The sound and smell of sizzling bacon woke me from slumber. Beside me, Isisa mumbled in her sleep and curled closer in against my side. Morning cuddles made for the best cuddles, so I nuzzled my face into the crook of her neck.

“Nandi is making breakfast. Time to wake up.”

“Don’t wanna,” Isisa grumbled.

“C’mon, sleepyhead.” My fingers tickled up her rib cage until she squealed with laughter. It wasn’t often that she was in the snuggly kind of mood.

“All right, I’m up, I’m up!”

Before I could crawl from bed, Isisa laced her fingers in my hair and drew me down to the disheveled sheets. The sweet surrender of her kisses, her exploring fingers, and her loving mouth were all I needed to overcome the traumatic memories of the previous night.

The mattress dipped and bedsprings creaked beneath Nandi’s weight as she joined us. Despite the scent of bacon and spiced maple syrup, breakfast became the furthest thing from my mind.

By the time we rolled out of bed and shambled into the kitchen, our bacon had gone cool. Isisa warmed the bacon in the skillet while I settled on a stool in the breakfast nook and admired her long legs. She had pulled on a T-shirt and panties but nothing else. As far as I was concerned, there weren’t a sexier pair of legs in the world.

My gaze drifted from Isisa to Nandi. Out of the three of us, she had the best tits, hands down, and her snug tank top showed them off. She glanced over and grinned, as if sensing my thoughts, so I blew a kiss and winked at her. She blew one back in return then fetched three coffee mugs from the cabinet.

“So, new game plan,” Isisa declared. “No more bars.”

I nodded. “No more bars. If we want a man who deserves us, we need to search for him in better places.”

“Libraries?” Nandi suggested. She set out creamer and sugar on the counter beside the mugs.

“That’ll work for a book nerd like you, but I want someone who won’t study his phone the entire time we’re at the Museum of Fine Arts,” Isisa muttered.

Nandi scrunched her nose. “I like art.”

“You had your face in your phone the whole time, like you were glued to it.”

“I was taking photos for Instagram!”

While they argued over the museum and our last date, I dreamed up the ideal man and a host of perfect traits from a love for his family to a fondness for fishing, swimming, and hiking. “I don’t care about art or books, though I suppose it would be nice to have a man with a taste for camping and hiking. A hunter maybe. Someone who wouldn’t freak about having a lioness take down a deer in front of him,” I said.

Isisa pursed her lips. “An athletic hunter would be nice.” She slid a plate in front of me then served Nandi before taking her own seat. “So, we want a nerdy outdoorsman with class and balls.” She snorted. “Yeah. That’s really going to happen.”

“It could happen,” I pointed out. “I mean, technically we just described Ian, but he’s taken.”

Nandi snuck a bacon slice from Isisa’s plate. “Then we still need to figure out where to meet such a man. Maybe…”

“Maybe what?” I asked, speaking around a mouthful of eggs.

Nandi dropped her gaze to her lap. “Maybe we should take a trip to Africa. Find another lion.”

Before I could reject the idea, Isisa dropped her fork and slammed her palm against the counter surface. “No.”

Nandi flinched back from the sharp slap of skin against marble and stared at her.

Isisa’s reaction didn’t come as a surprise, her experience with lion shifters different from mine. My father had been a good man, and he’d been slaughtered protecting my mother and me from hunters seeking skins and trophies. Isisa’s father had been a monster who terrorized them and ruled his pride with an iron fist.

For a while, we ate in silence, neither talking nor looking at one another. When she finished eating, Nandi shoved her plate into the dishwasher and went to the office to write.

“You shouldn’t have yelled at her,” I said.

“I didn’t even raise my voice.”

“You have this thing where you yell without yelling. Plus, you know, the whole smacking thing.”

An uneasy, fleeting smile came to Isisa’s face. “I suppose I owe her an apology. But you have to admit it would be nice if she’d let this shifter thing go.”

“Why? Isisa, my love, all lions are not the same. Your father was a bastard, but there are some out there who care for their prides.”

“We don’t need a man to come rule over us like some king of the urban jungle,” Isisa spit out bitterly. “I don’t want a lion shifter. I don’t want any shifter.”

“I respect your feelings, and I love you so much, but I think we’re making a mist—” Providing the interruption we needed, Disney music spilled from the cell phone I’d abandoned on the kitchen counter. Taylor had noticed my phone unattended a few months ago and changed my ringtone to The Lion King’s opening theme. I swept it up and peered at the caller ID. Ian.

Isisa’s eyes raised to my face. “Go ahead. I need more coffee if we’re going to talk about this and come to any kind of compromise.”

“All right. I’ll be right back then. It’s probably Ian checking in on me.” I kissed her cheek. Eager for fresh air and the privacy to discuss the previous night’s events if Ian needed me to rehash what happened, I crossed the floor and hurried onto the lower-level balcony. We had four in all: an enormous deck located off the living room, another off the downstairs bedroom, one off Nandi’s office, and a fourth located from the master bedroom. Once the door shut behind me, I squinted against the sun and raised the phone to my ear. The tang of chlorine and water reached my nose, wafting off the surface of our private pool. “Morning, Ian.”

“Morning, sweetheart. I figured you’d be awake by now. How are you? Do you need anything? Is there anything Leigh or I can do for you?”

Not only had Ian been the commander of our interbranch military operative team, but in the years since we’d all left the active service, he’d been a good friend to all of us. More than a friend. A father figure, a brother, whatever the situation called for whenever we needed him.

If I hadn’t handled last night’s situation, Ian would have peeled out of his driveway and blown down the highways. “As good as anyone can be after escaping an attack. I’m good. Really. The only thing they injured were my knuckles when I beat them.”

A low chuckle spilled through the phone. “Good. Is this a good time to discuss the details?”

I stole a look at Isisa through the blinds. She’d poured another cup of coffee and was reading the nutrition information on the back of some zucchini banana chocolate chip muffins. “As good as any. No one’s listening, so I can be candid.”

“All right. Do you want the good news or bad news first?”

“Good,” I said, lowering to a deck chair.

“My associates with HPD took in those two guys you left in the apartment, and of course, those two rolled over and squealed on their pal. He’s in lockup along with them.” A quiet lull passed between us before Ian spoke again. “Plenty of evidence found on scene.”

“Yeah, I saw.”

“Christ, Sasha, how’d you end up there anyway?”

Unashamed, but certainly not proud of the personal risks we’d all taken during our most desperate moments, I told Ian about my visit to the club. He listened without interruption or condescension, even after I told him we’d done it many times before without peril.

“You know what?” Ian finally said after a long, awkward silence.

“What?” Great. Now he’d probably tell me how irresponsibly I behaved, or worse, that I’d disappointed him.

“You should have tossed the damn drink in his face.”

My held breath escaped with a laugh. “If I did, we might have lost our evidence.”

“True. God knows those three needed the ass kicking you gave them. Anyway, my acquaintance recovered the video and filed it into evidence, but if you ask for it, I’ll make it disappear. The choice is yours.”

With the phone cradled between my ear and shoulder, I settled on one of the deck chairs and considered his offer. Involvement in a sexual assault case was the last thing I’d wanted. It could have gone differently, but it hadn’t, because the gifts I’d inherited from my parents had provided all the protection a gun couldn’t have provided.

“Think about it and get back with me. No rush.”

“Thanks, Ian. So, what happens now?”

“The police try to identify any of the young women in the videos and compare the information with recent sexual crimes. They’ll test genetic data from the perps against a few dozen unsolved rape kits.”

The thought made me shudder, but I hoped the investigation would bring a modicum of closure to other women out there in the world. Girls like Kerry.

“Anyway, if you need to talk to anyone, Leigh and I are here for you. Don’t forget that, okay?”

“I’m okay. Honest. As difficult as it was to leave them alive with their throats intact, I made the choice to drink a spiked cocktail. I’m glad they’re off the streets. Now what’s the bad news?”

“That this is bigger than those three idiots, but they had no useful information to offer. They received cash and mailed digital copies of their videos, stored on flash drives. When we tried to pull up the owner of the PO Box, we got squat. The box was registered to an elderly man who died two years ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll keep looking at it on our end, and I’ll let you know if I find out anything.”

Ian and I chatted for a short while longer before he made me promise to visit him, Leigh, and their daughter Sophia soon. When I ended the call, Isisa stepped outside and joined me on the low seat.

“Good news?”

“All three of them are in custody. Ian wants to know if I’ll come forward.”

“Will you?”

“I haven’t decided yet. Did you apologize to Nandi?”

“Not yet. I will in a moment.”

Despite the enormity of the unfinished conversation lingering between us, we sat in silence for a while, both of us gazing down at the world below the edge of the balcony railing. We lived in an enormous high-rise located at the edge of the Discovery Green, walking distance from Minute Maid Park and St. Raphael’s Hospital where I worked. Prime real estate, enormous mortgage payments each month, and absolute beauty that made the sacrifices we’d made to get there worth it.

“We didn’t want to argue with you. All we tried to say is that it would be prudent to give the idea due consideration.”

Isisa’s jaw clenched, but she dipped her chin. Her spine curved, and the eye contact between us ended. “Fine. If that’s what you two need.”

“I want what’s best for all of us. We’re not going to let some guy come between us. Ever. I’m not saying we have to go find a lion, only that we don’t rule them out from the start.”

Wrapping my arms around her didn’t ease the tension in her body. It remained long enough for each beat of my heart to echo like a sledgehammer strike between my ears. Slowly, muscle by muscle, she relaxed in my arms until she hugged me close with her head on my shoulder.

“Times are different now. If he’s some asshole who tries to put his hands on any of us, we’ll kick his ass. All right?”

Isisa tucked her face beneath my throat. “All right.”

My mother had smuggled my twin brother Sebastian and me from South Africa days after Dad was killed by trophy hunters coveting our pride’s white pelts. He’d been a good man, a just and fair leader who ruled with love, but the moment another alpha moved in on his territory, life had become absolute chaos.

Sometimes lion alphas gave in to their bestial natures, and they’d claim the widowed females of slain pride leaders as if they were markers on a poker table. Some mothers fled with her babies, but the cruel reality was that they often had no resources available to them.

The worst of those terrible practices ended with Mum’s generation. Eventually, lionesses who lost a mate banded together to defend their little ones in teams. They escaped to human cities, found jobs wherever they could as maids, cooks, and even nannies. They worked their fingers to the bone in factories and raised their offspring in cramped flats away from the wild plains we loved.

Some of them, like my mum, relocated to different countries altogether. I owed everything to her, a wonderful childhood and a successful adulthood, because she’d been the first role model in my life to teach me there was always a way forward if I was willing to work to find it.

“He won’t be like your father. I promise. It won’t ever come to that. You may think Nandi is the one we have to protect, but if someone tried to hurt you, her claws would come out. We’d never choose a man over you. Ever.” Punctuating words with kisses eased the remaining tension in her shoulders.

Isisa had lived a different childhood. I met her in the summer after my thirteenth birthday. Five years had passed since my mother had fled with me and my twin brother to America, and in that time, she’d worked toward gaining citizenship.

Our mothers met through a mutual friend, a leader of a secret support group for widowed shifters. Isisa’s mother had entered the country illegally, unlike us, and needed shelter after escaping an abusive husband planning to sell their eleven-year-old daughter to another pride leader. Isisa had been the intended child bride. We housed them for five years until her mother was on her feet again, growing closer the entire time.

I didn’t realize I’d fallen in love with my best friend until the day I left for boot camp.

As for my mother, now that she’d aged out of her breeding years, she’d accepted a man outside of our species—the sexiest Siberian tiger shifter I ever laid eyes on. Every so often, Mom and my silver fox stepdad booked a room at the nearby Ritz Carlton and showed up to visit over the weekend. They took us out to dinner, and I showed them the local nightlife. Nikolai loved the House of Blues, and we had one within walking distance.

“Fine. I won’t rule them out,” she relented. “But don’t expect me to dance for joy, either.”

“But you shake your ass so nicely,” I teased.

“Smart-ass.” She grinned and leaned in for a kiss.

“We good?”

“We’re good,” she agreed. “Now I’ll go ensure the same with Nandi.”

“Better take a peace offering.”

Isisa hesitated. “Brownies bad or ice cream bad?”

Considering Nandi had abandoned her recent diet attempts and fallen off the sweets wagon, there probably wasn’t any such thing as overkill. “I’d suggest brownies a la mode, just to be safe.”