refuse to let him involve me in shit that could send me to jail. I’ve seen enough crap in my life in war zones to spend my time back on home soil in a cell.” Annette cupped her cheek, rested her weight on her hand, and planted her elbow on the desk. “Things are changing, slowly. Christie is a dentist, but she works in prisons. A gang decided to use her as a means of passing messages to gang members on the inside. That’s not related to the MC.”

“No, but it will be now, won’t it? That gang hurt Mundo’s mate. Surely that makes it MC business?”

“To an extent.” She let out a slow breath. “I can’t say this world is totally safe. They do skate along a lot of laws, but you are cherished. Mates are precious and rare. If anything were to happen to you, the entire MC would congregate to fight at your back. Your situation isn’t that great; you’re illegal after all. We would always have helped you try to evade the law, but now? Now, you need never worry. You have the power of The Nomads at your back.” Annette grimaced. “That’s a double-edged sword, Mischa. They’re over protective as hell because you represent so much to them. They’re envious of Kiko but will do whatever they can to ensure your security. Without freaking you out, you’re their future. Not only that, but you represent hope for them. Does that help your misgivings?”

Mischa pondered that a second, unsure as to her own feelings—was she freaked out, or was she still just processing everything? She wasn’t overly flared though, so she reckoned it was the latter, not the former, and as a result, she asked the question she should have asked straightaway. “How’s Christie? Is she okay?”

Annette shrugged. “She’s keeping to herself. Mundo says she is. What she’s been through is a lot to take in, so we’re all giving her space until she’s ready.”

“Did the gang who took her hurt her?”

“They didn’t have time.”

Mischa let out a shaky breath of relief. “Good. I’m glad.” 

When she didn’t leave, Annette asked, “Do you have any other questions, Mischa? I’m happy to answer them. I want you to stay here for Kiko’s sake, but also because I’ve found my little place in this world, so there’s no reason you can’t. I know you’ve been through shit to get here, and really, you couldn’t have landed in a better spot. No man will love you or care for you like Kiko will. Take it from me, this mate bond stuff is a thousand times deeper than your mama warned you about.”

“My grandmother was the one who did the warning,” Mischa teased. “Shifters were close to our village during the war and left an indelible impression.”

Annette laughed. “I can only imagine. I mean, at least we know about them. They were brand spanking new back then, weren’t they? Can you imagine the novelty? Especially when they were coming out as saviors to get the Nazis off our backs.”

She nodded. “Yes. I think my grandmother would have been very happy to be a GI Bride, shall we say?”

“I’ll bet. I won’t lie; I never thought this would be my path, Mischa, but now I’m on it, I know exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

“You’ve been a huge help, Annette. Thank you for your patience, and I do want to apologize about keeping this a secret,” she mumbled sheepishly, wafting a hand in front of her. “I really did it to keep myself under the radar.”

Annette shrugged. “I understand where you were head wise, Mischa. I’ll forgive you. Just this once, mind you,” she ended with a wink. 

For a second, Mischa contemplated leaving, then when she thought about how much Annette had helped her, how she would continue to try and smooth Mischa’s path for her, she murmured, hesitantly, “I-I have heard something, Annette. Some of the brothers have loose lips around us because we do not speak English...”

“But you do,” Annette murmured, narrowing her eyes, focus fully trained on Mischa. “What have you heard?”

“Some of the men feel Mars is going on the straight and narrow too soon.”

“Oh, they do, do they?” She pursed her lips. “Are these men angry or just trying to be helpful?”

“Helpful,” Mischa said immediately, thinking back to how cautious Major had been. “Others…” She clicked her tongue. “It seems a few who liked the old President are the most dissatisfied of the lot.” 

“I’ll pass that on to Mars, Mischa. Thanks for letting me know.”

She jerked a shoulder. “Truth is, it isn’t much what I told you, but sometimes knowing about the seeds of dissent can stop the root from taking hold.”

“Truer words have never been spoken.” Annette eyed her with curiosity now, but she ducked her head. “I’ll see you around the clubhouse, Mischa.”

Knowing she’d been dismissed, she returned the farewell and headed out onto the admin area. Once there, she went to her quarters. 

It was time to pack, time to move her stuff into her mate’s rooms. 

She’d made her decision. 

Chapter Four

It didn’t sit well with him. Not one little bit. 

He folded his arms behind his head and rested his neck on his open palms. Staring up at the ceiling, he stopped himself, barely, from looking to the left and watching his mate sleep. 

He hated that she was on the sofa and he was in bed. He’d have preferred for them both to have been under the same duvet, but he knew that was way too soon. Still, a man caused no harm with wishful thinking. And if they couldn’t be on the same mattress, they could be in their rightful places. 

Kiko didn’t remember much about what his granddam had taught him, but he knew that in this kind of situation, the gentlemanly thing to do was to be on the sofa while his mate rested in comfort. And yet, said mate was more than insistent that he be anything but a gentleman. When he’d arrived back in his rooms after an urgent Council meeting, one that had taken place thanks to a shipment going awry because the cartel had shopped one of their routes to the DEA, he’d returned to a different space entirely. 

His closets were no longer empty, nor were they full, but they were shared between two people now. Mischa’s belongings were pathetically few, enough so that it damn near broke his heart and made him want to buy her everything under the sun. He wasn’t a poor man. He didn’t spend most of his earnings and had been saving them for that rainy day when he found his mate. He could well afford to change Mischa’s unfortunate circumstances—if she’d let him, that is. She was so stubborn, his female. He’d returned late and had found her resting on the settee. When he’d gone to shower, he’d seen her sparse toiletries taking up less room than his on the vanity and then had noticed she had unpacked some things in the closet when he went to get a fresh pair of boxers. Things weren’t worth a damn in the grand scheme of it all, but they could sure as shit make life easier. 

Blowing out a breath as he pondered how to get her to accept his help, he studied the ceiling fan as it swirled lazily overhead. The swirling motion was hypnotic, and usually it helped him sleep, even when he’d awoken thanks to one of the many nightmares that befell him at the witching hour—when his heart pumped like he’d been running a marathon, when his skin felt like he’d been in a sauna for twelve hours, and when his lungs were scorched of air as though his head had been held underwater for days. 

It was a testament to how out of sorts he felt that his mate was on the sofa and he was in bed. He’d been tossing and turning ever since he’d climbed between the sheets.

Granted, it was wonderful to have her in this room, period. He’d never have imagined that getting her in here would have been so easy. And the fact she spoke English? Hell, the instant she’d spoken, he’d wanted to drop to his knees in thanks. Being pissed off at her for lying to them all had been only momentary because he’d been so relieved, grateful even, that the miseries of the language barrier were no more. 

Still, he didn’t like it, and he huffed when his bear started making its displeasure known at the current state of affairs. 

“For God’s sake, Kiko, why do you keep on huffing and puffing? I thought it was the Big Bad Wolf who did that, not a bear? They eat the porridge, no?”

Lips twitching at her exasperated chiding, he mumbled, “You know your fairy tales.”

“I was a child once, you know. I even managed a childhood back in the Ukraine,” she returned, a teasing note to her tone. He heard the blankets he’d given her scrunch and shuffle as Mischa moved on the minute space she had available to her—a thought that agitated him all the more. “Now, why do you keep on sighing? It is most distracting!”

He blinked. “I didn’t think it would bother you.”

“No, I didn’t think it would either. After sleeping with all the women for so long and in far worse conditions than these, I can’t believe your fidgeting is keeping me awake. I think it must be to do with how aware I am of you,” she murmured, her tone clinical, considering, like a scientist faced with a bizarre puzzle she was intent on solving. “Because it was never an issue before.”

A full smile slashed his jaw. “You’re aware of me?”

It was her turn to huff. “Of course I am. I am your mate, no? I was aware of you before I knew this, and now I know it for certain, it is worse.” She didn’t sound too pleased about that, a notion that was confirmed when she clucked her tongue.

He cleared his throat and asked a question he didn’t particularly want the answer to. “Are you dissatisfied with me, Mischa?”

“Dissatisfied? That is a strange choice of word, Kiko.” 

He could sense her frowning at him but had to ask.

He’d heard tales of Mars’s reaction to Annette. A mutual response. They’d met up for an interview when Annette was a reporter for a state-wide paper and Mars had intended on being a whistleblower. The MC had been involved in some serious shit before Mars had taken over the presidency, and the women they’d saved from trafficking, his mate included, had been a part of a business deal their old Prez had negotiated. Mundo, a brother, had been there when they’d first met. He’d said that the chemistry between the two of them had been more than electric. Mundo had laughingly told him that he’d thought they were about to have sex there and then, in the diner where they’d arranged to meet! 

And then, Mundo had been another brother fortunate enough to meet his mate. He’d been inside, and she’d been the prison dentist. They’d met while he’d been under her ‘knife’, and the pair of them had suffered thanks to not being able to consummate their mate bond immediately. Kiko wasn’t sure how, but Mundo had said his mate, Christie, had been in a lot of discomfort. Considering Mundo could be the master of the understatement, Kiko had to figure Christie had been going out of her mind with the need her body and soul had for her mate. 

But where he and Mischa were concerned, nearly two months had passed without consummating their bond, and nothing. Nada. 

He knew there were different intensities of mate bonds. As with everything, each relationship was unique. There were mate bonds where if one of the pair died, the other would likely pass on shortly after. Then, there were those where the mated duo could lead separate lives without any misery, and if one passed, they’d feel the loss of the bond, but it wouldn’t kill them. 

Whenever he’d thought about meeting his mate, he’d never imagined his bond would be one of the weaker varieties. He’d wanted that total connection. He wanted to be consumed by it, by her. Now he’d met her, he didn’t want to live in a world where she didn’t exist. The thought might have seemed drastic, but after so many fucking decades alone, and having met Mischa and having known her, he couldn’t bear to be alone once more. 

Only now did he realize how lonely he’d been. How alone. Surrounded by his Clan, with some of the men he considered to be his den brothers and not just brothers in arms with the MC, it still hadn’t been enough. 

It would never be enough, not now that he knew Mischa. 

Maybe when he was younger, more foolish, he’d have preferred the less fragile bond. But after so many years of desperately seeking the woman the Goddesses had crafted expressly for him, he wanted it all—warts and everything. The good, the bad, and the ugly. 

And yet, it seemed he wasn’t going to get that. 

Mischa could pull away. She didn’t seem too interested in him sexually. He’d jacked off in front of her, and she’d made a slight moan, but that was it. Then they’d had that whole conversation with him standing butt naked, and she hadn’t lost control. She hadn’t ravaged him—not like Annette, who had practically attacked Mars where he stood. Now, here they were, in separate sleeping areas in the same room, and once again, she was perfectly at ease—unlike Christie who’d had to endure weeks without her mate and had suffered as a consequence, so much so, they’d had to take the claiming at a slow pace so as not to overwhelm her body. Not that Mundo talked about it all that much, but Kiko was old enough to know how to read between the lines and read them well. 

His mate might have been totally comfortable where she was, at peace with her new life, but Kiko wasn’t, nor was his bear. The beast was riled up, relieved its mate was close enough to protect yet uncertain as to why she couldn’t be claimed yet, making her proximity a blessing and a curse. 

Her answer seemed to take an age in coming. So long, in fact, that he’d almost forgotten what it was he’d asked her, too intent on the constant analysis of worries and fears that assailed him in regard to their mate bond. But then, she broke into his scared musings and murmured, “No, I’m not dissatisfied. I’m anything but.”

Well, that sounded a little more reassuring. 

Anything but...? That had to bode well, right? 

She’d been through hell, and he had no intention of adding to the torment she must still be enduring psychologically. If anyone understood what hell was like, Kiko did. He’d never force anything on her and would always treat her wishes with respect and care. It was why he wasn’t humping her leg like a dog, even though that was what he felt like doing. His cock was so hard, he was surprised it hadn’t torn a hole through the sheet covering him! 

“Then why did you say it’s worse now you’re aware of me?” Christ, he sounded like a pouting cub. He scrubbed a hand over his face, tired by the emotional wringer of having a mate yet not having her. Truth was, times like this, he felt like a cub, scared, still clinging to his dam’s skirts, looking to her to make his world right. Only trouble was, Kiko’s dam had died a long time ago. She’d caught the mumps, of all things, and a rare side effect had killed her. Although their immune systems were incredibly strong after the claiming, human mates could still be felled. It was what made them so precious and had their mates terrified whenever they caught so much as a sniffle. When she’d passed, she’d taken her mate, Kiko’s father, along with her. 

“I didn’t mean worse as in it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. I meant more like the intensity of my awareness is stronger than ever before.” She seemed to taste the words, selecting them carefully, choosing each one with care now that she knew she’d inadvertently hurt him. 

And that was the bitch of it. She had hurt him. 

Crazy, that. 

He was a biker for one of the most renowned MCs in the area. The Nomads’ territory was vast, hard won, and ferociously defended. He’d helped fight in a world war, could shift into a bear that had torn another man apart, and this little woman, with her hurt eyes and soft lips, could wound him with a few words. 

How the mighty fucking fall.

He shook his head and sighed. “Okay. That makes sense,” he told her. 

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she whispered, apparently picking up on the fact that her words stung. 

“No, I’m sure you didn’t.”

“But I did?” It was her turn to sigh. “Kiko, do you want me to be honest with you?”

In the darkness of the bedroom, where the walls were covered in shadows that were only broken up by the glare of headlights from a random car riding out along the distant highway every few minutes or so, it seemed easier to talk. Easier than earlier, at any rate. 

“I always want you to be honest with me,” he countered. “And by that rote, I will always be honest with you too.” He would as well. After all he’d been through in life, the many things he’d seen and learned, he’d seen how lies could tear worlds apart. 

He had no intention of finding his salvation only to lose it because of some stupid misunderstanding or falsehood. 

She murmured, hesitant again, but her accent was thicker, and he could sense she was worried what his reaction would be. “This might hurt you, but you have to understand my side of things. Maybe then it will be easier to move forward. I-I know what you must want from me. I’m not a fool. I have seen Annette with her Mars, and even the new lady, Christie, with Mundo.” She cleared her throat. “They are all very noisy.”

His lips twitched because she wasn’t wrong. They were noisy, and it had been torture having those sounds ring out all around him when his mate was in the building but might as well have been back in the Ukraine for how much distance was between them emotionally. 

“Noisy is the word,” he murmured softly, laughing a little when she huffed. 

“I don’t know much about Shifters, only what my Baba, my grandmother, told me from what she’d seen in the war. But there are things you must understand about me. Where I lived in the Ukraine, it was a small town. Our farm was on the outskirts, closer to another village really, but I went into Azovske a lot when I was young. It was market day, and I had some money saved up for a dance that was happening within the month. I wanted a new skirt. There was a group of boys who cornered me, and...” Her words became mangled sounds. “All four of them.” 

Tension, worse than anything he’d ever known, spilled through him like napalm. His bear roared so loudly, he felt certain it would shatter his skeleton with the force of withholding the noise. If he roared, she would be frightened, and after...

Four. 

She’d been gang raped.

Dear God. No wonder she’d fought and conquered the mate bond. 

He closed his eyes, trying to hide from the fact his mate had been brutalized because he didn’t know how to cope with it. He wanted to kill them. He wanted to let his bear out, wanted the creature to tear them limb from limb, rip their hearts to shreds in their chests. 

Oh, how the need for vengeance slammed through him. 

“You are quiet,” she whispered, agony in her voice. “Are you not interested now you know I am used goods?”

A snarl escaped him. Her words triggered it. She thought... she thought? He couldn’t contain the roar, now. It flushed through him, bringing with it an immediate release in tension that once dispersed, immediately started to gather again. The roar sent electric charges through the air as the magic of the shift slipped through the atmosphere. 

She couldn’t not feel it. But he couldn’t sense if she was scared or not, because he was too far gone. His bear had wrestled control from him. The creature knew the men were far away, long gone, but that didn’t take away the rage, the hatred, the need to hurt… to show his mate he was strong, he would always protect her, always keep her safe. 

The bear mourned the loss of his mate’s innocence. 

Not her virginity, her innocence, because those men had stolen that from her. They’d made her frightened of her own shadow. He’d seen the hurt in her eyes, the tremor in her lips, the way she hunched her shoulders to hide herself. The way she watched the world was as though she knew a bomb was waiting in the wings, and she was seeking out the explosion before it happened. 

That was what he mourned for. 

And to compound it all, there was the way she’d arrived in America—gang raped then trafficked. 

“Mischa,” he whispered her name, his own torment at her suffering making his voice break. 

Something in his words had her scuttling off the sofa. He figured it was from fear, and he mourned that too—mourned the fact she was frightened of him when he was reeling with what had happened to her, when he was grieving for her. 

He half expected to hear the door opening and her footsteps scurrying away, but he didn’t hear that. Instead, he felt the mattress depress, and then hesitant hands pressed his leg. 

“It’s okay, Kiko,” she murmured, soothing him, repeating the words over and over again, as though he were the one in need of comforting. 

Her hand swept up to his shoulders, the other to his cheek. He could scent her wonderful essence, but also her surprise and wonder at how he was reacting. She seemed to sense that he wasn’t mad at her, that he wasn’t upset at the fact she was ‘used goods’—he snarled again at her use of that hideous phrase—but that he was suffering for her. 

She hushed him under her breath then started humming a soothing little tune as she stroked him. 

He didn’t even know how long it took him to gain back his control. It was embarrassing to realize that his mate had been tending to him like a cub, but he felt her ease, felt how she’d lost herself a little to the pleasure of being able to touch him. It was a fact that both pleased him and broke his heart.

By the time his bear released him, Kiko felt sweaty with the exertion it took not to shift. It wouldn’t be the first time one of them shifted indoors, but it was a bitch to get the repair work done. Even though the clubhouse had been built to spec, with reinforcements for a bear’s weight just in case accidents happened, it was best not to shift. And even though his bear would hurt itself rather than hurt her, he was relieved his control had held. 

Letting out a shuddery breath, he realized she’d moved his head onto her lap and was stroking his hair. He blinked up at her, stunned that she’d maneuvered him about without his awareness. It scared him that she’d been able to do that. It told him that yes, his control had held, but it had been a closely won battle. 

“I’m so sorry, Mischa,” he whispered, the skin around his eyes pinching as the anger hit him once more. 

The left side of her mouth twitched up in a half-smile. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”

“I wish I could make them pay for what they did to you.”

She shook her head. “Vengeance would get us nowhere.”

“It would satisfy me.” He clenched his jaw. “I’m sure your father felt the same way.”

“He’d died the year before. My grandfather did though. My grandmother and mother had to work very hard to get him to stay at home.” Her mouth quirked. “He was a very old man, even then. They would have eaten him for breakfast.”

“They should have let him loose. No man likes to think one of his cubs has been hurt, never mind sexually brutalized.” A breath hissed from between his lips. “I will never allow any harm to come to you, Mischa. Never. I vow this to you.”

“I know,” she told him, utterly serene at that moment. “That’s one of the reasons I can accept that you’re a Shifter and that I’m your mate.” She pursed her lips. “That makes me sound very... what’s the word? Mercenary? Yes, that’s it. But I’m not, not really. You represent safety, Kiko. I realized that when you told me what I was to you.”

Did that truth sting? A little. But in her circumstances, with her history, how could he blame her? 

Kiko couldn’t. He wouldn’t. 

He would keep her safe. She would never even scent a whiff of danger. Not if it meant he had to leave the MC to keep it from her. She’d endured much, but now she was his, and she would always be protected. 

“You need never be afraid again,” he vowed to her, his voice urgent.

A curious smile played about her mouth. “When we were talking earlier, I realized that. But when I saw your reaction to what happened to me... and then I remember something I heard about Christie and Mundo... I’ve come to see that there is much danger in the MC.” He started to sit up, but she pressed at his shoulders. “Relax,” she murmured. “I’m not going anywhere. There is danger everywhere, but nowhere with as many protectors as The Nomads. Plus, you are more than just my bodyguard.” She tapped a hand to her chest. “I can feel the connection growing already.”

He stared up at her, longing for her curling throughout his veins. But he curbed it, because this was too important to fuck up. His bear wanted to soothe his mate. The man wanted to help her, show her that there would be nothing but tenderness between them, to show her that what she’d known then was night compared to the day their love for one another would be. 

“I won’t touch you, Mischa. You have my word. But sleep with me? I... It will help me to have you close.”

She bit her lip. “I know you must be finding this difficult. I just don’t think I’m ready for you... for us to—”

“I swear, I don’t want sex. My bear needs to feel you close, Mischa. Please. It’s about comfort and connection rather than sex.” He urged her to understand, desperation making his voice hoarse. “I can wait for that. I want you, sweetheart, but I want more. It won’t be worth it unless you’re totally at ease with me, totally ready to be my lover, but I need you close. You say you can feel the connection starting? For me, it’s utterly implanted in my being. Keeping my distance from you has been so hard, but I did it. I waited for you to come to me, didn’t I? I will wait until you are ready to be claimed. I’m a man of my word, mate.”

She blinked then stared at him for what felt like forever until finally, she nodded. Once. She picked up the top right corner of the sheet, raised it high, and burrowed underneath it. 

His bear immediately settled down, knowing and giving thanks for her proximity. It didn’t matter that she was hugging the side of the bed, that he could feel her tension... He knew that when she eventually fell asleep, she’d be at peace as he was because being close was exactly where mates needed to be. 

***

Mischa’s eyes popped open quickly when she realized she wasn’t alone in bed. 

As had been the way for the past five days, she still felt stunned by her location. And as usual, what astonished her the most was the fact she was the one hugging Kiko first thing that morning. 

He wasn’t spooning her—she was spooning him! 

The buzz of it still had the power to make her tingle. That this big, strong man willingly allowed her to be dominant in their relationship put her at such ease that she could feel the mate bond unfurling within her on a daily basis. And every time she felt it settling deeper inside her, she felt such a level of peace that she wasn’t certain how she’d coped without it before. 

It was becoming an intrinsic part of her. She could sense that now, where before, fear had shielded the endless possibilities from her. 

“Good morning,” came the rumbled greeting from her mate.

He never said anything about their position, never mentioned that she was hugging him, clinging to him like some groupie terrified of letting go of her favorite band member. If anything, when she sensed he was aware of his location—in her arms—he seemed to breathe easier. 

Because he was turned away from her, she never saw his face. She kind of wished she could. There would come a time when she would watch him sleep just to see him at peace. But for now, she still huddled into bed at nighttime, cautious but no longer afraid of sleeping beside this large creature for the whole night.

“Morning,” she murmured in reply, her voice husky with misuse. She’d gone to bed earlier than him last night. There’d been a Council meeting—a rendezvous between the MC’s most powerful members—and her mate was second-in-command with many responsibilities to keep him busy.

She’d drifted off to sleep in the bed they had started sharing, not even awakening when Kiko had returned after the meeting. 

“How was the Council meeting last night?” she asked, deciding to say to hell with it and keep on hugging him the way she was. It would have been too awkward to let go of him, too noticeable, and the truth was, she didn’t want to let go. 

He smelled good—like strength, like earthy sandalwood, like warmth. 

Like hers. 

She nuzzled her face between his shoulder blades as he said, “Stressful.”

“Why?”

“Dissent in the ranks.” He tried to speak dismissively, but she heard his concern. Could feel it. 

“What kind of dissent?”

“We weren’t always the way we are now, Mischa.”

She clucked her tongue. “Don’t make out your boy scouts, Kiko. I know what you ship. Your men spoke quite freely in front of me because they didn’t realize I could speak English.”

“Little sneak.” She stiffened a little at the phrasing then heard the teasing affection in his tone. “It’s a shame they have to know you speak English. You’d make a good spy.”

“I heard enough,” she retorted primly. 

“Yeah, you did if you know what we move.” He snorted. 

“Aren’t you concerned that I know?”

He shrugged, and the move jostled his shoulders, rubbing her nose against them. “Why would I be? You’re my mate. The whole idea is to be together, not to be apart. You’re not going to do anything that would send me away.”

He was certainly sure of himself, wasn’t he? But then, what defense did she have when she was here, snuggled into him like they’d known each other a lifetime, only a few days after he’d told her she was his mate?

She let out a sigh. “Know it all.” 

His chuckle made her lips twitch. “Thing is, we’re still transporting, but that’s pretty much it now. It’s not as lucrative as some of the business ventures the old Prez had us involved in.” When she stiffened, he relented, “Of course, that business involved transporting humans about. Jackson only involved some of his close allies, though, and they’re the ones who are stirring shit. They weren’t bothered about what kind of cargo we were moving, and they’re still not. They see dollar signs. That’s all that matters to them.”

“What are you going to do?”

Kiko tensed then turned around, moving over so he could face her. “Not traffic humans, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He cocked a brow at her. “And we both know you were.”

“Money talks,” she retorted stiffly. “And the MC is a business, even though I know now it’s more than just a biker gang.” When he just stared at her, she clarified, “You know—a place for you and the other bears to come together.”

His smile was warm, congratulatory. “A Clan,” he prompted. 

“Yes, this is the word I was looking for.” She frowned. “Is that why you all came together? Or was it motorcycles first then the fact you are all bears.”

He snorted. “No way. Bears before bikes, babe.”

Babe? She processed the word and then grinned, liking it. “I like this word, Kiko,” she told him, satisfaction lacing her words. “You maybe call me by that if you would like.”

A chuckle escaped him. “Sure, there are plenty of words I will call you over time.”

“Not nice ones?” she asked, scowling. “My mother used to call papa many things behind his back when she angered him.”

Laughing hard, he managed to splutter, “No! That isn’t what I meant. I meant more like, you know, the regular stuff—darling, honey, sweetheart.” His tone deepened. “Love.”

As these words were far more pleasing to her sensibilities than the ones she remembered her mama using, she nodded. “I like those ones too.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“You’re laughing at me,” she retorted, nudging him with a finger in his lower back. He let out a surprised yelp, and she demanded, “What’s so funny?”

“You!” he said around a snicker. “I just like the way you see the world. That’s all.”

He did? “Well, I suppose it’s a good thing, isn’t it? If you’re stuck with me.”

“There’s no being stuck, babe.” This time, he rolled over fully, not just peering over his shoulder at her. When she was bang in the middle of his attention, he reached up and cupped her cheek, then whispered, “I would never let you go if I had a say in it, Mischa. It kills me when you leave the compound because I want to keep you safe, and I need to know you’re okay.” He sucked in a breath. “I need to ask you for a favor.”

His possessiveness should have concerned her, but she couldn’t stress about it because in the last five days, he’d left the clubhouse on every single one of them—doing only God knew what. She hadn’t been able to breathe easily until he’d returned home, so she could well understand why he was scared for her. 

“Of course,” she told him softly, her tone reflecting the fact his confession hadn’t annoyed her. 

“I know you’re Ms. Independent—” 

She snorted at that. He’d been trying to buy her stuff, and she’d persisted in refusing. 

“—but,” he continued as though she hadn’t made a sound. “I would really appreciate it if you’d let me get you a phone. I won’t use it to check up on you. I won’t do anything to bug you with it. I’ll feel a whole helluva lot better if I know I can call you whenever I’m worried about you.”

Considering the fact that it had been a long time since anyone had checked up on her, and his need should have irked her, it actually didn’t. How could it?

He cared. 

She let the wonder of that sink through her a second then murmured again, “Of course.”

Kiko released a relieved sigh. “Thank you.”

“It’s nothing,” she told him, meaning it. “If it makes you feel better, that is for the good. I know how I feel when you leave this place, and I don’t know when you’re coming back.” Or, more importantly, if he was coming back. 

Before the fear could settle in, he frowned at her. “I will always come back for you, Mischa. Always.” 

“You promise?”

“I told you before. I do more than that. I swear my life on it. I would never leave you. I’d die first.”

His oath was solemn, perhaps graver than required, but it soothed her as nothing else could. 

Kiko’s intensity was what consistently won her over. The very fact he could make such vows without having to have his arm pulled, that he made them and meant them, let her feel at ease about the depth of her feelings for him. If she was in over her head, then he was too. 

With their faces so close, she could feel his breath on her chin. He was staring into her eyes, giving her no quarter, not letting her pull away, but the truth was, she didn’t want to. 

She liked this closeness. It was a need that was steadily increasing with every passing day, a desire to be near him, to never be far. 

If she hadn’t experienced it herself, she would never have believed it. Despite all that had happened to her, she liked her independence. She liked to come and go as she wanted, even if coming and going involved being scared when men approached her. It was something she’d always managed to maintain, though she had to duck her shoulders to cloak the size of her breasts and duck behind her bangs to hide her face. She only allowed herself that luxury if she still went out and about. 

It should have irked her that she liked being close to him when she could, but it didn’t. Instead, it added to her sense of comfort. 

Being with Kiko was becoming as vital as oxygen. 

“I wish...” She closed her eyes, letting the thought trail off with a quick head shake. 

“What? What do you wish?” he asked, as always, eager to understand her even if she herself knew she made no sense. 

“I wish things were different.” She felt him stiffen up and sighed, knowing she’d hurt him without meaning to. Quickly, she amended her statement, “I wish I was different.”

“Why? You’re perfect.”

The way he said it made her smile because he meant it, every crazy word of it. 

To him, she was perfect. 

She, who had so many flaws and neuroses and crazy ticks that she would be a psychologist’s wet dream. It made no sense, and yet, it made perfect sense. 

Didn’t she accept him, warts and all?

She knew he dealt drugs. She knew that he transported worse than that. There were arms in some of his ‘shipments’. The only thing he didn’t seem to deal in was human flesh—something Mars as Prez had put a stop to. 

He wasn’t the man her Baba would have wanted for her. In fact, if she even knew what she was looking to mate herself to, undoubtedly her grandmama would have told her to run like the hounds of hell were at her heels. And yet, she would be running away from the best thing that had ever happened to her. 

She knew that. 

And so, she adapted. 

This was a new world in so many ways for her. She had to embrace the differences rather than shun them. 

“Thank you for thinking I’m perfect,” she whispered eventually, looking deep into his creamy blue-green eyes. They swirled with emotion, feelings that were heartfelt and aimed utterly her way. “I just... I know I’m not. I want things from you, Kiko. So many things.” She sighed, feeling needs that were alien and yet familiar course through her. She knew what she wanted, but she expected no man to give it to her. 

Not even her mate.

“Like what?” he asked gently. “Talk to me, Mischa. How can I understand if you don’t explain it to me?”

She grimaced. “Some things aren’t all that easy to explain, Kiko!”

“You can tell me anything. I won’t judge. My bear... He might get possessive, but I can control him. Where you’re concerned, he’s on hair trigger, but I’m stronger than I look.”

That had her snorting. “You look ridiculously strong, so I don’t know how you think you look.”

He jerked a shoulder. “That’s beside the point, and you know it. Come on, Mischa. Talk to me.”

She gulped then ducked her gaze, because if she was going to share, she couldn’t do it while staring him square in the eye. “Sometimes, I get these feelings for you, Kiko. I know what they are, but I’m frightened of them. I know what they’ll represent to you, and I don’t know if I’m ready for that.” The confession had her shivering a little with the relief that came after revealing that to him. 

“What kind of feelings, Mischa? I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

Her eyes popped open. She gawked at him a little in stunned surprise. How could he not know what she meant? 

Uncertain if he was just getting her to spell out the obvious, she studied him a little suspiciously at first. Then, realizing he just looked confused, she confessed once more. “I need you. My body craves yours. But my head is...” She bit her lip and looked up at him. “Do you understand what I mean?”

He looked a little stunned by her revelation. She wasn’t sure why. She’d seen him masturbating at least twice a day. He always tried to sneak it, but she knew what he was doing—at nighttime after he showered, in the morning before he brushed his teeth. It was like clockwork. 

She wasn’t sure how she knew. 

She thought it could have been something to do with the mate bond linking them, because she didn’t hear or see anything. There was no outside reason for her to be aware of what he was doing, but internally was a different matter entirely. 

She knew, knew, with every fiber of her being that he was touching himself. And when he brought himself to climax, she knew the exact moment. She felt it in her core and burned with a need of her own. 

She thought that was why these needs of hers were suddenly springing up when before, she’d always been able to ignore them, preferring to avoid them rather than handle them and the muss and fuss that came with having a man in her life—one who would have to know her past to understand the way she was. 

But with Kiko, there was no muss and certainly no fuss. 

He treated her with an ease that came of knowing someone for a hellishly long time. And Mischa? Mischa felt a peace with him that she had only known with a handful of people in her life—her grandparents and father. 

He cleared his throat, dragging her from the craziness of her thoughts, and asked, “You want me?”

There was a dulled edge to his tone that had her frowning, but she nodded, needing to get it off her chest at last. 

Once she made that slight gesture, he let out a huge whoosh of air. His hand shot out, hovered over her belly, then shot back into his side. His fingers flared wide, as though he longed to touch her but knew that he had to act with caution, and she had to admit, she admired his control. He acted out of instinct then immediately remembered and sought to rectify his mistake. 

God, the man’s strength was astonishing. 

He was still a second then murmured, “Do you know how long I’ve waited for you to say those words?”

Her top lip quirked up. “No, but I can guess. Sixty-three days and a few hours, right?”

“Make that around eighteen hours. The minute I saw you, I knew what you were to me. I knew what we were to each other. And I knew, even though it nearly broke my fucking heart, that I couldn’t do anything about it. That I couldn’t act on it because you wouldn’t be interested in anything I had to offer you. Not at that point. I’ve spent each and every day terrified that you were going to run off like the other women, terrified that I was going to lose you before I even had you.” He blew out a shuddery breath. “I can tell you’re scared about wanting me. So, how should we go about helping you get to the next step?”

She bit her lip and let her glance sweep over him. “I don’t know.” Even as she said the words, she knew what she wanted but didn’t dare ask. 

He reached for her hand, pressed her fingers firmly against his chest, “You can tell me, Mischa. You don’t have to worry about sharing anything with me.”

Closing her eyes, she gulped and then admitted, “I’d like to touch you. Get used to you that way if in no other.”

“I’m yours, Mischa. You can do what you want to me. If it helps you, it helps us. That’s all I want—for you to find a way to heal yourself... And we’ll do whatever we have to for that to happen.”

“I was very lucky when fate matched me with you, wasn’t I?” she murmured softly, reaching up to cup his jaw. He tilted his head into her hand, nuzzling into her a little. 

“I was the lucky one. And it was fate. It was the Goddesses.”

She cocked a brow. “The Goddesses?”

“Yup, but that discussion can be for another time. Have your wicked way with me, Mischa. I’m all yours.”

She bit her lip at that declaration, both terrified and turned on. It was the latter that won, beating the former into submission by a mile. He lay back, arms and legs akimbo, and what a sight he made. He took her fool breath away. 

He was toned and taut, lean and long, with muscles on top of muscles, which were topped with golden skin covered in ink. His chest was bare, but his arms were full of designs. There were at least two bears roaring and growling at one another, done with a finesse that was astonishing. They weren’t just ink but art. Real art. The bristling fur on each bear’s scruff was immaculately detailed, standing up just so, until it felt like she could feel the aggression darting between one another. 

He wore boxers which were currently tented. When he saw where she was looking, he shrugged, triggering a play of muscle that was perfectly choreographed and did the craziest things to her insides. Wow. This man was hers. What was that about? 

She shook her head at her own luck and then returned her attention where it needed to be. Him. Biting her lip, Mischa trailed a finger down the center line of his abs. His skin immediately goose-fleshed, and she peered up at him, entranced by the sight of his heavily lidded eyes, eyes which almost seemed to glow with the desire he felt for her. 

‘’You really want me, don't you?’’ she half breathed, feeling a little incredulous at the wonder in his gaze. ‘’Even though...’’ Her voice trailed off, unwilling to discuss a memory that could ruin this moment. 

He curled up onto his forearms, making all those muscles move again. She had no idea that men actually looked like that in real life, so he transfixed her with his very unique and masculine beauty. 

‘’Hey,’’ he told her, interrupting her gawking. ‘’That's in the past. What we are today, who we are today, is all that matters. The past is only on the table because it has the potential to hurt you today, which is why I want to do this. I want you to explore me. I want you to touch me and learn me. I want to do anything that makes you happy and comfortable, Mischa, that's all that counts to me.’’

She couldn't help but sigh at that. Holy hell. Could this man be any more perfect? 

His very selflessness made her brave. She let her hand settle on his stomach, allowed her fingers to spread wide and then trailed them down the lean length of his torso. He was sculpted like Michelangelo’s finest, and again, that splendor was laying before her, supine, open to anything and everything she wanted to do to him. 

It beggared belief.

He always wore boxers. Always. Ever since that first time she’d seen him jerking off in the bathroom, she had yet to see his dick again, but she always felt it. If they moved at night out of the positions they awoke in, her spooning him, she usually felt the nudge of his shaft against her thigh or her leg, sometimes the bottom of her back or her belly. Now, hidden beneath the cotton blend, was something she’d never really imagined wanting to explore again. 

That day, those men had taken more than just her innocence. They’d taken away the burgeoning desires a young woman had started to experience as a teenager. They’d robbed her of many years of innocent exploration. It seemed like Kiko was going to get the whole gamut of those lost years because she could feel excitement start to throb through her. Her heart beat in her ears, and her hand shook as she tugged at the waistband of his covering. 

Sucking in a deep breath of air, she dragged it down and over his hips, letting the fabric collect at his upper thighs. With that deep inhalation, she’d closed her eyes, but now, she opened them. What she saw had her swallowing down a moan.

He was thick. He was big. And he was long. 

She knew that already thanks to spying him in the bathroom, but seeing it, literally in the flesh, when it was all pointed at her? Jesus. 

Licking her lips, she trailed a finger from the tip right down to the base. It was easy as it lay flat against his belly, throbbing a little but otherwise inert. At her move, however, he sucked in a sharp breath, and the muscles in his torso shuffled again. When her gaze flashed up to his face, his features were contorted, and his eyes were closed. 

He looked like a drowning man praying for a savior. 

The notion had her hiding a grin. It was empowering to see his reaction to her. That simple touch, and he was already locking down his control as though he was inside her. 

Feeling awash with triumph, she decided to lose herself in this, to free herself to do whatever the hell she wanted. He was offering. Why shouldn’t she accept? He was her mate, after all. She could feel the clinging vines of that bond every day, had done so ever since they’d first found one another, but it was different now she was aware of the truth. The link between them was strengthening every day. In ways she couldn’t quantify, so she knew he wasn’t lying about this, he truly was at her mercy. 

That being said, she did what she’d wanted to do when she’d seen him tugging at his shaft all those days ago… She dropped her head and swirled at the head of his cock. Liquid had gathered there, and it was salty and earthy on her tongue. His groan was strangled, and with another grin, she popped him into her mouth to explore the fascinating shininess of the tip. It was smooth and soft, silky and velvety, yet with a strange hardness too. She couldn’t describe the contradiction. She was just grateful she was experiencing it. 

Beside his hips, his hands had clawed the sheets, and from her field of vision, she could see his knuckles straining as he fought his nature. She knew it was probably hard for him not to grab hold of her head and force her down onto his shaft. Men were aggressive by nature, and he shared his soul with a bear—that only doubled the risk of violence. But somehow, she knew he would never hurt her, that he would hurt himself before he ever tried to do wrong by her. 

And wasn’t that a turn on? 

This huge beast of a man was like a pussycat for her. She wasn’t sure if that made her a cat whisperer or a lion tamer. Either way, it didn’t matter. It just made her feel fearless, and after so long being scared, that was one of the best feelings in the world. 

He was too big to take deeper, but it didn’t stop her from trying, and she slurped up the copious drops of pre-ejaculate that escaped into her mouth, enjoying and testing the resilient hardness that was all hers. 

Mischa knew she needed practice—a fact that was both disappointing and enthralling. She loved that she would need to explore him more but wanted to experience it all now, wanted the thick fullness between her lips, a chance to taste all of him. 

She shuddered, aroused by her own thoughts, and moved her mouth away. She was teasing him, inadvertently, but teasing all the same, and she couldn’t repay his generosity with suffering. 

Dipping her head, she licked at the crease where groin met thigh, and inhaled sharply through her nose. God, his smell! He was like the best cookie, the best ice cream, and the best candy all wrapped into one delicious breath. 

That innocent move seemed to trigger a response in him that went farther than sucking his dick had. She heard the sound of renting fabric, and her eyes widened at the sight of huge claws lodged into the mattress. 

Mischa peered up at him, saw he still looked pained, and that tension had overtaken every bit of him. She winced a little at the blood around his claws, the spaces where skin and whatever claw was made of—were they like human nails, made out of keratin?—met. The flesh was ragged, torn, droplets of blood oozing sickeningly here and there, staining the white sheets beneath him. The sinews in his hands, the tension between his knuckles, all of it led up to arms that were straining, a body that was heaving with the pressure she was forcing him to endure. 

And it was that word that triggered it. Force. He said he wanted this, that he wanted her to explore him, but she saw his suffering and hated herself for causing it. “This isn’t fair to you.” 

He shook his head at her gentle words, long strands of beautiful silk rubbing against the pillowcase as he physically rejected her words. “I’ve endured pain; this is ecstasy.” 

She wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be reassuring or not. It didn’t go far in making her happy though. Men. Were they so different from women? She frowned, staring down at him, then sighed. She knew he wouldn’t let her stop this. She knew he wanted her to learn him, to learn to be comfortable with him.

Truth was, she was as comfortable as she was going to get. It was a fact she’d been coming to terms with over the last few days, which meant it was a now or never moment. 

She could drag this out, be a coward, and have them both suffer, or she could try. Try to embrace a side of herself she’d been hiding from all these years. Try to explore these crazy feelings being in Kiko’s presence stirred up. 

Try was all she could do. And with him, she could do that. It no longer felt like an insurmountable task, because out of nowhere, this beacon of hope called Kiko had appeared. Though it was insane, and though his background was just as nutty, she trusted him to the core. Outside of family, she’d never had that before, but now, it enabled her to liberate herself from the shackles of her past. 

It didn’t stop her from taking a huge gulp, mind, when she decided to straddle him, but straddle him she did. Lifting her leg over him, though, frazzled her nerves. She’d taken to wearing his boxers too. They fit, but they were baggy on her and comfortable. She wasn’t sure why, because they were clean, but they smelled of him somehow, and she liked that—or at least, it was something she was growing to like. Beneath the loose fabric, however, the lips of her sex parted, and she was suddenly totally aware of what was happening down there. 

It stunned her to realize she was wet. 

The movement of shifting her leg had made the tiniest of drafts run along the length of her most intimate parts, and it was like a bolt of electricity through her body. The intensity stunned her, had her freezing in place for a handful of seconds as she got used to the notion that she was aroused. 

Expelling another shuddery breath, she stopped hovering and did what she’d been intending to do all along—straddle him properly. Only, when their sexes collided, it wasn’t what she’d been intending at all.

If anything, it was a thousand times worse and a thousand times better. 

She’d never known anything like it. Nothing at all. A shiver raced up her spine, urging her to fling her head back as the glory of the moment flooded all her synapses. 

It came to her then that she’d been born for this. 

Born to be with this man. 

Life had gotten in the way, changed her, but her experiences had been what urged her to make the horrendous trip to America in the first place. She wouldn’t be here, with this man, if her past hadn’t panned out exactly the way it had.

She wanted to question why it had all happened so painfully, but she couldn’t. Not now. Not when she realized what a gift she’d been presented. 

In a shaken voice, she whispered the only words that made any sense, “Claim me, Kiko.” 

His eyes flared wide at her soft declaration, and she saw the strain in those sea-green eyes of his. He was battling not only himself but the bear. The flashes of deep emerald that sparkled every few seconds were the beast, she knew, and at her words, that beautiful emerald took over. 

“Claim. You?” 

The words were said singly and on exhale. 

She felt his pain and winced at it then nodded. “I’m yours.” 

He gritted his teeth, shaking his head. “Can’t. Have to be inside you. Need you to do that.” He was gasping out the words, his throat nothing more than straining sinews that looked painful to behold. She’d never seen a man whose body was under such pressure, a pressure triggered by her. It beggared belief. “Can claim you once you’ve claimed me.”

Biting her lip, she accepted his words with a slight duck of her head. But he took her acquiescence and acted on it, finally freeing the sheets from his grasp and then reaching for the boxers she wore. In less than a second, they were in shreds, baring her pussy to him, every bit of her laid out for him to see. Stunned, she sat there, the tattered fabric of her underwear still clinging to the curves of her ass and hips. 

“You could have warned me,” she grumbled, staring down at herself. But for once, when she looked at that part of her, she didn’t feel shame. The spidery vines of distress weren’t there, a nasty reminder of a vicious mental scar… It was curiously freeing. 

She frowned, wondering why shame didn’t cling to her as it always did, but when she saw the way he was looking at her, Mischa couldn’t find it in her to care. 

His response was borderline comical. If his eyes could bug out anymore, they’d be on stalks. As it was, she hadn’t thought he could look more intense, but she’d been wrong. 

Before, he’d looked close to shifting. Now, explosion seemed imminent.

She folded her lips between her teeth, amused at the thought. Explosion? Of the best kind, she hoped, peering down at his cock and seeing the hot, throbbing monolith that burned an angry red as though the extremity itself was pissed at being denied. 

Taking pity on him and on it, Mischa reached for his shaft, freezing when he let out a hiss, his back arching at her touch, rocking his hips up and nudging against her. It was her turn to hiss, and she settled herself so that the parted lips of her sex were directly against his cock. The instant they connected there, dear God, it was like heaven on a platter. Hot, wet silk met velvet-covered steel, and sensation after sensation plunged her into a paradise of their making. 

The control was hers. She felt it flush through her as she started to, admittedly awkwardly, rock her pelvis back and forth. Each time his dick nudged her clit, she wanted to whimper, but she knew her sounds would only incite Kiko more, and she’d tortured the poor man enough. Biting her lip, clenching down on it with her teeth until the pain rivalled the pleasure, she let her body become used to the feel of his. 

And what an experience that was.

He was thick, separating the petals of her pussy even more, until the tender inner channel was weeping at the friction of his shaft against her. He was long, rubbing her clit with each motion and pulling at the entrance to her body with hungry entreaty on every caress. He was hard, making each caress of her clit feel like heaven and hell. The sloppy, slippery slide was like nothing she’d ever imagined, had never even thought possible for her, but she wanted it. Wanted every bit of it. 

When the haziness of her pleasure started to coalesce, forming into an entity she had no idea how to handle, she slowed down. She took a second to check in with him and saw that his claws were back and were burrowed into the mattress once more. Sweat beaded at his hairline, and his body was one big mass of tension. She looked at him, really looked at him, and knew she was ready. 

This time, on the downward rock, when his cock tugged at her slit, she stayed there. Reaching to grab the base of his cock, she worked hard to fit him to her and let out an irritated hiss when she couldn’t seem to get him inside. “Help, Kiko,” she panted, feeling the flush on her face and the scorch of the heat inside her. She was aflame, and she needed him to quench the fire.

Hunger filled her, until it was like she’d never eaten, until her entire body ached sustenance, a gift only he could provide. 

He grabbed her hand, reinforcing her grip with one of his, but then used his free fingers to torment her. They went straight to her clit before diving down to her gate. She moaned when he slid a digit inside, then let out a deeper one when he pushed another into her channel. It was tight, God, was it. The strain his fingers incited made her pussy weep in earnest, like it knew he was huge and needed all the help it could get to take all of him. He seemed to read her reaction because Kiko began a scissoring action that had her eyes opening wide and her lungs choking for air. 

What the hell was he doing to her?

She could feel the stretch, hissed at the burn, then cried out as he thumbed her clit, teasing her—pleasuring her and preparing her in one shot. Dear Lord, it was magic. 

Then, just when she felt like she was going to scream, he did this thing with those same heavenly torturous fingers. Curling them inward, in a come-here motion. Once, twice, three times. She burst. 

There was no pleasant way to describe the ecstasy that cascaded over her. 

It was like a fireworks display, a cacophonous sound that suddenly formed into an orchestral piece fit for the angels. 

It blinded her and deafened her. 

It robbed her of her senses and fortified them so that she felt every single ounce of pleasure he gave her, and then came a heavy fullness. She was lost, but her body wasn’t, and she knew he was filling her. With each and every firework bursting overhead, he took another inch and another inch until he was all the way inside, until she was, finally, his. But the pleasure didn’t dissipate. She experienced no pain at his invasion, because each thrust took her higher, until she felt like she was drowning in the glory of what he was making her experience. 

It was then she realized the prolonged orgasm was leading up to something. The claiming. 

She tore her eyes open, forced herself to be aware at last of what was going on. She saw he’d sat up, was looming close to her, and then she saw his eyes. 

All emerald. All Bear.

Then, she noticed his fangs, the tilt of his head as he stared at her like she was prey and he was predator, and before fear could settle in her, he struck. 

And when an agonizing pain battled with a glorious surfeit of wonder, her mind surrendered, and she didn’t remember anything after that.