Candice woke to the sound of the door slapping open. She shot out of bed and hurried downstairs, expecting to find Wyatt in the living room. What she found startled a scream from her lips. The faces of the two men snapped to her direction, and she froze.

“There she is, the dirty shifter lover. Get her,” said a familiar voice. He was the one from the grove, the one who’d shot the bear.

The second man grabbed her, his face a mask of disgust and rage.

“Let me go,” she wailed.

“You’re coming with us,” the first man said.

“Why are you doing this?” she screamed, gasping, as they dragged her outside.

“You’re a dirty shifter lover,” the second man said. “First we deal with you, then we get your boyfriend.”

“What are you talking about?” she cried as they pushed her into the back of a van. “Wyatt isn’t a shifter.”

“So he hasn’t told you yet, huh? Typical shifter manipulation. Using a human woman. He would probably turn you without your permission. Then you’d be one of them.”

“What makes you think Wyatt’s a shifter?” she wailed. They tied her hands together with a bungee cord and shoved a dirty rag in her mouth.

“Let’s just say, we know all the shifters in town. We have access to the clan’s meeting records. Believe me, your boyfriend is one of them.”

Hurt and rage filled Candice as tears slid down her face. Was Wyatt really a shifter? Why hadn’t he told her? She didn’t have anything against shifters. The opposite, in fact. She believed people should leave them alone, and they should be allowed to live in peace.

After seeing a shifter murdered before her eyes, she had the greatest empathy for their struggle. She didn’t want to see another shifter hurt or brutalized for something they had no control over. Every person deserved to be treated with respect and equality, even people who were able to transform into animals.

But the fact that Wyatt hadn’t told her that he was a shifter really hurt her. It wasn’t that she thought differently of him. It didn’t matter to her that he was a shifter. It was actually rather fascinating. What hurt her was the fact that he hadn’t trusted her enough to share it with her.

After everything they’d been through together, after he’d had her paintings put up in a gallery, saved her from attackers, and sheltered her in his home, why hadn’t he trusted her enough to share his true self with her?

The van bumped through the woods, and fear coiled in Candice’s chest. What did they plan to do with her? They’d gone so far as to murder a man for being a shifter. There wasn’t much they weren’t willing to do in their sick quest to rid the world of people they believed below them.

Finally, the van came to a stop, and they pushed open the door. They were out in the woods somewhere Candice didn’t recognize. The men pulled her out of the van and yanked her across a gravel driveway.

They came to the front door of a rustic hunting cabin and pushed her inside. She dropped onto a dusty, red couch that smelled of mold. Candice told herself not to cry, but the tears wouldn’t stop rolling down her face.

The men opened a cooler full of beer and opened the cans with a loud crack before they began to chug. She noticed one of them had a pistol tucked in the waist of his jeans at the small of his back.

The second picked up a shotgun from a rack beside the door and began waving it around as the two drank their beer. “What should we do with her?” the one with the pistol asked. He pulled the pistol out of his waistband and pressed the barrel under Candice’s chin, lifting her face to look in her eyes.

“I say we shoot her and bury her in the woods,” the one with the shotgun said. Candice blanched at that, squeezing her eyes closed as hard as she could.

Her heart pounded furiously, and all her thoughts focused on Wyatt finding her. She didn’t care that he was a shifter. All she wanted was him. These psychopaths deserved to be put away for a long time. How could they think that they were somehow better than peaceful men and women who happened to be able to transform into animals? It just wasn’t right.

“I say we have a little fun first,” the one with the pistol said. “Look at her. She’s so cute and curvy. A shifter took my woman. I think it’s only fair that I take a shifter’s woman back.”

Candice whimpered under the disgusting gag in her mouth, her body shaking as the man looked down at her exposed cleavage.