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THE BEAR'S

SECRET SURROGATE

BEARS WITH MONEY BOOK 2

AMY STAR

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About This Book

When billionaire bachelor Atticus Grevieux felt his secret identity as a werebear was about to be exposed he decided to take drastic action.

He knew he had to do whatever it took to appear as human as possible.

And that meant starting a family. That meant having a child.

So he hired young Casey Madison to be the secret surrogate to his future baby.

However, when Atticus found himself getting closer to Casey than he intended he knew he had no choice but to tell her his secret.

And once Casey knew the truth, life as they both knew it would be changed forever...

This is a fun standalone werebear romance full of adult scenes, furry heroes, action and mystery. Perfect for a good afternoon/evening read!

ELEVEN

CHAPTER ONE

When one has a great deal of money, it could be rather stunning how quickly people were willing to spread rumors. It could be even more amazing just how outlandish some of the rumors could be. People would invent no end of imaginary skeletons in a rich person’s closet if it would make them feel better about themselves.

Having grown up in a very wealthy family, Atticus Grevieux was used to it. Some were more bland (mistresses, shady business deals, theft). All unsubstantiated, of course, and they always fell off the radar fairly quickly. Others were a bit more entertaining -- midnight rituals, haunted houses, curses, all kinds of wild ideas, generally trying to explain away why he still hadn’t secured a legacy even at the age of thirty-two, and he usually found it pretty funny.

At least, he found it funny until someone came a bit too close to the truth.

He liked to troll conspiracy forums from time to time, where he could keep up to date on the strangest parts of the rumor mill. On occasion, they were good for a laugh. And when someone suggested that maybe he was some sort of monster and that was why the bloodline hadn’t continued yet, he laughed it off at first. Just about anyone could be called a monster in the present day, and it rarely actually meant anything.

Even so, he kept an eye on that thread, so he noticed when people started talking specifically about bears.

There were even pictures. Pictures of him in his bear form. All very blurry and far away, but still too close to what was recognizably his car or his yard or his house. (Ordinarily, he might assume someone was stalking him, but he had found paparazzi in some very inconvenient places, so the proximity to his house didn’t actually stand out as particularly unusual.)

A few people tried to play the voice of reason, pointing out that he lived far enough out of the city that a bear could just live in the area. But enough people were throwing around the idea of Atticus being a bear for him to take notice, some of them even tossing around the idea that he hadn’t worked on continuing the family legacy because he needed to bite and change someone to breed.

They were partially right. He couldn’t actually change anyone else into a were-bear. It didn’t work that way. But he didn’t want to spring a surprise like that on a regular human woman. He wasn’t exactly thrilled at the idea of telling someone he was a were-bear when he had no proof that she wouldn’t run screaming into the night to tell as many people as she could.

In theory, he could have simply had a child with another were-bear, but there were a few problems with that. There was one other family of were-bears in the area: the Croasdells. However, one of his older cousins had already married into the family two decades back, and while it wasn’t technically incest, it felt a bit too much like incest for him to be comfortable with it, and he knew it would set off some new and substantially more stubborn rumors. (Besides, he wasn’t even sure if the Croasdells had any female heirs.)

He thought that if he just ignored it, the rumors would go away. Eventually, that particular thread would die, and it wouldn’t be a big deal. He could look back on it and laugh.

But that wasn’t what happened. The voices of reason got tired of arguing and abandoned the topic, leaving it to fill up more and more with people who decided it seemed perfectly logical that Atticus Grevieux might be a bear.

If that hadn’t actually been the truth, then he wouldn’t have cared, but as it was, complete strangers were dancing too close to the truth for him to be comfortable. Were-creatures had too many bad experiences with regular humans to just be open and honest about it. If too many people started to believe the rumors, then it could very well lead to other were-creatures getting hurt or, more importantly, trying to hurt Atticus.

Granted, the vast majority of the rumors seemed to hinge upon figuring out why he hadn’t started a family. He supposed it made sense. Basically, everyone else in his family had married off and started having children—preserving the were-bear bloodline or something like that—so it would make sense that people would notice if he hadn’t. To be frank, he just liked his house too much to pick up and move.

But considering that, he supposed if he had a kid, then the rumors would probably not stop because rumors never stopped entirely, just based on how many people were still convinced that the moon landing hadn’t happened, but they would quiet down, if nothing else.

He didn’t actually have anyone he was particularly interested in having children with, though, nor did he know of anyone particularly interested in having children with him. Luckily, he had a great deal of money. Billions of dollars, in fact; he was a very successful businessman. And a lot could be done with a great deal of money.

He had a few phone calls he needed to make.

When it came to money, there was a lot that Casey Madison was willing to do. She liked to think of it as self-defense. She had been homeless for a time. Not direly so, she supposed—she had couch-surfed in a friend’s run-down little apartment until she managed to scrape up enough to pay rent on her own run-down little apartment—but the point still stood. Even with a roof over her head, she rarely felt particularly stable, like the ground was just waiting to fall away under her feet if she breathed wrong.

When a man in a very expensive suit met her as she was leaving work, closing the door on the restaurant’s noise, maneuvering carefully with her rollerblades dangling around her neck, she nearly panicked at first. She didn’t remember being late on any bills. She was pretty sure she had paid all of her taxes. And she was pretty sure government officials would meet her at her apartment rather than her job. So, who was he, and what did he want?

He didn’t tell her his name. It wasn’t important just then, apparently. He simply had a deal to offer her on behalf of Atticus Grevieux.

Casey knew the name. If something in the tri-state area involved the words “power” or “refinery,” then it seemed like his family probably owned it. It led to the sort of money that nearly had Casey drooling just at the very idea of it.

“Recent… social matters,” the scary man in the very expensive suit spoke carefully, “have made it rather important that he at least puts up the appearance of starting a family.”

“I don’t know what that has to do with me,” Casey mumbled, fidgeting from one foot to the other and picking at the aglet of one of her rollerblade laces.

“After very carefully looking into several potential candidates for him, we’ve agreed that you would be a good option,” the man explained simply, linking his hands together behind his back and shrugging one shoulder easily, as if he was just discussing the weather over coffee. “You marry him and have a child, and you will never need to worry about money, security, or anything else ever again. You will want for nothing.”

“There has to be a catch,” Casey returned cautiously, twining one lace tightly around her finger. “There has to be more to it than that.”

The man looked strangely amused for a moment before he cleared his throat. “Should you agree,” he replied slowly, “you would be marrying a man you don’t know and having his child, and there is no guarantee on how the two of you will get on with each other.” His voice dropped to a stage whisper as he added, “Most people would consider all that to be a catch.”

Casey’s face heated, and her hands curled into fists. “Do not patronize me,” she snapped, eyes narrowing as she scowled up at him. “You are asking for a favor from me. You don’t get to be a shit heel.”

He held his hands up in front of himself as if in surrender. “My apologies. You’re right; that was rude.”

Casey huffed out a sigh and folded her arms over her chest, her shoulders rounding defensively. “And what if we don’t get on?” she asked expectantly. “What if we can’t stand each other?”

“You would be free to leave,” the man explained, waving the matter off with a flick of his wrist.

“But…?” Casey asked, tapping one foot on the sidewalk.

He blinked and cocked his head at her. “But… nothing. That’s it. Well, mostly. The child would be left in Mr. Grevieux’s care, but you would have visitation if you wanted it, and he would continue to support you monetarily. As you said, this would be a favor from you, and a very large one at that. Mr. Grevieux is very good at paying back his favors.”

Casey hunched further, her fingers tightening around her upper arms. She stared down at the sidewalk between her toes as her thoughts raced.

After a moment, the man cleared his throat and pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket. He handed it over with a slightly unnecessary flourish, and when Casey took it, it simply had a phone number on it.

“You think about this,” he told her, his voice gentling just slightly. “And when you come to a decision, you call Atticus,” he pointed to the card, “and let him know what your answer is.”

She nodded stiffly, holding the card so tightly that one of the edges began to wrinkle. “Right,” she mumbled faintly.

The man cleared his throat and gestured loosely over his shoulder to a car parked along the side of the road. “Would you like a ride—”

“I’m not getting in your car,” Casey informed him flatly, finally stuttering back into motion to shove the card into her pocket. She sat down on the edge of the sidewalk so she could begin to put her rollerblades on, hardly sparing the man another glance.

He backed up a few paces before he turned on his heel and made his way back to his very expensive, very shiny car.

Casey watched warily as the car pulled away, as if it would turn around and come back. That didn’t happen, of course, and she finished lacing up her rollerblades and got to her feet.

“’Scuse me, sorry, pardon me.” The words left Casey’s mouth in a low, nearly unconscious stream as she wove her way through the near omnipresent crowd of people around the front of her apartment building (many of which were there for what Casey was certain were… dubiously legal reasons). Even racing along at top speed, she didn’t bump into any of them; it was a well-rehearsed routine.

She barely slowed before she simply tossed herself down to sit on the building’s front step, sliding slightly on the cement. Eventually, one of the back pockets of these jeans would rip free too, but she probably had a few weeks before that happened, and then she could probably staple it back into place.

She tugged her rollerblades off and heaved herself back to her feet before she made her way up the steps and through the front doors. She passed through what counted as the building’s lobby, though it always smelled like cigarettes and something that Casey was convinced was cat pee, and she had never seen anyone in the room for longer than a few minutes, save for the poor receptionist (who was, hopefully, immune to the smell by that point). She got to the stairs and practically sprinted her way up them until she got to the third floor, where she latched onto the corner of the wall and used her momentum to launch herself around it, continuing down the hall with the same amount of speed.

She grabbed onto the frame of her apartment’s front door to drag herself to a halt and threw the door open. It wasn’t locked; she didn’t have anything that was really worth stealing, and if someone was really determined to get into her apartment, they would find a way in regardless of whether or not the door was locked.

Her apartment was… small, to say the least. It consisted of three rooms—a kitchenette and sitting room, a bedroom, and a bathroom—and all three rooms together were approximately the size of a shoebox. The sitting room was mostly just a loveseat, an armchair, a side table, and a static-filled television crammed into one half of the main room, and while the oven in the kitchenette worked more or less, the stove had long ago kicked the bucket, forcing Casey to rely on a hotplate. It lived on top of the mini-fridge so she wouldn’t have to sacrifice any of her limited counter space, most of which was taken up by a drying rack for dishes.

She tossed her rollerblades down on the loveseat, letting the front door slam closed behind her, and she breezed into the bedroom. It consisted of a mattress on the floor, a footlocker she had acquired at a thrift store and repurposed to use as a dresser, and a floor lamp that only successfully lit half the room on a good day (and on a bad day, it flickered like it was trying to give her a seizure).

She threw herself down on the mattress, the comforter easing the landing slightly. The springs in the mattress were starting to give, so she may as well have just been throwing herself straight down onto the floor. She stared up at the ceiling for a moment—an unattractive popcorn ceiling speckled with yellow, water-stained patches—before she slung an arm over her face, hiding her eyes in the crook of one elbow.

She had a rather important decision to make, she supposed. One that could change the entire course of her life. A huge decision, but as she thought about it, it was hard to think of any actual drawbacks. There were risks to any pregnancy, of course, but with the medical care she was sure Atticus would get for her, it would be about as safe as it could be. She was pretty sure she was genetically predisposed towards easy births, she wasn’t against getting a C-section if it was necessary, and she was only twenty-six, so it wasn’t like she had to worry about any age-related complications.

She would never need to worry about money again. She could leave her little apartment with the leak in the bathroom faucet and the peeling wallpaper and the smell like moldy carpet behind. She would be able to send money to her sister and her best friend to help them get out of their own apartments, so none of them would need to live in conditions that were only half a step above being condemned.

She would need to deal with the paparazzi, she supposed. And Mr. Grevieux’s no-doubt very wealthy, upper crust social circle. She doubted they would look kindly upon her and her origins.

But she had always been good at getting people who sniffed and looked down their noses at her to back off. She liked to think of it as a special talent of hers. She imagined she would hold onto that skill even in a new environment.

She supposed it was also a risk that she and Atticus just wouldn’t like each other. But was that even really a risk when he would still support her afterwards? Even if they completely hated each other, she only needed to put up with him for nine months, and then, once the kid popped into the world, she could file for divorce and leave.

Nine months wasn’t that long, especially when she would have the resources all around her to be safe and happy and comfortable. Besides, she had seen pictures of his house; she was positive that they could go for days without ever even walking past each other in that behemoth.

She supposed that meant she had made up her mind.

She dug her cellphone—a positively ancient flip phone with a crack across the screen and a penchant for typing the same number more than once—out of her pocket, along with the paper with Atticus’s number on it, and though it took three attempts before she got her phone to cooperate and dial the correct number, soon enough, she was holding it to her ear as it rang, the sound tinny and slightly muffled with ever-present static.

It rang four times before a deep voice answered on the other end of the line, “Atticus Grevieux speaking.”

And suddenly, Casey found herself struck shy, as if just hearing his voice had suddenly opened the floodgates, dumping the enormity of the situation on top of her.

“…Hello?”

“H-hi,” Casey mumbled into the receiver. “I, uh… I’m… This is Casey Madison?” she finally managed, though it came out more like a question than a statement. “I met with—”

“Trust me, I am aware of who you are,” he assured her, sounding very business-like about it. She supposed that made sense for a businessman. “I take it you’ve made your decision?”

Her voice was still a low mumble as she said, “Yes. I would like to take the offer.”

There was a moment of silence, followed by a sigh that sounded slightly relieved. “Good. Very good. When would you like to meet?”

“I’m off work this upcoming Tuesday,” she replied, finally finding her voice. “We could meet that afternoon?”

“Great. I’ve got just the place in mind. I’ll text you the name and address, and I’ll see you then.”

“Sounds good,” Casey murmured into the receiver, and after a faltering farewell, she hung up the phone.

She wondered if this counted as being engaged.

The café was nothing truly spectacular. It was quirky more than anything, decorated with multicolored fairy lights, whimsical paintings of giant candy, and braided rugs in every color. The tables and chairs were clean and in good condition, but the couch and the armchairs gathered in a half-circle around the fireplace were tattered and had seen better days. It was cozy, all things considered.

And it had some of the best coffee Atticus had ever had, which was the important part. He sat at a table by a window and sipped his coffee leisurely.

She was a pretty young woman, Atticus reflected, as he watched her through the café window as she loitered by the door, evidently working up the nerve to come in.

She was a bit taller than average—5’6” or so, maybe—and pale enough that she looked as if she had never seen the sun. Her complexion was flawless. Her hair was such a pale shade of blond that it was nearly white, and it went clear down to her backside. Just based on the way it was frizzing slightly and how it seemed to drift around her, he could only assume she had very fine hair. Whatever color her eyes were, he couldn’t tell (blue, perhaps?), but they were pale enough that they almost looked colorless. She was thin—a bit too thin, maybe—with long, slender limbs and a rather modest bust.

Her clothing was simple, aside from the rollerblades dangling from one hand, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. It gave the illusion that she was plainer than she really was. Granted, he had barely spoken to her. For all he knew, she was plain. Not that he would complain if that were the case, but he rather hoped she wasn’t.

He supposed he would know soon enough.

After loitering outside the door and gesturing people in ahead of her for nearly seven minutes, Casey finally took a deep breath, wrapped a hand around the handle, and let herself inside.

She spotted Atticus immediately and bustled over to him, dropping her skates beside the table’s free chair and moving to pull the chair out. True enough, the café smelled amazing, but she didn’t like to spend money on things that weren’t essential, so she could live without getting her own cup of coffee.

And then, Atticus handed her a twenty-dollar bill and waved her towards the counter. She accepted the bill warily, fingers curling around it as if it was a snake that was going to bite her if she didn’t handle it properly; then, she turned and headed towards the counter.

There were two people in line ahead of her, and as she waited, she used it as a chance to observe her… date? She wasn’t sure if that was the proper term, but then again, she wasn’t too fussed by the terminology.

She had already known what he looked like, of course; she had seen pictures of him before, on magazine covers while she waited in line in the grocery store and in the newspaper from time to time. But she had never seen him in person.

He looked like he would be tall, with broad shoulders and a trim waist. His skin was tan, though she wasn’t sure if it was natural or if he used a tanning bed; it didn’t look like a spray tan, at least, and that was a relief. His hair was short and neatly trimmed, and a shade of brown dark enough that it verged on black. His eyes were the dark, nearly-black brown of freshly brewed coffee.

He was wearing a dark, charcoal grey polo shirt and dark slacks. Maybe that counted as “dressed down” for him. Casey couldn’t say that would surprise her.

Behind her, the barista cleared her throat, and Casey turned towards the counter, stepping closer to it to make her order.

When she returned to the table, it was with a very well-foamed dark chocolate mocha in a cheerfully bright green mug. She put it on the table and sat down, and for a moment, the two of them sat in silence, sipping their coffee.

Eventually, Casey spoke.

“So,” she began, addressing her mug more than Atticus. “You want me to have your baby.” To her relief, she sounded remarkably calm as she made the observation.

“If you’re agreeable to the idea,” he replied simply.

“Can I ask why?” she wondered, leaning an elbow on the table and propping her chin up in one hand. She stared down at her mug like it was the most fascinating thing in the world, absentmindedly tracing the tip of her finger around the edge of it.

Atticus cleared his throat. “Some rather… impolite rumors have been circulating about why I haven’t started a family or had any kids yet, when my family is known for being rather… well, family-oriented. I would like to nip the rumors in the bud before they start reflecting poorly on the rest of the family, and the simplest way to do that would seem to be to acquire a baby.”

Well, that was one way to phrase it.

Slowly, Casey wondered, “If we wind up breaking up, wouldn’t that just lead to more rumors?”

Atticus seemed rather dryly amused as he returned, “I can tolerate people assuming I’m simply disagreeable. That would be preferable to the rumors that I am literally an inhuman monster.”

Her eyebrows shot up towards her forehead, eyes widening slightly. “That’s, uh…” She trailed off as she tried to think of the words to describe it, though she came up short.

“Exactly,” he returned. “I’m hoping that sort of nonsense will stop after this.”

“Would it, uh…” Casey cleared her throat. “Would it be an actual wedding, or what?”

“Just signing some papers at the courthouse,” he replied. “You’ve no experience with the media, and I see no reason to throw you straight into the middle of it five minutes after meeting you. There will be talk of it being a shotgun wedding if you come up pregnant basically immediately afterwards, but—”

“You can tolerate people assuming that?” Casey guessed.

Atticus smiled, small enough that it was barely noticeable. “Precisely.”

She darted a brief glance towards his face and then down to her coffee again. She busied herself taking a sip of it before she wondered, “Can I ask why you picked me?”

“It’s not a particularly romantic reason,” he cautioned plainly.

She shrugged one shoulder and drummed her fingers along the side of her mug. “You’re paying me to have a baby and marry you. Nothing about this is particularly romantic.”

“Fair enough,” he conceded with a nod. “I needed someone likely to agree, and the closer the better. You’re young, not particularly well-off, and reasonably isolated. You seemed the most likely to agree. And if you decide you’re not interested, I’ll just move down the list.”

“You seem to know a lot about me,” she pointed out faintly, curling both hands around her mug.

“Money goes a long way,” he informed her. “But I only know some basics; I wasn’t interested in prying into your personal life.”

She nodded slowly and glanced up at him again. “Can I take a bit more time to think over it?” she wondered cautiously.

“Of course,” he assured her, before he picked up his mug and finished the last of his coffee. “Thank you for considering it and for meeting with me. It was very nice to meet you.”

He left a few dollars on the table for whoever cleaned it later, pushed his chair out, and stood up. He held a hand out for a brief handshake, and with that done, he was on his way.

The bell over the door chimed merrily as he left, and Casey’s thoughts raced like a thoroughbred’s as she finished her coffee. She had a lot to think about.

Casey’s best friend was a young man only a few months older than her. His name was Jason, and they had known each other since middle school. Much like her, he had not grown up with a lot of money, but unlike her, he had lived with a herd of siblings rather than just one. She acted as his safe haven when he needed space to breathe, he kept her safe from the kids at school who tormented her, and they had been close ever since.

He lived in the same apartment building as her, and though his wife was frequently absent—taking care of an ailing father clear on the opposite side of the country—she still left her mark on their apartment, her touch keeping it from looking like the landfill it probably could have qualified as.

“You’ve been pacing through my living room for the past ten minutes,” Jason stated blandly, watching her as she paced back and forth and back and forth. He was average height and slightly bronze-toned, with brown eyes and brown hair. There was nothing about him that particularly stood out.

Casey snorted and reminded him, “This doesn’t qualify as a living room,” though she did finally stop pacing. “I’m just… thinking through something, and I can think better here than at my apartment. My faucet keeps dripping, and it smells weird.”

“Buy an air freshener,” he suggested flatly. “Or several, probably.”

Casey held one hand up, her middle finger extended. “You aren’t helping,” she huffed.

“I don’t even know what the problem is,” he reminded her. “You just sort of barged in and started pacing like a caged tiger.”

“I could make a lot of money,” she spat out suddenly. “Like, a lot, a lot.”

Jason’s eyebrows rose. “Doing what?”

“Marrying a guy and having his baby.” It sounded sort of crazy when she put it that way, but there it was.

Jason groaned, his head falling back against the couch cushion. “Ah, Christ, first my sister, now you. I’m going to be alone in my little gutter at this rate.”

“I didn’t say I was going to do it,” Casey protested, though she wasn’t sure why she was protesting.

“But you should,” he reasoned. “I mean, no one really deserves to live in this dumpster. If you get the chance to get out, you should. Assuming you don’t mind having a baby.”

“And you know, he never said I couldn’t share the money he gives me with my friends,” she mused, tapping her lower lip with one finger.

“You know I don’t like handouts,” Jason reminded her sharply. (Despite that, Casey was pretty sure he was still annoyed that his sister hadn’t at least offered any since coming into her own fortune. Casey wasn’t going to pretend Jason made sense one hundred percent of the time, but she was also used to him not always making sense.)

“It would be a gift, not a handout,” Casey stated primly. “Besides, I’m sure I could think of something for you to do that I could justify paying you for. You couldn’t really complain about that.”

Jason shrugged stiffly, warily conceding the point. “Sounds like you’ve basically made up your mind,” he observed. “Are you going to go through with it?”

Slowly, Casey sighed. “Yeah,” she decided after a moment. “I think I’m going to. It all seems… pretty reasonable, I guess. Or at least as reasonable as this sort of deal can be.” She scratched the back of her neck. “Can’t say I was expecting to be a wife or a mom, but I guess life goes in strange directions sometimes.”

“Just don’t forget about us little people once you’re rich,” Jason joked, and if he sounded a bit too bitter underneath the joking tone, then Casey charitably refrained from mentioning it.

She supposed she really had made up her mind. She would just need to call Atticus back and let him know.

“I look okay?” Casey fretted, turning this way and that in front of the mirror. “I don’t look too… I don’t know, cheap?”

“You look fine,” Annie assured her. Her sister was well used to her anxiety over most things. And despite the seriousness of the situation, she seemed as calm and light as a spring breeze, green eyes serene and long brown hair pulled back into a perfectly smooth, tight ponytail. There wasn’t a drop of sweat on her slightly tanned skin. If not for the fact that it was sort of comforting, it probably would have been sort of infuriating. Casey felt like a mess. It wasn’t fair that Annie was not equally a mess.

Casey supposed she probably did look just fine, though. Her dress was the nicest one she owned—a white, deliberately wrinkled, strapless mini-dress with flowers in all sorts of colors scattered across it—and Annie was letting her borrow a pair of teal ankle boots to go with it. Annie had also done her makeup for her, as it was a skill that Casey had never quite grasped. She supposed she would have to at some point, if she was going to be getting cameras shoved in her face.

“Now, stop moving,” Annie instructed sharply, and once Casey was standing still, Annie finished braiding her hair, coiled the braid elaborately against the back of her head, and pinned it in place with enough bobby pins to keep a dance troupe satisfied, before she finally finished it off with a teal, jeweled hairpin.

Casey turned in front of the mirror one more time before Annie grabbed her wrist. “Stop preening!” she huffed, and with a tug at Casey’s wrist, she began dragging her out the door. “You’ve got places you need to be.”

With that said, Annie burst into a jog, forcing Casey to keep up.

Getting married by just signing a contract seemed a touch… clinical. Casey couldn’t say she had been expecting it to be a particularly romantic process, but just standing at the desk and signing on the dotted line seemed so removed from the idea of marriage that it was almost surreal. Casey brought her sister as a witness. Atticus brought a stylish young woman who wore a watch that likely cost as much as a sports car.

They were only there for a short time. As it turned out, just signing a piece of paper didn’t take that long.

Casey didn’t feel particularly different afterwards. Atticus gave her a ring—a simple rose gold wedding band—but she still felt more or less the same as she’d felt the day before. Annie made a valiant effort at trying to get Casey excited about it but with only middling success.

Two days later, it was time for her to move out of her apartment and into Atticus’s house.

‘House’ didn’t quite seem like the right term. ‘Estate,’ maybe. Even that didn’t quite seem to cover it. There were acres of land surrounding the house, and ninety percent of it was covered by trees and wildflowers, save for the paths that wound through the woods and the winding driveway that had to have been at least half a mile long. The house was three stories tall and looked like it was made of more window than wall, and it was framed on either side by a chimney.

Casey didn’t bring much with her. She brought some photographs and knick-knacks she couldn’t bear to be parted from and some of her favorite clothes. It all fit into a single suitcase. Everything else stayed behind.

Atticus showed her to her room—maybe they would sleep together eventually, maybe they wouldn’t, but Casey didn’t want to leap into that immediately—and then he excused himself, saying he had to get to work.

Casey took the chance to explore the house. Her room—her suite, actually, with a bedroom, a sitting room, and a bathroom—was lavish and comfortable and her old apartment would have fit in it with room to spare, but she would need to add a few touches to make it look like it was being lived in. It was on the second floor, so she started there in her explorations, finding three other bedroom suites, two bathrooms, two studies and a sitting room off to the eastern side of the house, with chairs, a couch, and a rug arranged around a fireplace.

She ventured to the third floor from there, finding two more bathrooms, a handful of bedroom suites, and a nearly identical sitting room to the western end of the floor.

When she made her way down to the first floor, she found a bit more variation. A kitchen and a dining room, a formal parlor, a library with a fireplace, a slightly more casual sitting room with another fireplace, and another study, all arranged around an entry foyer and a broad hallway that made navigation easy.

In the sitting room, she very nearly had a heart attack. There was a dog on the largest couch, though the word “dog” didn’t quite do the creature justice. It was black and shaggy, with a long muzzle and pointed ears. She would have sworn it was a wolf if not for the fact that it was roughly the size of a lion.

The hound lifted its head as she gasped in surprise, cocking its head to one side as it’s gold eyes opened. It blinked at her placidly.

“There is a monster on the couch,” Casey breathed to herself, and the dog’s head jerked back in a way that almost seemed affronted, if not for the fact that Casey really doubted the hound could understand her.

With a lurch, the dog hefted itself off the couch and trotted out of the room, passing close enough to Casey that its coarse fur brushed her thigh. She went rigid until she heard its claws click away down the hall.

In the library, she found another surprise in the form of a bird perched on the arm of a chair in front of the fireplace. It looked like a crow, except for the fact that it was the size of an eagle. It appeared to be asleep, its feathers slightly fluffed up and its head tucked close to its chest.

Slowly, Casey backed out of the room before it could notice her. She was going to need to have a chat with Atticus about warning people about his pets; they were a little bit intense.

Dinner that night happened about fifteen minutes after Atticus got back from work. He had a chef. Casey couldn’t say she was surprised by that knowledge, but she was wondering where the chef (and the rest of the staff that she was assuming worked in the house) was hiding throughout the day, since she hadn’t seen anyone other than the monster of a dog and the enormous bird.

“So, your dog,” Casey began suddenly, halfway through the meal. It was simple but incredible, and she knew she would have never had a chance at making anything like it on her hot plate. “And your bird. A bit of warning would have been appreciated. They both look big enough to eat me.”

Strangely, Atticus actually seemed slightly confused. It took a moment for realization to dawn, and he cleared his throat. “A couple friends leave their pets here during the day so my staff can keep an eye on them. I forget they’re even here most of the time.”

“Ah.” Casey wasn’t sure if she was relieved or not, but she let the topic drop.

It was later that night that Casey got to meet Atticus’s friends. Well, officially meet them. Technically, she already had, but neither of them had bothered to introduce themselves before.

Branson was a tall, slender man, built more like a gymnast compared to Atticus’s linebacker body. He was pale, albeit not to quite the same extent as Casey, with a mop of carefully ordered auburn hair and peculiarly gold eyes. He was also the slightly scary man in the expensive suit who had first approached Casey about the deal. He was still wearing an expensive suit when Casey met him in the foyer that evening, but he was considerably less scary when she was meeting him indoors rather than just running into him on the sidewalk outside of her place of employment.

Lydia was a petite woman a few inches shorter than Casey with skin like caramel and wavy black hair piled on top of her head in an untidy bun, though Casey knew from prior experience that it fell down to her waist. Her eyes gleamed a shade of brown that Casey had never seen before. She was also the one who Atticus brought with him to the courthouse, and she was still wearing the expensive watch.

Casey hardly waited for introductions to be out of the way before she wondered, “So, were they your dog and bird?”

Lydia snorted out a laugh and cleared her throat behind one hand. “The bird was mine. Bit of a shithead, but I promise she’s harmless.”

“Dog’s mine,” Branson added, considerably less upbeat than Lydia.

“He’s huge,” Casey informed him, as if he could possibly be unaware of what his own dog looked like. “I thought he was going to eat me.”

Atticus carefully coughed into his fist to mask a laugh, and Branson seemed bizarrely ruffled by the statement, offering just a sullen, “Designer breed. He’s friendly.” Though Casey supposed she couldn’t blame him for being protective of his dog, even if she really doubted his dog needed the protection.

On the whole, the two of them seemed nice enough, though Casey wasn’t sure what she was supposed to talk to any of them—including Atticus—about. She doubted they would have many life experiences in common. But they were friendly enough. And considering the amount of shit Casey had taken over the course of her life, she was pretty sure she could coexist pretty contently with someone who wasn’t going to treat her like she had just crawled out of a dumpster.

It would be nice if she could at least be friends with Atticus, and she wasn’t going to give up hope that it would happen, but even if it didn’t, she supposed she wouldn’t mind too much. Just as long as he kept being a gentleman.

Atticus turned in early, citing an early morning as the reason. Casey didn’t need to work tomorrow—technically, she didn’t need to work at all anymore, but she had never had the time or money to really invest into hobbies, and she knew she would go crazy if she had nothing to do all day—so she bid him goodnight and kept exploring the house. She was pretty sure it would take months before she managed to find all of the house’s secrets, but that was sort of exciting. Like living in a detective novel.

Eventually, though, when the enormous, largely empty house began to get a bit too unnerving, she returned to her… suite (that was still such a strange thought). She paced through the sitting room for a few minutes before she pulled her phone out (and she supposed she had more than enough money to buy a replacement now, but she would get to that later) and dialed her sister’s number.

Annie was as chipper as ever as she answered. “Hey there! How was the first day in the mansion?”

“It doesn’t really feel like a mansion,” Casey protested, though she wasn’t sure why. It didn’t have stone columns, it wasn’t pure white, and it didn’t look like it had been plucked out of ancient Rome or Greece, which were all the things she tended to associate with the word “mansion.” It looked more Victorian than anything else.

Annie snorted. “It’s a mansion.”

Sighing and rolling her eyes, Casey agreed, “It’s a mansion. It’s nice! I could probably get lost on the way to breakfast tomorrow, and I think I’ll be eighty by the time I finally stop finding new nooks and crannies to poke around in.”

“I’m going to assume he doesn’t mind you poking through his stuff,” Annie observed wryly.

“If he did,” Casey sniffed, “he wouldn’t have left me unattended.”

“So romantic.”

“He’s paying me,” Casey reminded her. “That doesn’t exactly scream ‘romance.’”

“Fair point,” Annie conceded. “Are things at least going well enough so far? Nothing too strange? No one’s being a dick?”

“Everyone seems pretty nice so far, though I’m pretty sure the staff just sort of melts out of the walls whenever they’re needed. I know they’re here, but I haven’t actually seen any of them yet.”

“They probably have scheduled shifts, you goose,” Annie snorted.

They talked about nothing in particular and everything that their thoughts drifted to for another half hour before they both started yawning and decided it was time to call it a night.

Casey would need to get used to living outside of the city, she realized once she was in bed, as a wolf howled in the distance and owls hooted outside the house. Everything sounded a lot different from the pigeons and raccoons and traffic sounds.

Even so, she slept well that night. The bed was plain but so much more comfortable than her old mattress. It was like she was sleeping on a cloud.

Though Casey was used to waking early, Atticus was indeed already gone when she woke up the next morning. She woke up earlier than usual, in fact, as she slept far better than she usually did. She had to take a few moments to just stare at the ceiling until she could convince herself to get out of bed. It wasn’t like it was going anywhere; she would be right back in it that night.

The chef, apparently, only worked evenings, but the kitchen was well-organized, and Casey found all of the ingredients to make French toast for breakfast. She was halfway done eating, standing at the kitchen counter because it felt a bit strange to eat in the dining room all by herself, when a woman wearing something like scrubs and smelling like wood polish wandered in: part of the nebulous cleaning staff.

“There you are!” she greeted pleasantly, and she pulled an envelope out of her back pocket. “Mr. Grevieux asked me to give this to you,” she added before she set the envelope down on the counter and bustled on her way once again, in what Casey was reasonably sure was the direction of the library.

Ignoring her breakfast for the time being, Casey ripped open the envelope and found a few twenty-dollar bills and a note, reading simply, ‘While I know you don’t have work today, if you want to leave the house or have someone over, you’re free to do so. If you have any trouble with anything and can’t get in touch with me for whatever reason, Branson and Lydia are generally able to drop everything at their leisure. – Atticus

There were two phone numbers at the bottom of the page, one labeled for Branson and the other for Lydia.

Casey leafed through the money, staring at it with wide eyes. She folded the note around the bills and set them aside, scarfed down the rest of her breakfast, left the dishes in the sink, and then bolted back up to her suite to get dressed and call Jason. She wasn’t going to invite him over—she knew him well enough to know that while he would attempt to put on a brave face, being surrounded by so much money would do little more than put him in a bad mood—but she saw no reason not to have lunch with him. She could even afford a taxi to get into the city.

“This place is expensive,” Jason observed, his tone mildly suspicious as he looked at the menu.

“I know!” Casey practically squealed, holding the menu close to her chest for a second before she finally looked at it. “Atticus just handed me money—well, a maid handed me money, but Atticus handed it to her.”

“A maid,” Jason repeated.

“It’s a big house,” Casey replied, as if that answered everything. And in a sense, it did; it was a big enough house that no one would ever want to clean it on their own, so why not just pay a group of people to clean it? “Now, stop pouting.” She wagged a finger at him. “I asked you here to have a good meal, not to complain about money. You aren’t even paying for lunch.”

He opened his mouth again, only to close it with a click when Casey made a sharp, wordless noise at him. Finally, he shook his head and sighed, smiling slightly. “Alright, alright,” he conceded. “So, I take it everything’s going well enough? He hasn’t turned into an asshole? You know I’ll beat him up if he does.”

Casey rolled her eyes. “He could flatten you without even trying,” she informed him wryly, “but I appreciate the offer. Everything’s fine, though. I just… need to think of things to do to keep me busy.”

“What do you mean?” Jason wondered, though an answer had to wait until after the waitress took their orders.

As the waitress left once again, Casey answered, “Well, I don’t want to keep working at the restaurant forever. I don’t like it there. I don’t think anyone really likes it there. And if I can get away from the guys that grab my ass through their car windows, then I’m going to.”

“I still think it’s skeevy that your ‘uniform,’” Jason included air quotes as he stressed the word, “involves shorts tiny enough to be denim underwear.”

Casey snorted and threw a hand up in exasperation. “I guess upper management couldn’t think of any other way to make attractive women rollerblading around with food look appealing.”

Bringing a hand to his chest, Jason lamented, “I truly pity such a lack of creativity.” Immediately changing the subject after that, he suggested, “Maybe you could learn some extreme stunts. You basically live in the middle of nowhere now, don’t you? It’s probably great for learning how to jump off of or over things.”

“I think I would die,” Casey replied candidly. “I would trip over a rock and die.”

“I seriously hope you aren’t actually that clumsy.” He sounded genuinely anxious as he said it. “I’ve seen the speeds you skate at to get home. You don’t even wear a helmet.”

“I like to live life on the edge,” she informed him loftily.

“You don’t have health insurance,” he deadpanned. “You already live life on the edge.”

“I do, too,” she protested, followed by a beat before she added, “Now I do, at least.”

Rolling his eyes, Jason drawled, “You’ll need to read the fine print and see if that all applies retroactively.”

It was a pretty good afternoon, all things considered. It felt nice to know that even with her life changing, she could still talk to Jason normally. And it felt nice to know that he was going to have at least one decent meal that day, and there would only be a moderate amount of complaining on his end even if she had to beat him with her napkin to make sure of it.

(She did, but only a few times.)

By the time Casey made her way down the stairs for dinner, she had already changed into a t-shirt and a pair of jeans, taken her hair out of its braid, and taken her contact lenses out, instead wearing a pair of bright blue frames on the bridge of her nose.

When she made her way into the dining room, Atticus was already there, typing something on his phone, though he put it down as she entered. And he stared at her for a moment before he observed, “I didn’t know you wore glasses.”

“Oh, yeah,” she replied, pushing the frames up the bridge of her nose with one finger. “My eyesight’s never been great. Usually, I had to wear seriously ugly frames that I swear were half an inch thick; these took me ages to save up for.”

“They suit you,” Atticus offered, and Casey beamed as she took her seat at the table.

Asking him about his work seemed like a safe enough topic to start with. Surprisingly, while he owned a few stocks in it, he was reasonably removed from the family business. He was a businessman still, which she could have guessed, but apparently, he did a lot of dealing in antiquities, though Casey was pretty sure there was more to it than that. If he wasn’t going to tell her, though, she wasn’t going to pry. She was pretty sure they didn’t know each other well enough for that, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know about everything he got up to anyway.

“My work on its own isn’t as lucrative as you might expect,” he pointed out. “I also come from old money; I don’t think I would be remotely capable of blowing through everything that’s been left to me by family members.”

“No siblings or cousins or anything to take a share of it?” Casey wondered, leaning an elbow on the table once she was sure Atticus wouldn’t actually care about manners.

“A few cousins, but one of them married into an equally wealthy family and so insisted that her share be left to someone else, and I was deemed the… least likely to be an idiot about it,” he stated carefully.

Casey snorted before she could help it.

“You see more money in a day than I have for my entire life,” she sighed wistfully, halfway through her meal and trying not to drool over the smell of dessert wafting out of the kitchen.

“Was there a reason?” Atticus wondered, curious but mild, the sort of tone that implied he wouldn’t mind if she decided she didn’t want to answer him.

She shrugged one shoulder in a lackadaisical manner and took a few more bites. “Some of the typical stuff: parents couldn’t afford to go to college, stuck in jobs that didn’t pay great. The sort of jobs that definitely don’t offer any benefits, so we were all kind of up shit’s creek when I turned out to be a very problematic child.”

“Problematic,” Atticus repeated dubiously.

Casey snorted. “I wasn’t the healthiest kid in the world growing up,” she replied. “I got sick at the drop of a hat. If someone sneezed six blocks away, I would get sick, and my parents were basically stuck paying for all of it out of pocket. Cousins and grandparents helped out when they could, but that didn’t really add up to much. So, we never really had a chance to climb out of that hole we were slipping into.”

“Where are your parents at now?” he wondered, voice gentling slightly.

Casey was silent for a moment. “They pretty much worked themselves to death for me,” she answered eventually, shrugging again like it was no big deal. “Dad died of lung cancer a few years back. Mom followed a few months later with a bottle of pain pills. We were in the foster system for a few months, but then Annie—that’s my sister, you met her a couple days ago—aged out and took me with her.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Atticus offered, because really, there wasn’t much else to say on the topic.

Casey waved it off and chased a bean in a circle around her plate with her fork, though her mood improved dramatically when she was presented with a slice of lemon meringue pie by the chef, who never seemed to stop smiling. It was a good quality to have, Casey figured.

And on the whole, it felt good to talk about. It wasn’t a topic she enjoyed, of course, but it felt good to get it off of her chest. She always felt bad bringing it up around Annie; her sister had been in the middle of the whole mess just as much as Casey had, and she needed no reminders about it. And it didn’t seem like Atticus was looking at her any differently than he had been before, and that was… a relief.

It had been years since Casey had been in a proper doctor’s office. Typically, she just went to a walk-in clinic if she needed to see a doctor, and she didn’t think she had ever actually seen a specialist. But if she was going to have a baby, then everyone needed to know if she was healthy enough for that first. No one wanted any unfortunate surprises halfway through, least of all Casey.

Everything looked and smelled sterile, the receptionist was smiling cheerfully, and there were only a few other people in the waiting room. Lydia escorted her, since Casey was reluctant to go alone, but she wasn’t going to demand her sister take a day off from work. Lydia didn’t seem to mind; apparently, she really could just drop everything at her leisure.

Once she was called back to the exam room, Casey was poked and prodded, blood was drawn, and she peed in a cup. Preliminarily, she was given a clean bill of health and told that someone from the office would call if anything turned up, but in general, no news was good news.

Three days later, Lydia accompanied Casey to a gynecologist appointment. Casey had never seen a gynecologist before. She had certainly never had an internal exam done. The doctor was a polite, friendly woman with a warm smile, and it was all painless enough, but Casey couldn’t help but feel slightly embarrassed afterwards.

Once again, though, she was given a clean bill of health and told that if no one got in touch with her, then there was nothing wrong.

Lydia bought her coffee to cheer her up on the way back to the house.

Casey stared at the smart phone in her hand for almost a full minute before she finally convinced herself that she wasn’t going to break it just by touching it. It was a touch screen; she was supposed to touch it. That was the entire point.

Carefully, she typed in Jason’s phone number and hit the call button, listening to it ring and being silently grateful that she had been able to keep her original number. Jason could be a bit weird about answering the phone from numbers he was unfamiliar with, and it was always sort of up in the air whether or not he would actually listen to any voicemails he got.

When he answered, it was with a blunt, “It is nearly midnight.”

“Hey, don’t take that tone with me,” Casey huffed, folding her arms as best she could while still holding her phone to her ear. “I don’t choose when I start freaking out; it just happens.”

“What are you freaking out about?” he asked, his complaints about the time apparently forgotten.

“Right, so, it’s not like I managed to forget what this deal with Atticus is all about,” she began, and she started pacing across her sitting room, “but I had my first visit to the lady doc’s office today, and it sort of hit me that, yeah, I’m getting ready to get pregnant.”

“If you’re against it, you could still back out,” Jason reminded her, though in the tone of someone who knew it wouldn’t happen and was pointing the option out more out of obligation.

“It’s not that I don’t want to,” she protested, shaking her head slightly despite the fact that Jason wasn’t there to see her. “It’s just a lot happening all at once. Or at least, kind of all at once.”

Jason cleared his throat. “Not that I’m not cool with letting you vent or whatever, but I feel obligated to point out that your sister might be able to relate better to most of whatever you’re going to go through.”

Casey snorted. “Well, yeah, but she’s asleep. I know you’re awake at weird hours.”

Jason sighed wistfully. “I always love being the fallback plan.”

“You’re my favorite fallback plan,” Casey assured him. “And I’m not even expecting you to say anything, really. I just like knowing that you’re listening.”

“Whenever you need me to,” he hurried to reply. “But you’re fine, right?”

“I’m fine,” she confirmed. “Just waiting for the boat to stop rocking.”

“I’m not sure it’s going to any time soon,” he cautioned. “But I know you; you’ll find your sea legs soon enough.”

“Sometimes, I wish I had as much faith in me as you do,” she mumbled, toeing at the carpet with one foot.

“I’ve got enough faith in you to share,” he assured her wryly. “You can handle this, and it’s not like you’re on your own.”

There were so many doctors’ appointments after that. Casey had known it was coming, and her doctor was a very nice woman, but she hadn’t been entirely up to date on just how often she was going to need to see a doctor to determine when the perfect window to introduce the sperm would be.

It didn’t even happen for weeks after Casey moved in. Sometimes, Atticus took her to appointments, sometimes Annie, but for the most part, it was Lydia. Casey was learning to find her quiet mischief and her snide sarcasm comforting.

But obviously, one day, it was time. Or at least, they were figuring it was time. All of the observations on her ovulation cycle were saying it was. She had been warned over and over that there was no guarantee that it would take on the first attempt, so she was pretty sure she was ready.

It was actually sort of anticlimactic. Sperm was injected with a syringe, and she lay on a table for about forty-five minutes after that before the doctor declared her free to go. When she made her way back out to the waiting room, Atticus, Annie, and Lydia were all waiting, apparently engaged in a conversation that involved a lot of very broad hand gestures on Lydia’s part.

They went out for dinner afterwards, and the evening felt very normal compared to what Casey had expected. Granted, she knew it took a while to tell if conception actually happened, but she was expecting to feel… different.

But maybe it was good that she still felt pretty normal. Not everything had to be momentous and terrifying.

“Give us a turn,” Lydia instructed. Standing beside her, Annie bounced eagerly on the balls of her feet, her hands clenched together in front of her chest.

With a sigh, Casey turned in a circle, the loose, swishing skirt of her knee-length dress billowing around her as she did. In its swirling shades of red and gold and orange and black, it almost looked as if the skirt had turned into fire. Her boots were shining black leather up to her knees, over a pair of red fishnet stockings. Her makeup was in natural tones, and her hair was simply braided down her back. As far as Lydia was concerned, trying to do anything that would disguise its length may as well have been criminal.

Annie practically squealed. “You look great!” she enthused, her feet actually leaving the floor for a split second. “You’ll knock the socks off of anyone who points a camera at you.”

Casey shifted uncomfortably. “Are we sure that’s actually going to happen?” she wondered. “I mean, we’re just going out for dinner.”

The look on Lydia’s face—it seemed to translate to “oh, my poor child” —rather quickly dashed any of Casey’s hopes that she could slip through the evening unnoticed.

Granted, she supposed she shouldn’t be surprised. It was the first time she was really going to be seen in public attached to Atticus, even if it was only for something as simple as dinner. She just didn’t understand why it needed to be a huge production.

Or rather, she understood perfectly—his relationship with her was to save his reputation, so he needed to be seen with her—but that didn’t mean she had to be particularly thrilled about it. She had heard horror stories of what the paparazzi would do if they were really determined to get a scoop.

She smoothed her hands down her dress and linked them together in front of herself, shifting back and forth from one foot to the other. “I’m as ready as I’m ever likely to be,” she decided. Not the most enthusiastic attitude, she supposed, but she would rather walk into something pessimistic and then be pleasantly surprised, rather than the other way around.

“Then, let’s get going!” Annie proclaimed before she caught Casey by the hand and began to tow her out of the suite at a jog. Lydia followed behind them at a more sedate pace.

They met Atticus in the foyer, and he cut an impressive figure in his black shirt and slacks and his red and gold vest. Casey felt strangely pleased when he gave her a rather noticeable once-over.

Annie escorted them outside to Atticus’s car, presumably to get some idea of whether or not Atticus planned to be a gentleman. Whether she was satisfied with her brief investigation or not, Casey wasn’t sure, but she waved goodbye as the car began to pull away, driving along the winding driveway.

Atticus’s car was an impressive beast. It wasn’t enormous, but the engine growled like it planned to devour the world and everything in it, and once they left the bumpy, pitted driveway behind in favor of the road, the car accelerated like it was trying to outrun the entire world. It was a metallic gold color, and somehow, that just seemed to make it seem like it was even faster.

All things considered, it probably wasn’t going to be a particularly long drive to the restaurant.

The restaurant was not what Casey had been expecting. She had been expecting crystal and expensive floors and chandeliers. Instead, it looked more like a log cabin once they were inside. There were blazing fireplaces and everything. It was actually pretty cozy.

They got inside painlessly, and the hostess led them from the door to a small, secluded table beside one of the fireplaces. She lingered just long enough to hand them menus and take their drink orders before bustling away again.

The conversation, at first, was less of a true conversation and more just Casey gushing about how cute she thought the woodsy aesthetic was, until she finally settled an expectant look on him. Leaning her elbows on the table and propping her chin up in both hands, she wondered, “Considering you actually do live in the middle of nowhere, more or less, why does this place look more rustic than your house?”

Atticus cleared his throat. “Because I’m spoiled and didn’t want to do away with any of the comforts I grew up with, but making a house the size of mine look like a cabin would be ridiculous.”

Casey snorted. “Well, points for self-awareness. Why the antiques, then?”

He shrugged a shoulder and leaned his chin in one hand, his elbow on the edge of the table. “I can be spoiled and self-aware and still appreciate it when a room feels like it has history in it. Those two things aren’t necessarily diametrically opposed. It just means I’m quirky.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Casey returned dryly, smirking behind her fingers when Atticus rolled his eyes at her.

The conversation lulled for a moment as the waitress trotted up to drop off their drinks and take their orders.

The wine was exquisite, considering that ordinarily, Casey didn’t particularly like wine. The appetizer was incredible. The salad that came with the entrée was amazing, and Casey didn’t even eat salad particularly often. By the time their actual meals arrived, she was convinced she would be too full to eat any of it, but after two bites, she was in love with it and finished the entire plate. Dessert, though it didn’t seem possible, was even better than everything else that had come to the table that evening.

Throughout the meal, they spoke surprisingly little. It wasn’t strange, though. It was comfortable. And when conversation did crop up, it was surprisingly easy.

All in all, it was a good night, though she avoided looking at the number on the bottom of the receipt afterward, just to spare her blood pressure.

Maybe Casey should have expected it. Okay, she definitely should have expected it. She walked into a restaurant with Atticus Grevieux. Though their entrance into the restaurant had been reasonably calm, she had no doubts that word about his presence had spread quickly. So, as they walked out of the restaurant, they were greeted—assaulted might have been a better word—by the flashing lights of half a dozen cameras. Casey squealed in surprise and ground to a halt in the doorway, blinking at the small crowd.

With an exasperated scoff, Atticus shouldered his way between her and the camera people. One of his hands settled against her back, between her shoulders, urging her forwards. She tripped into motion, tucked against his side to make herself as invisible as she could. Once he ushered her into the car, she slid down in her seat until she could hardly even see out the window anymore.

It was only after the car pulled away from the curb and made it a few miles down the road that she sat back up and wondered dazedly, “Is it always like that?”

“Unfortunately,” Atticus sighed. “I was hoping we might be able to get in and out before any of them showed up, but I suppose that was a bit optimistic.”

Casey snorted. “I didn’t know optimism was hoping for just the minimum amount of harassment.”

“Ah, the stories I could tell,” Atticus sighed, and Casey huffed out a laugh.

When Casey woke up the next morning, it was with the utmost of reluctance. It was too early. Not so early that Atticus would still be home, but still early enough that she didn’t want to be up. She rolled over and grabbed her phone from the bedside table, answering the call to make it be quiet and bringing it to her ear.

“What?” she whined, contemplating rolling over and burying her face against her pillow again.

Jason cleared his throat on the other line. “You should take a look at today’s news. I emailed you a link.”

Curiosity finally piqued enough to break her connection to the bed, so Casey sat up and dragged her laptop closer from where it had migrated down to the foot of the bed. She flipped it open, got to her email, and clicked the link.

She squealed in surprise as soon as she saw the pictures attached to the article.

Most of them were simply taken from the sidewalk outside the restaurant as Atticus led her back to the car, Casey looking flustered and affronted by the flashing lights and unwanted attention. There were a few, though, that were a bit more… personal.

There were three pictures of Casey in various stages of undress, taken through the window of her bedroom. One of them had been blurred out as it had been taken after she removed her bra.

She didn’t care what the actual article was about. It could have been about anything, good or bad, and nothing was going to redeem it from the fact that there were pictures of her sans most of her clothing without her permission. She wasn’t even sure where the pictures had been taken from, though she sort of hoped they had been taken from reasonably close to the house, because at least then they could go after the photographer for trespassing. That would be better than nothing.

“Yeah,” Jason sighed before Casey could gather her wits enough to come up with an actually intelligent reply. “I wanted to give you a bit of warning before you just stumbled over it later.”

“There are pictures of me naked!” she reminded him, a bit more loudly than was strictly necessary. “Even having warning doesn’t make this much better!” She fell silent then, closing her mouth with an audible click. She sucked in a breath and sighed it out. “But thanks,” she mumbled, sullen.

“Are you going to be okay?” Jason wondered, and Casey could just barely hear the sounds of him pacing back and forth as his floor creaked.

“Yeah,” she sighed in return. “I’ll be fine. Atticus will have a better idea of whether or not we can do anything about this.” She scratched at the back of her head with one hand and tugged her fingers idly through a tangle. “I’ll call and let you know the verdict later.”

“If you’re lucky, the guy who took the pictures will get hit by a car,” Jason offered, his tone slightly soothing.

Casey snorted despite herself. “I’m not going to hope for that,” she informed him primly. “Unlike you, I’m not a complete barbarian.”

“But I got you to laugh,” he pointed out. “Anyway, I need to get to work. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Later.” The call ended, and Casey set her phone back down on the table before she mashed her face against her pillow again with an overwrought sigh. She wasn’t even a celebrity. She was just a celebrity’s peripheral. And already, this sort of shit was happening.

She grumbled to herself until she fell back to sleep for a couple more hours, until her alarm went off, squawking at her to drag herself out of bed.

She made her way downstairs, and at the bottom of the steps, facing the front door, she was greeted by the sight of the enormous black dog letting himself in, shoving the doorknob down with a paw and tugging the door open with his teeth. They stared at each other once he was inside, the door banging closed behind him.

Slowly, Casey approached, holding a hand out. The dog recoiled and bolted into a different room. Shaking her head slightly, Casey remarked, “Awfully skittish for such a big guy,” to no one in particular.

She stared in the direction the dog went for a moment just to see if he would come back, before she shrugged and carried on towards the kitchen. She needed breakfast. She wasn’t going to attempt to deal with the mess she had been made aware of on an empty stomach.

Maybe it was strange, but she was pretty sure her favorite part about living in the mansion was how well-stocked the kitchen always was. She was completely positive that Atticus had never had to subsist on stale cereal and instant noodles for three weeks straight, and she was also entirely positive that she was never going to have to do that again.

It was a slow day, other than that morning’s unfortunate discovery and a phone call from Annie around lunchtime to rant about it. In fairness, though, Casey avoided anything that might have brought it up. She didn’t watch the news. She didn’t read the news. She was already perfectly well aware of what had happened, and she didn’t need anyone to inform her of it. So, she felt no guilt in letting her use of electronics be completely recreational that day.

When Atticus returned that evening, he found her in the library, curled up on a couch with a book (ridiculously over the top with a few too many people waving around broadswords with one hand to be plausible, but it was a good distraction). He peered into the room and cleared his throat, and Casey’s attention snapped from the book to him.

He looked annoyed. She was worried for a second, but then the first words out of his mouth were, “Are you alright?”

Casey wrinkled her nose slightly as she replied, “Well, I wasn’t expecting my wake-up call to come in the form of my unmentionables on display, but yeah. I’m fine.”

Atticus sighed and dragged a hand down his face. “I should have warned you. Sorry. I just wasn’t expecting something like that to happen quite so immediately.” He folded his arms over his chest and leaned in the doorway. “Lydia is digging up whatever she can. If she can find out if the photographer put even a toe out of line, then she’ll be on his ass like a feral schnauzer.”

Casey couldn’t help but snort at the mental image. “Good to know. You’ll have to keep me up to date on whatever she finds.”

“And we’ll have to tighten up security around here,” Atticus sighed. “The property line has always been clearly marked, but if he just used a particularly long-range lens, then we’ll need to do… something to dissuade them from even getting close to the property.”

“What if I just hole up here and become a hermit?” Casey sighed. “I can close all the curtains and live like a vampire.”

“Then, you would get bored,” Atticus returned blandly. “And rickets.”

Casey heaved a blustering sigh. “Foiled already,” she mused woefully. “Here I thought you were on my side.”

Holding a hand up like he was giving an oath, Atticus assured her, “Then, from here on out, I’ll endeavor to only think of your health when it’s the most convenient for you.”

Nodding once in overly earnest satisfaction, Casey instructed him, “See that you do.”

There was one detail that didn’t occur to Casey until the next afternoon, after she got to work. Her face was known now. People would recognize her. She didn’t even think of that until someone showed up to take her picture while she was delivering a customer’s food to a car. The camera’s flash took her so off-guard that she nearly tripped over her rollerblades. The customer at least had the decency to ask if she was alright and to flip off the cameraman for her, and she was glad she didn’t actually drop anything.

If that had been the worst of it, she wouldn’t have cared—or rather, she would have cared, but she would have simply forgotten about it by the next morning—but it didn’t end there. The man with the camera lurked outside all day, snapping pictures of Casey whenever she was visible. He only bothered to back up to the sidewalk after Casey’s boss went charging after him with the ‘no loitering’ sign in hand, and even after that, he only bothered to stay on the sidewalk after the third time he was chased off.

It only got worse when it came time for Casey to clock out for the day. She lived too far away to simply skate home from work anymore, so she called a cab and listed an intersection a few blocks down to pick her up, because she didn’t want to just be standing around outside the restaurant while the man with the camera was right there.

She skated down the sidewalk, a few last camera flashes following her as she went. Regretfully, she still had to wait for a couple of minutes once she got to the intersection she had mentioned before her cab pulled up. Once it did, she threw herself inside like it was her last salvation and it would vanish if she didn’t move instantly.

The cab ride was calm enough. Traffic was only moderately horrible, which was better than it usually was at that time of the evening. By the time the cab made it to the driveway, it wasn’t particularly late, though it was still late enough that Atticus was likely to be home. To Casey’s irritation, the cabbie refused to actually drive down the driveway, instead insisting she get out at the top of it. After a few moments of arguing, she tossed open the car door and then sat there, legs hanging out of the car as she pulled her rollerblades off, for as long as she feasibly could, just to listen to the cabbie get steadily more irritated behind her.

Finally, she started jogging.

She made it only a few hundred yards when she swore she heard a car pulling to a halt in the street. She glanced over her shoulder, but the curving of the driveway and the trees combined to make it so she couldn’t see much. Clutching her rollerblades more tightly, she picked up her pace.

She heard noises in the woods to either side of the driveway, but for all she knew, it could have just been normal things that lived in the woods. She was just psyching herself out, probably.

And then, she heard the sounds of something very large lumbering through the underbrush, and she ground to a halt. It probably would have made more sense to move faster, but she panicked, and besides, wasn’t the advice for dealing with wild animals always telling her to stand her ground and try to look bigger than she was?

She ran out of time to argue with herself when a large, boxy head with small, round ears and a long muzzle poked out of the trees, followed shortly by the rest of the bear. It was not a cute, round black bear. It was the rough brown of crackling tree bark, with eyes so dark they were nearly black. It was enormous. It looked right at Casey for a few seconds before it carried on across the driveway and into the woods on the opposite side.

She heard a breathless, panicked voice hiss, “Shit,” and the clattering crash of a camera meeting the forest floor as it was dropped, and then the hasty retreat of fleeing footsteps through the leaves. Casey was still rooted to the spot, though, so she couldn’t exactly check.

The bear emerged from the woods once again, standing in the middle of the driveway and just staring at Casey. It almost looked expectant, but that was crazy, because it was a bear, and it shouldn’t have been able to look expectant.

And then, it jerked its head towards the house and shuffled in place.

Casey stared at it, gaping openly. When it sighed and pointed its muzzle towards the house more emphatically, she jerked into motion once again, continuing her trek along the driveway.

The bear followed only a few feet behind her, silent and benign, which were probably not words she was supposed to associate with a bear the size of a family van, but there they were.

As they got closer to the house, it picked up its pace, moving ahead of her. It paused only to look over its shoulder at her, making sure she was following.

She probably should have just bolted for the front door. This was a bear. Not a bear cub. Not a black bear, which were mostly the size of a particularly round human. Not a teddy bear. But an incredibly large bear, with teeth and claws.

But it was looking at her like there was something going on in its head, and she found herself following it as it led the way around the side of the house to the garage. The garage was tucked beneath the mansion’s foundation, with three bay doors that typically hid a muscle car, a slightly more practical hatchback, and a pair of motorcycles. The door that typically hid the motorcycles had been rolled up towards the ceiling, and there was a pile of clothing on the ground.

Casey watched with enormous eyes as the bear turned into a very naked Atticus. He shook his head slightly and carded his hand through his hair a couple times before he began to get dressed again, pulling his boxers from the pile on the floor.

Casey was a little unclear on what happened after that. She was pretty sure he said something to her, but everything sounded fuzzy and distant, tinny as if it was echoing to her ears from the other end of a long tunnel. She backed up a few paces, but then her knees buckled and she sank to the ground. Her vision was going a bit spotty, tunneling inwards rapidly from there.

She was pretty sure that passing out was a completely logical course of action, so she did exactly that.

When Casey swam back to consciousness, she was in a dim room, laying on something comfortable. She opened her eyes slowly with the greatest of reluctance, at first just cracking one eye open before finally taking a proper look around. She was in the library on a couch. Most of the lights were off, though there was a lamp lit on the other side of the room, and when she looked in that direction, she saw Atticus sitting in a chair beside it, reading a book.

Casey sort of wanted to just pretend she was still asleep. She also sort of wanted to just pretend the entire evening had been a dream, but she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have passed out for no reason. If she had, Atticus would probably be slightly less calm. So, her memory was probably regrettably reliable just then.

And then, her window of opportunity to pretend she was still asleep vanished as Atticus observed, “You took it surprisingly well, all things considered.” He was looking at Casey over the top edge of his book.

“That’s me,” Casey returned faintly. “I’m a trooper.”

Atticus breathed out something that was sort of a laugh. “Indeed. How are you feeling?”

“You’re a bear,” Casey threw back, rather than actually answering the question. “When you said this deal was to get rid of some rumors, you neglected to mention that the rumors were true!”

“I’m only marginally inhuman,” he returned, “and I’m not a monster. If I were a monster, I would have done more than simply scare that man off.”

“I—I need to… go. Back to my room.” Slowly, Casey sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the couch so her feet hit the floor. “I need to think about… everything. All of this.”

“Of course,” Atticus agreed, and though it was hard to tell, Casey was pretty sure he sounded a bit apprehensive. She didn’t give herself time to think that over before she got to her feet and fled the room at a very hasty walk.

One direction, then the other direction, then back in the first direction, and in the second direction once again, and the pattern repeated ad infinitum. Casey paced back and forth across her suite’s sitting room, wringing her hands together as she did, nails digging at her cuticles.

When she agreed to marry a celebrity, she supposed she should have expected the harassment, and to some extent, she had. She just hadn’t expected to be stalked. But she was pretty damn positive that no one would have expected to find out that Atticus was a bear.

She didn’t know what she was supposed to do with that detail. Just calling it ‘a detail’ seemed to sort of minimize the entire thing, but she wasn’t sure what else to call it. She legitimately had no words with which to describe the evening’s events. She had been watched at work, followed home, rescued by a bear, and then the bear turned into her husband.

She was married to a bear.

A reasonably gentlemanly bear, true, but the fact remained that he was a bear. That changed everything. She just… wasn’t sure what she wanted to do about it. Logically, she knew she could leave, and Atticus wouldn’t stop her. She could leave whenever she wanted; that had been part of the deal. Considering she had already undergone artificial insemination, he would keep paying her hefty allowance.

But that was sort of the crux of the issue, right there. She wasn’t sure yet -- she probably wouldn’t be sure for a few weeks -- but for all she knew, she could have been pregnant already. If that was the case, she didn’t know what to do about an inhuman pregnancy. She didn’t know what to do about an inhuman baby. And if she left, she would be going into it blind.

So, she supposed she would just… stick it out. Bear or not, Atticus hadn’t hurt her. He hadn’t even been impolite to her. So, things probably wouldn’t change much.

She couldn’t believe she was rationalizing it to herself, but sticking around was probably her best option. Especially since if she left, she really doubted the harassment would stop, since then, she would just be The Ex-Wife Who Couldn’t Put Up With Some Photographers. Maybe she was being shallow, but she didn’t want to deal with that on top of everything else.

Sighing, she dragged a hand down her face and pulled her phone out of her pocket. If nothing else, she wasn’t going to stick it out on her own.

She dialed in her sister’s number first and didn’t even give Annie time to properly answer. As soon as she heard her sister’s end of the line pick up, she said, “Hang on, I need to conference Jason in.” She put her sister on hold and dialed Jason’s number, and once again hardly gave him time to react before informing him, “It’s a group call,” before she merged the calls together.

“Why the conference call?” Annie wondered, her bemusement clear in her tone. “Do we need to get ready for battle or something?”

“My armor’s at the cleaner’s,” Jason deadpanned.

Casey rolled her eyes. “No, it’s just been… an interesting day.”

“You’re using the diplomatic voice,” Jason accused. “What happened?”

“A paparazzi -- paparazzo? Whatever. A camera guy was lurking outside the restaurant all goddamn day, and then he followed me home.” Casey paused as, predictably, Jason and Annie both erupted into outrage, rambling over top of each other so Casey could hardly pick out any individual words. Raising her voice to be heard over them, she added, “And then, a bear moseyed its ass out of the woods and sent the camera guy scampering. He dropped his camera and everything.”

The other two fell quiet so abruptly that Casey almost swore she could hear crickets chirping. After a few moments of silence, Annie hesitantly wondered, “A bear?”

“A bear,” Casey confirmed. “Fucking enormous, too. Followed me back to the house, where it then promptly turned into my husband.”

The silence after that was so intense that it almost seemed to echo, and Casey counted down from five in her head. As she reached zero, both Annie and Jason erupted into noise, both of them once again babbling over top of each other so Casey could hardly understand a word of what they were saying. She was pretty sure she got the gist of it, and the gist of it seemed to be that they were worried she’d been drugged or hit her head or that she had gotten food poisoning at some point.

Before either of them could threaten to drive down to the house and drag her to the emergency room, Casey cleared her throat loudly. “So, I passed out because watching a bear turn into my husband wasn’t how I was expecting my evening to go, and then I had a very thorough think about everything that’s happened so far.”

They didn’t believe a word she was saying, and she knew that, but even so, it felt good to get it off of her chest. If nothing else, at some point down the line, no one would ever be able to accuse her of keeping secrets, and she supposed it would eventually make one epic “I told you so.”

For the moment, though, it was mostly annoying. It took another fifteen minutes for her to convince them that no, really, she was fine and she didn’t need to see a doctor. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting them to say, but either way, the entire conversation left her more than a little irritated after she hung up.

She fell over into bed without even bothering to put her pajamas on. Instead, she simply pulled her pillow over her head and did her best to fall asleep.

The next day, work was… unusual. The first hour or so was fairly standard, but then something caught Casey’s eye, just out of the corner of her vision. She finished making a delivery to a car and made a tiny detour, just enough to catch a peek at whatever it was.

She nearly tripped over her skates when she saw Branson’s behemoth of a dog draped casually over the sidewalk, leisurely taking up the building’s shade.

It was another two hours before Casey could take her break, and she hurried down to the sidewalk with her lunch. The dog lifted his head from his paws as she approached, his ears angled towards her as she sat down on the curb.

“What in the world are you doing here?” she sighed, before she shook her head and grumbled, “I’m talking to a dog. Great.”

He cocked his head to one side slowly. When Casey offered him her hand, he deigned to give it a sniff before prodding it with his nose, and then he yawned and let his head fall back down to rest on his paws.

He wasn’t a particularly good conversationalist, but he was better company than most of her coworkers, so she stayed there for the rest of her break as she ate her lunch. It wasn’t until she was getting back to her feet to head back to work that she realized why he was there.

She hadn’t seen any camera people that day, at least not until that moment. She looked up as the dog lifted his head, and her eyes narrowed as she saw a woman with a camera across the street.

The woman was staring at the dog with some apprehension, and she beat a hasty retreat when he bared his teeth and surged to his feet.

Casey snorted out a laugh. “Good boy.”

It did occur to her, briefly, that he would need to be a very smart dog to identify such a specific subset of people to keep at bay, but she decided she didn’t want to think about it too much.

It was something of a relief that Casey could just wait outside the restaurant for a cab to pick her up. After all, no one was going to get anywhere near her with her furry, four-legged guardian angel still sitting on standby.

She was contemplating texting Branson to let him know she was leaving so he would know to come get his dog, but when the cab pulled up and Casey pulled open the door, the dog hopped right in before she could say a word. The cabbie made an irritable noise but didn’t object beyond that, possibly for fear that the lion-sized dog would eat him if he did.

The dog curled up into a neat, surprisingly small ball on one half of the seat, and with a brief shake of her head, Casey slid onto the remaining seat and pulled the door shut.

It was a tense, quiet cab ride after that, and once again, the cabbie refused to actually take her down the driveway, leaving her to once again walk. At least she had company that time, as the dog trotted along beside her.

Curious, she followed him as they got closer to the bottom of the driveway, wondering where he was going to go. Branson’s car was already parked at the bottom, so she supposed the dog would just go find him.

A strange feeling—a mix of dread and déjà vu—began to bubble in her chest as the dog carried on towards the once again open garage. There was a pile of clothing neatly folded on the seat of one of the motorcycles.

The dog strolled into the garage and paused, looking over his shoulder expectantly. He glanced from Casey to the pile of clothing and then back again, and he cocked his head to one side.

Clearing her throat, Casey closed her eyes and then covered them with her hands just for good measure. A moment later, she could hear fabric rustling, followed by Branson’s voice informing her, “I’m decent.”

She dropped her hands to her sides and opened her eyes in time to see Branson finish pulling a t-shirt over his head.

“So, the giant dog that looks like an over-sized wolf is actually an over-sized wolf,” Casey stated.

“A were-wolf,” Branson confirmed, running a hand through his hair a few times to put it in something resembling order.

Groaning, Casey dropped her face down into her hands. “Is Lydia the bird?” she asked, voice partially muffled.

“A crow, yes,” Branson replied.

“What were you doing the other times I ran into you?” she wondered, her face still covered. She peered at him from between two fingers.

“The first time, I was sleeping off the full moon from the night before,” he answered dryly, folding his arms over his chest and shifting his weight to one side. “The second time, Atticus called me after he saw the photos and asked me to check the woods to see if I could find anyone still lurking.”

Casey grumbled incoherently behind her hands, and Branson patted her on the shoulder. “It’s not quite as horrific as you’re pretending it is,” he informed her, tone dry and utterly unsympathetic. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve been sitting on a sidewalk all day doing basically nothing, so I’m going to go find something entertaining to do until my brain reengages with the rest of my body.”

He strolled past her, and Casey stayed right where she was until she heard his car start and begin to pull away. Finally, hands falling away from her face, she turned to peek out of the garage and watch his taillights disappear, leaning around the bay doorway.

She wasn’t pretending it was horrific. He just wasn’t looking at things from her perspective. She was just—

…She was sort of being a bitch, she supposed. If she turned into an animal, she supposed she wouldn’t have told anyone until it was absolutely necessary either. Even if she turned into something pretty innocuous, like a giant crow. She supposed she especially wouldn’t have told a practical stranger, at least not until she had some sort of proof that they wouldn’t freak out. And despite her marriage to Atticus, she was still basically a stranger to all of them, and they had no proof that she wouldn’t freak out. She had freaked out.

She groaned and let her forehead thump against the edge of the open doorway before she finally shoved herself away from the doorway. She slapped the button on the wall that would close the door, and as it rumbled down from the ceiling, she ducked under it, back onto the driveway, and followed the steps back up to the front door.

It was probably about time to talk to Atticus about… everything, she decided, determination solidifying in her gut.

Her determination faltered slightly as she stepped into the foyer and remembered that Atticus wasn’t home yet. Grumbling to herself in impotent irritation, she kicked at the rug on the floor, only to immediately make sure it was laying flat once again, smoothing it out with the toes of one foot.

Heaving a sigh, she kicked off her shoes, dropped her rollerblades from where they had been dangling around her neck, and made her way to the library. It was always good for keeping busy for a few hours.

When Casey met Atticus in the dining room for dinner that evening, he seemed more than slightly surprised. “I assumed you would have dinner in your room,” he remarked, though he didn’t sound offended. That didn’t make Casey feel any better about it.

She took her seat and folded her arms on the table, staring down at her fingers, splayed over the table. The chef made no idle chitchat as he brought their dishes in, evidently aware of the tense atmosphere. He delivered dinner quickly and efficiently and then bustled back to the kitchen.

Casey and Atticus ate in silence at first, until finally Casey wondered, “So, did you actually plan on telling me?”

“If it was necessary,” Atticus replied plainly. “People have a history of reacting poorly to the news, so I tend to avoid just spitting it out at random.”

“So, you didn’t deem it necessary to tell me that I’m going to give birth to a bear?” Casey asked sharply.

Atticus scoffed, but cleared his throat immediately afterwards. “The odds of you actually giving birth to a were-bear are low enough to be hilarious. It is possible, but highly improbable. If it was a guarantee, I would have told you from the start, but in reality, it’s more probable that if not for your friendly stalker, you wouldn’t have needed to know and you would have been happier not knowing.”

Casey prodded her food around on her plate and slid down lower in her seat. “I guess that makes sense,” she conceded, her voice low and sullen. She supposed that meant she could leave, if the odds of her actually giving birth to a were-bear were so low. But the odds weren’t nonexistent, so they were still just a bit too high for her to take her chances. And besides, Atticus hadn’t actually done anything to her, other than keeping a secret that she herself had already acknowledged that she would have kept if their roles had been switched.

She was just… annoyed at being left out of the loop. And really, how immature was that? But self-flagellation wasn’t going to make anything better. She could scold herself for the rest of her life about it, or she could do something about it. Considering that just sitting on her hands as things happened was not what she wanted to be known for, she supposed that narrowed her options quite a bit. Alright then.

Slowly, she sat back up in her seat to start eating in earnest, a look of determination on her face, no matter how out of place it felt just then. After a few bites, she looked up at Atticus, stating simply, “We should go on a date tomorrow.”

He blinked at her, looking utterly dumbstruck for a moment, before he gathered his composure and replied, “Alright. Anything in particular in mind?”

She shrugged and waved it off. “Not important,” she answered. “Just… somewhere to actually talk. There’s stuff I want to know, and now there’s no excuse not to tell me.”

Atticus nodded slowly. “Alright,” he conceded. “I’ll think of something.” He looked dissatisfied with his own answer, but Casey hadn’t expected him to just spit out an idea right then and there. She simply nodded once, accepting the ambiguity for the moment.

The rest of the meal was silent after that, but the tension, surprisingly, was minimal.

Casey woke up the next morning to find a note on the floor of her sitting room, having been slid under the door at some point. It simply informed her that Atticus would pick her up from work that afternoon.

She brought a backpack with her that day, a change of clothing stashed in it. Unsure of what he had in mind, she packed an outfit that was nice, but could still feasibly be called casual.

The rest of the morning was fairly normal. She found some bacon in the fridge and made that and cooked some eggs. She called a cab, and by the time she was dressed, ready for work, and approaching the end of the driveway at a jog with her bag thumping against her back, her cab was pulling to a halt.

As the cabbie laid on the horn, despite the fact that he could see Casey coming and she was maybe twenty feet away at most, Casey put some very real thought into just quitting her job. It wasn’t as if she needed the money anymore, and it wasn’t as if she liked the work or the people.

(That thought led to some slightly more honest contemplation during the cab ride, as she couldn’t actually think of a single decent reason why she still had her job, other than habit.)

Halfway through the day, Casey noticed three of her coworkers clustered together, whispering to each other. Eventually, one of them urgently pointed to something, and when Casey looked up to follow where she was pointing, she saw an enormous crow sitting on top of a streetlight beside the restaurant.

Lydia looked down at her, croaked affably, and then fluffed her feathers and returned to keeping watch.

Casey got to watch Lydia dive bomb two people that day, squawking and flapping and pecking and generally making it impossible for them to take any pictures before they wisely decided to get the hell out of there. Somehow, Casey managed to refrain from laughing both times.

It was amazing for her morale. A man grabbed her ass (and Lydia saw it happen; Casey knew because she heard the most affronted squawk immediately afterwards) and one of her coworkers spilled a large soda on her, and neither of those things managed to ruin her day.

When she took her break, Casey sat down on the curb beneath the streetlight. She was there for maybe a few seconds before Lydia fluttered down from her perch to land on the sidewalk beside her.

She was even more enormous up close than she had been from across a room. Though she looked like a crow, glossy black from her beak to her claws, she was nearly as tall as Casey’s torso. She looked as if she could have picked a small child up without any issue. She was also, in a strange way, incredibly pretty. But Casey supposed most wild animals were.

Casey stared at her for a moment, before she finally observed blandly, “The fact that you’re as pretty as an animal as you are as a human is ridiculously unfair. I’m judging you.” The words were not exactly intimidating, sadly.

Despite the (admittedly weak) judgment, Lydia fluffed her feathers up and preened pointedly for a few seconds.

“You’re not helping,” Casey sulked.

As if to offer some comfort, Lydia patted her beak against Casey’s shoulder. She was a very condescending bird.

Heaving a sigh, Casey let the topic drop. “What do you think?” she wondered blandly. “Think I should quit my job?”

The response was an immediate croak and a flurry of squawking as Lydia hopped in place and rustled her wings. It was a very emphatic answer.

“I guess,” Casey sighed, though she wasn’t quite sure what she was agreeing with. “I just wonder what I would do with my time without it.”

Watching a bird roll her eyes was sort of surreal. It was followed by a stern peck to Casey’s shoulder and a tug at a lock of her hair. Pouting slightly at the assault, Casey leaned out of reach, though she did at least concede, “Yeah, I know, that’s a really lousy reason to keep a job. But still, I don’t want to go stir crazy or get cabin fever or something.”

Lydia looked around rather pointedly, as if to encompass the entire city as a whole with the gesture. And Casey supposed it was a fair point; if she didn’t want to get bored, then she had an entire city with which to keep herself occupied and more money than she would ever feasibly need to do just that.

“I’ll think about it,” she sighed, followed by a sharp, “Hey!” as Lydia pecked at her shoulder again. “I said I would think about it!”

So, maybe Casey was a creature of habit, and maybe she was generally a little skeptical about trying new things, especially when “get married to a celebrity, potentially get pregnant with his baby, and figure out that celebrity and his social circle all turn into very large animals” had pretty effectively filled her ‘try new things’ quota for the month.

Lydia rolled her eyes again and fluffed herself downwards until she was nearly spherical, but she let the topic drop after that. Evidently, she decided that she could only get so far by pecking at Casey like she was trying to catch a stubborn worm.

All in all, the day seemed to fly by, so Casey actually needed to be reminded that it was time to clock out. Granted, the reminder didn’t come in the form of an actual reminder—her boss most likely would have been perfectly content to milk every second of work out of her as he legally could—but instead in the form of a few of her coworkers wondering who the motorcyclist idling on the curb was.

It took Casey a moment to recall that Atticus had not one but two motorcycles and that he was picking her up that day, so the motorcyclist on the curb was probably her ride. She dashed to the employee bathroom and hurried to get changed into her jeans and a blouse, and she shoved her uniform and her skates into her bag.

She paused in her jog to the curb to look up at the streetlight and offer Lydia a wave, and she had to smother a laugh behind one hand when the crow partially spread her wings and bowed before taking off and flying away to… wherever Lydia went. Casey wasn’t actually sure of much of anything about them, other than knowing that they tended to just wander into Atticus’s house as they pleased.

(Given her own tendency to saunter into Jason’s apartment uninvited, she could understand.)

She slung her bag onto her back just before she climbed onto the back of the bike’s seat, and immediately, Atticus presented her with a second helmet. As if he could sense her rolling her eyes, he informed her blandly, “If you want to skate without a helmet and risk bashing your head open, that’s your prerogative. But my bike, my rules. Put the damn helmet on.”

“Put the damn helmet on,” Casey parroted back at him, her voice deepening to something that still sounded nothing at all like Atticus’s voice, no matter how hard she tried. She squealed in surprise when he revved the engine before she dutifully plopped the helmet down on her head.

“Where are we going?” she wondered as the bike pulled away from the curb.

Atticus might have answered her, but if he did, his reply was lost to the wind as the bike sped up. Casey supposed she would just need to wait and see, then. If nothing else, she had already had the biggest surprise of her life, so anything else would likely seem like small potatoes.

What a strange thought, to be able to say with reasonable certainty that she had already had the biggest shock of her life. It was actually sort of a relief.

Casey hadn’t been expecting to wind up at one of the city parks. Not that she was complaining; Crestholme had always been an attractive city, and its parks were in abundance. She had just sort of assumed that Atticus had something fancy in mind.

Granted, as they walked along the winding trails, it started to make more sense. Everyone expected him to opt for something fancier. As such, they didn’t run into a single camera-person. It was sort of surreal; they had something approximating privacy.

Besides, Casey wasn’t going to complain about a reasonably simple date. Assuming it counted as a date. Were they dating? They were already married, even if they had hardly even stood closer than arm’s length from each other. Casey was just going to go ahead and say that they were dating, for simplicity’s sake and the sake of her own sanity.

There was a café in the park, though it was more just a small counter in a shack with a kitchen behind it. It was near the main entrance to the park, beside a complicated arrangement of tables and chairs around an ornate fountain. Atticus and Casey entered the park from a gate that was nearly clear on the opposite side of the park and meandered their way to the main gate, where they got dinner at the tiny café. Soup, a sandwich, and coffee may not have been a feast fit for kings, but Casey was content with it, and she balanced it carefully as she carried it to one of the tables closest to the fountain.

Their conversation had carried on in no particular direction as they walked, and it continued to do so for the first few minutes as they ate, though gradually it lulled.

“What about your job?” Casey wondered quietly, once their aimless chitchat turned into silence and she remembered that there was supposed to be a purpose to the evening. She was supposed to be learning about him. She stirred her soup in idle circles with her spoon. “The antiquities thing. Was that true?”

“Yes, though not the whole story,” Atticus replied. “I own a travel agency. Under a different name, of course. It’s called Highland Ventures. And it is a legitimate business, but it’s also a front for a much more specific sort of travel.”

“I’m going to assume that travel involves people who turn into animals,” Casey guessed before she picked up her cup to drink the last of her soup.

“Right.” Atticus nodded once. “I use the business to help were-animals that have been discovered or are at risk of being discovered to disappear. A lot of the time, it’s as simple as just relocating them, but occasionally, we’ve had to manufacture entirely new identities.”

“Who are they running from?” Casey wondered, bemused. It took a moment for her to recall that her first instinct had been to tell two other people, so perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that occasionally a were-animal might need to run from their past. She felt bad for a moment, until she reminded herself that neither Annie nor Jason had actually believed her and so were both pretty unlikely to actually tell anyone else about it.

“Neighbors or coworkers or something like that who found them out on accident and can’t be trusted not to say anything about it, most of the time,” Atticus answered, just reinforcing Casey’s silent musings. “In those cases, just relocating them typically works because then, even if the neighbor or whoever tells everyone they know, they’re pretty unlikely to be believed, or whoever they’re telling won’t know the were-animal in question and so probably won’t give a shit.”

“And what about the rest of the time?” Casey asked slowly.

Atticus cleared his throat. “Sometimes, people find out, and they get violent or obsessive. And it’s really rare in this day and age, but there are still a few families who consider themselves hunters, and they can be tenacious, to put it mildly.”

“Hunters,” Casey repeated flatly.

“Hunters,” Atticus confirmed. “People dedicated to getting rid of were-animals. Like I said, though, they’re pretty rare now that getting away with murder is such a challenge; the only guaranteed way to do so is to make sure the were-animal is in their animal shape, and that’s when we tend to be the most dangerous.”

“Why is that a guarantee?” Casey mumbled against the edge of her coffee cup’s lid.

“We don’t shift back when we’re dead. Whatever form we die in, that’s how we stay,” Atticus answered simply, as if he were just explaining a biology lesson to someone. In a way, he sort of was.

Casey started on her sandwich, since it offered her a decent excuse not to say anything as she processed everything she had been told. A quarter of the way through it, she paused and mused slowly, “So, you don’t want people to know because it’s not safe for people to know. Or potentially unsafe, I guess.”

“That’s part of it,” he agreed. “On top of that, my job is to help other people disappear. It doesn’t look particularly professional if I get found out myself. My business would crumble, and considering there aren’t many people offering the service that I’m offering, that could leave a lot of people in danger.”

“I guess I can understand that,” Casey mumbled before she returned her attention to her sandwich. She was learning all sorts of strange and unusual things that night. Whether or not she actually wanted to know them, she was still undecided, but she supposed she had decided they were going on a date so she could ask him about those things. She couldn’t say she had expected every detail of it to be sunshine and daisies.

“Have you ever met any hunters?” she wondered once her sandwich was gone and all that remained was the last two thirds of her coffee.

“Maybe?” Atticus didn’t sound particularly sure, but he also didn’t sound especially bothered by the ambiguity. “Much like were-animals, hunters tend not to just… announce themselves. Since most of the world doesn’t believe in were-animals, most people assume someone saying they hunt were-animals is delusional, on drugs, or trying to pull a really strange joke.” He shrugged one shoulder. “So, I suppose it’s possible that I’ve met a few, but I wouldn’t really know. It’s not exactly the sort of thing I can quiz people on without being too obvious about my own secrets.”

“This has gotten a lot more complicated than I expected,” Casey informed her coffee softly.

Atticus sighed out a quiet laugh. “I doubt it’s going to come up in day-to-day conversation,” he assured her wryly. “And the odds of you running into any hunters is honestly slimmer than the odds of you running into other were-animals.”

“How many were-animals are there?” Casey wondered, before she picked up her cup and tipped her head back to drain the last of it.

Once again, Atticus shrugged. “We don’t exactly keep a tally. Crestholme has a higher than average number because two families congregated in the area, along with their tagalongs.” “Two families” didn’t sound like a lot to be considered a higher than average amount when Casey thought about it. Considering that, she was pretty content to assume that were-animals were not particularly common.

“Tagalongs,” she repeated, caught somewhere between confusion and amusement. “Is that what Branson and Lydia are?” she asked dryly.

“More or less,” came the easy reply. “I helped relocate both of them a few years back. They decided to stick around. Since then, I’ve handed most of the running of the travel agency over to them.”

“How much money does that sort of business even make?” Casey asked as the thought occurred to her.

“It depends on who’s being relocated,” he replied. “Technically speaking, I do it for free, but those who can afford to do so are encouraged to leave a… healthy tip. Forging documents is expensive, yes, but so is making someone disappear even without a change of identity.”

Casey hummed thoughtfully as she pondered that.

They were both done eating by then, and the sun was starting to sink. Casey’s thoughts were spinning in sixteen different directions. Considering all of that, it seemed like a good time to wrap up the conversation.

They threw out their garbage and made their way back across the park towards the gate they had initially used, where Atticus’s motorcycle was still parked along the side of the road, just waiting for them to return.

There was something strangely thrilling about riding a motorcycle after dark, and Casey put some serious thought into asking Atticus to teach her how to drive one. Another time, though, if only because she didn’t want to go through the hassle of getting a motorcycle license when she wasn’t even licensed to drive a car yet.

The house was quiet when they got back. The chef hadn’t been in that day, and the cleaning staff had already left for the night. For once, neither Branson nor Lydia were there. As Casey and Atticus walked through the front door, everything was so quiet, and it felt as if they were the only two people in the world.

“Hey.” The word left Casey’s lips before she could rethink it, and Atticus paused and glanced over his shoulder at her until something about her expression made him turn around to face her properly. With a deep breath, Casey reached up, clasping one hand around the back of his neck so she could draw him down to her height. He bent easily, and when Casey kissed him, he needed no coaxing to return it.

The kiss was slow and gentle, slightly fumbling at first as they adjusted to each other. And then, Atticus gently cupped her jaw in one hand; he pressed his other hand to the small of her back, and it felt right after that. It felt like it was where they were both supposed to be.

They were dating, after all.

Casey couldn’t quite hold in a giggle at the thought, and the kiss broke. Atticus offered her a slightly bewildered smile as he wondered, “What’s so funny?”

Casey shook her head briefly. “It’s nothing,” she replied. “Just a silly thought.” She leaned up on her toes to kiss him one more time, just a brief peck that time, before she retreated once more.

Slowly, almost cautiously, she wondered, “Can I sleep in your room tonight?” There was nothing sultry in her tone. There was no double entendre. The words meant exactly what they spelled out; she was asking about sleeping and nothing more.

At first, her only answer was startled surprise, before Atticus finished processing the question and assured her, “Of course.”

Casey grinned up at him. “Great. I’ll… see you in a few minutes then.”

Despite that, it took a moment before they both stopped staring at each other long enough to go their separate ways.

The curtains in her bedroom were closed. They always were if she was getting undressed. She had learned that lesson very quickly. Casey changed into her sleepwear, and for some odd reason, she felt compelled to check herself in the mirror before she headed to Atticus’s suite, as if he hadn’t already seen her in her pajamas or in clothes that she saved for just lounging around the house. All they were going to do was sleep, and yet she found herself feeling self-conscious, as if somehow, she would mess that up, even if she couldn’t even see how that was possible.

She allowed herself only a moment of dithering, though, before she left her suite and headed to Atticus’s.

He wasn’t wearing a shirt when she got there. Just a pair of sleep pants. Casey sort of wanted to touch his abs, but she kept her hands to herself, clenching them together in front of herself and wringing them as he ushered her through his sitting room and into his bedroom.

Casey followed a few steps behind him, waiting to see which side of the bed he would take before she lied down on the other side. Nothing happened at first, and then he shuffled closer to her, pressing closer to her back. She fought back the urge to tense, and relaxed completely when she heard him murmur, “Is this alright?” against her ear.

“Yeah,” she answered, whispering even if she wasn’t sure why. Breaking the stillness of the room just seemed strangely impolite.

And it was alright, honestly. Atticus was warm, his bed was comfortable, and on the whole, he was keeping his hands to himself, with one hand resting against the side of her ribs rather than reaching any higher or lower.

His breathing was steady behind her, and if she concentrated, she could feel his heartbeat against her back. It was soothing, and soon enough, her eyes began to drift shut, and she couldn’t find it within herself to fight to keep them open. She drifted off gently, and she dreamed of peaceful things, though later she would recall them only as splashes of light and brief, bright bursts of beautiful sound.

Casey woke up when Atticus moved, blinking her eyes open slowly as he sat up behind her. “You don’t have work today,” she reminded him, her mouth getting ahead of her brain in that moment. She rolled over to face him.

“No,” he agreed wryly. “But old habits die hard; I wake up at more or less the same time regardless of whether or not I have work.”

Casey grunted at him, ignoring his logic. “You can be awake without moving,” she pointed out, reaching a hand towards him only to let it flop down onto the mattress.

“I could,” he conceded dryly. “But that doesn’t sound particularly interesting, just lying in bed and staring at the back of your head while you sleep. What do I get out of it?”

“Who said anything about sleeping?” Casey asked, trying for something like an innocent tone and more or less missing the mark.

Atticus cocked an eyebrow at her, one corner of his lips quirking up slightly. “What are you suggesting?”

Slowly, still loose-limbed with sleep, Casey sat up and slung a leg over his thighs, settling on his lap as if she belonged there. She kissed him slowly, her hands settling on his shoulders at first before they drifted downwards to rest against his chest. He met the kiss without complaint, his hands curling around her hips to pull her closer.

It was just as Casey was beginning to rock slightly in his lap and his tongue was probing at the seam of her lips that his phone rang on the bedside table, and he leaned away from her to answer it. Casey pouted at him, but she kept quiet. As she watched, his expression got more and more put out until he hung up the phone once again.

With a sigh, he dropped his phone onto the bed and stated, “They need me to come in today. There’s been something of a mix-up, and it needs to be straightened out.”

“And there’s no one else who can do it?” Casey simpered, trailing the tip of one finger in idle, aimless patterns over his skin.

“If it was the antiquities business, yes,” he returned wryly, “but it’s not.”

Oh. Right. His other, probably more important job.

With a sigh, Casey tumbled to the side, falling off of his lap to land in a graceless heap in the blankets. He leaned down after her, kissing her briefly. When he leaned away, it was just enough to say, “We can continue this later,” before he kissed her again.

He stood up after that, disappearing into his bathroom to get ready for the day, and Casey sprawled out on his bed, taking up as much space as she could, as if she had been sleeping in it every night for weeks.

It could have been a worse morning, she supposed. Maybe she was a little… justifiably frustrated, but it definitely could have been a worse morning.

She dozed until he left his bathroom once again, and she watched him bustle through his room until he was dressed and ready for the day. He made no mention of her in his suite, apparently content to let her lie there for as long as she wanted in his absence.

She didn’t remember dozing off again, but when she woke up as the sun spilled across her face, it was an hour later, and Atticus was long gone. With a yawn, she sat up, stretching her arms over her head. She made her way back to her suite, intent on using her own bathroom and getting dressed before she headed downstairs to throw breakfast together.

At least she didn’t need to worry about getting called in on her off days.

The day seemed to pass at a crawl. Casey couldn’t get Atticus’s words out of her head. We can continue this later. There was nothing inherently special about those words, but considering what they had been doing at the time, those words felt an awful lot like a promise. One that Casey was eager to have fulfilled.

She kept glancing at the clock in whatever room she moseyed into, and it seemed like every time she did, regardless of how it felt like hours had crawled by, it had only been a few dozen minutes.

She wound up sprawled out in a heap on the rug in the library at one point, staring up at the ceiling lamp as if it would answer all of her questions, or at the very least hypnotize her until Atticus got back. It did neither.

Eventually, she pulled her cellphone out of her pocket and dialed her sister’s number. Annie answered after two rings with a chirpy, “What’s up?”

“I’m pretty sure Atticus and I are going to fuck tonight,” Casey explained, blunt to the point that a sledgehammer looked like a knife in comparison.

On the other end of the line, Annie sputtered incoherently for a moment, spraying something—probably tea—all over the phone and whatever else was around her. Casey felt bad for her desk for a moment. But only for a moment.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously,” she returned placidly. “Or at least, it sounded like that’s what we were talking about this morning.”

There was a pause, and then Annie asked slyly, “Do I need to give you the talk or something?”

Casey rolled her eyes, regardless of the fact that she was alone in the room. “I think I know the basics,” she returned flatly.

“Should I do the whole ‘be sure to use a condom’ shtick?” Annie wondered innocently.

“What for?” Casey asked, her exasperation plain. “I’m clean. I’m willing to bet he’s clean. And either I’m already pregnant or I’m supposed to be pregnant, in which case a condom would be pretty detrimental to the cause.”

“Fair point,” Annie conceded. “Are you going to give him a show?”

“I hadn’t planned on it,” Casey returned simply. “I don’t know how to put on a show. I’d probably mess it up and, like… fall out a window or something. I don’t know. I’m pretty sure I would find a way to make that happen.” She didn’t know how she would make that happen, but it seemed like the most likely outcome to trying to get too adventurous on the first night. She would save the show-stopping stunts for later, after a bit of research and a bit more familiarity between her and Atticus.

“You worry me occasionally,” Annie returned blandly. She didn’t sound particularly surprised by the words coming out of Casey’s mouth, though. Whether that was a good thing or just slightly insulting was still up in the air.

“Only occasionally?” Casey asked, her tone hopeful and overly earnest to the point of being comical. “I used to worry you all the time! I’ll take it as a good sign.”

She couldn’t see Annie’s face, of course, but her sigh sounded very much like she was rolling her eyes. “I need to get back to work. You’re too ridiculous to talk to.”

“Uuuuugh,” Casey groaned. “I’m going to go crazy waiting for tonight!”

“Then go find something to do!” Annie laughed. “You’re willingly a shut-in. No one is stopping you from doing anything. You don’t even need to spend money if you’re that set against it.”

Casey blinked up at the light. “I guess so,” she returned slowly. “I’ll let you get back to work.”

“Give me the details later!” Annie insisted.

Casey just managed to shout, “Pervert!” down the line before her sister hung up.

She supposed Annie had a point. No one had told her she had to just laze around the house. She wasn’t being held at gunpoint and told to be the most stereotypical fifties housewife or anything like that (which was good, in hindsight, since the cooking and cleaning crew would have robbed her of any stereotypical housewife duties, and she hated cleaning to begin with). Sure, Annie and Jason were both working, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t find anything to do.

She peeled herself off of the floor and changed into some shorts and a t-shirt that she didn’t care particularly much about in case they got dirty, and she rooted through her closet, dipping into some boxes that still hadn’t been unpacked until she pulled out her old elbow pads, knee pads, and helmet. They were practical and all black, though while the pads were matte, the helmet had a blueish shimmer to it in just the right light. There was nothing special about them, but they had been helpful back when she had just been learning how to skate for work.

She supposed if she was going to make an actual hobby out of it, she should get back into the habit of wearing them. Besides, there was nothing particularly special about her rollerblades either, so she supposed they were all well-matched for each other.

She braided her hair and pinned it up, low on the back of her head so it wouldn’t be uncomfortably smashed beneath her helmet. She plopped the helmet onto her head and buckled it, strapped on the knee and elbow pads, and grabbed her skates. She jogged up the driveway at a steady pace until she got to the road, where she put her skates on. With that done, she got busy.

She kept it simple at first, just skating in various shapes and squiggly lines until she could feel herself working up a sweat, and she picked up the pace, trying harder stunts, picking up her speed. There was a hill a block or so down the road, and while it wasn’t particularly long, it was steep, and she knew she could get some decent speed going down it.

She made a beeline for it, keeping her eyes open for cars, though it was rare that the road they lived on got traffic.

She made it to the hill without any incident, peered down it to get an idea of what she was in for, and then backed up again. She started skating at the hill with as much momentum as she could work up, her legs pounding furiously and her arms pumping at her sides.

Time seemed to slow down for a split second when she reached the crest of the hill, just before she plunged downwards. Strands of her hair were whipped free of her bun, and they fluttered around her face, the dangling, excess length of her helmet strap clacking loudly against the plastic of her helmet as it blew backwards.

She crouched carefully and brought her arms in close, and she let out a whoop of delighted laughter as she picked up more speed, cruising down the road like she was never going to stop. Even once she made it down to the bottom of the hill, she kept going, momentum carrying her along the straightaway until she reached the next hill, and only the incline started to slow her properly.

Halfway up the hill, she straightened up and came to a halt, stepping onto the grass beside the road. Adrenaline pumped through her, pasting a manic smile onto her face. She doubled over, her hands on her knees as she just breathed for a moment and appreciated where she fit in the world.

Finally, she turned back towards the house and headed back in the direction she came from. By the time she made it back to the top of the bigger hill, sweat was pouring down her face and neck, and she was panting like a dog that had been forced to run a marathon, but she didn’t give into the temptation to stop for a break; she kept plowing onwards.

It was as she was nearing the driveway again that things started to seem a bit unusual. Above her, a flock of birds took flight, and a pair of squirrels scampered up a tree trunk and along a pair of branches. A branch snapped, and when she looked in that direction, she saw something gleaming, bright and shiny. It looked small, and it sparkled slightly, but she couldn’t make out what it was; it was gone an instant later. Regardless, it was pretty obvious that it was not simply a part of nature; nature didn’t shine like jewelry, or at least it didn’t in the middle of the woods.

Shading her eyes with one hand against her forehead, she squinted into the woods, but she couldn’t spot anything. She shook herself slightly, mumbling to herself about adrenaline messing with her head as she started to make her careful way back down the driveway. It wasn’t the first time she had gotten overly excited and sworn she was seeing things that weren’t there.

But still, her lot in life at that point meant she was less skeptical than she would have previously been inclined to be, and the woods seemed a bit too quiet as she made her way back to the house. Sure, it was probably nothing, but she would mention it to Atticus all the same. Either it was nothing, and thus nothing would happen, or it was something and she was alerting him to bad news.

It seemed like a win/win situation if anyone felt inclined to ask her.

Casey left her skates by the door and pulled her phone out of her pocket, bringing up Atticus’s number and texting him.

‘Could’ve sworn I heard someone in the woods while I was outside. didn’t really see much of anything, but it was super weird. just glad I was fully dressed this time.’

It took almost ten minutes before she got a reply. ‘I’ll have Branson and Lydia check out the property once they’re done here.’

‘lazy. why don’t you ever check your own property?’ Casey meant it in good fun, of course.

The reply came quicker that time. “Lydia can fly, and Branson has a better sense of smell. I’m just very large, so I’m less helpful for this sort of thing.”

“Dumb muscle without the dumb part. got it.”

She expected that to be the end of the conversation after that, but a few moments later, her phone beeped again to let her know she had another text.

“Occasionally with the dumb part.”

Casey clapped a hand over her mouth to mask a snort despite the fact that there was no one there to hear her.

Well, she had given him props for his self-awareness in the past. She supposed there was no reason for it to just evaporate.

She shoved her phone back into her pocket and left all of her rollerblading gear in a pile to deal with later, letting it slip from her mind as she wandered into the kitchen to make herself a sandwich. More time had passed than she expected, and it had been hours since she’d last eaten.

She constructed the meal quickly and ate it even quicker before she moseyed back into the library. She browsed books absentmindedly for a few minutes, occasionally plucking one from a shelf and leaving them in a pile for her to sort through in greater detail later. Eventually, she realized that if she wanted to get busy with Atticus once he was home, it would probably be more enjoyable for all parties if she didn’t smell like a skate park. With some reluctance, she dragged herself back up the stairs and into her suite to take a shower, changing into some clothes that she could easily lounge around the house in.

When Atticus got back, Casey was waiting for him on the stairs, sitting on one step with her feet on another. She was leaning forward so her elbows were perched on her knees and her chin was propped up in both hands.

Atticus paused in the doorway when he saw her for a moment before he stepped the rest of the way inside and let the door close behind him. “Hi,” he offered slowly, seeming slightly bemused.

“I have been waiting for you to get back all day,” Casey informed him plainly, sitting up and leaning her elbows on a step behind her. Atticus looked her over as the new position made her back arch. “We have some unfinished business from this morning, if you care to recall.”

“Not even going to let me in the front door first?” he wondered dryly, already shrugging out of his jacket.

“Nope,” Casey answered pleasantly. “You. Me. Upstairs. Let’s get going.”

He glanced past her, towards the kitchen, and for a moment, she worried that she was pushing too hard. That he was going to just walk right past her, as if she weren’t even there. And then, he carefully took off his shoes and closed the space between them, picked her up as if she weighed absolutely nothing, and began to carry her up the stairs. Casey squealed in startled surprise, her arms wrapping around the back of his neck. As an afterthought, she crossed one ankle coyly over the other and shifted herself in his hold so she could properly look up at him.

“Just as eager as I am, then?” she wondered playfully. “Good. I would hate for us to be on uneven footing.”

The trip to Atticus’s room was quick, and Casey laughed as he dropped her onto his bed with a bounce. As he started unbuttoning his shirt, Casey started pulling her t-shirt over her head and followed it by unbuttoning and unzipping her shorts and kicking them off the end of the bed. She slid the straps of her bra off of her arms and finally sat up enough to reach back and unclasp it, and the bra, too, was tossed to the floor.

By the time Atticus was shrugging out of his shirt and unbuttoning his pants, Casey was already shimmying her panties down her hips until they were far enough down her legs to simply kick them off. She offered Atticus a small, impish grin and a beatific, “Take your time.”

He rolled his eyes and tossed his pants at her once he stepped out of them. Casey caught them by one pant leg and flung them aside to land in a heap on the floor along with everything else.

Atticus let his boxers drop to the floor, and once both of them were naked, they took a moment to just look each other over, appreciating what was in front of them. Casey felt a bit inadequate as she took in the sight of Atticus’s abs and his arms and his shoulders, but he was giving her a look like he was getting ready to eat her alive, so she was willing to content herself with the knowledge that she had absolutely nothing to worry about.

Atticus leaned a knee on the edge of the mattress on one side of Casey’s legs. As she lay back, he set his hands on the bed on either side of her, his other leg joining the first as he crawled onto the mattress, braced on either side of her. She grinned up at him and reached up with one hand, fingers curling around the back of his neck and tightening in his hair. She pulled him down until their lips met, and as the kiss deepened, he bore more of his weight down on her, until she could feel his cock against her hip.

She hummed thoughtfully into the kiss and reached down with her free hand, fingers curling around his cock. Loosely at first, just to listen to the way his breath stuttered for a fraction of a second, before she tightened her grip and began to stroke it.

For a few minutes, they moved together, her hand on his cock, his lips against hers, his hands sliding along her sides and kneading her breasts. She sighed into the kiss every time he pinched one of her nipples, and his cock steadily hardened and grew in her grasp until his hips were rolling and he was pulling himself away from her.

He shifted slightly until he was kneeling between her knees, his cock red and erect and dripping just a bit. He reached for her, his hands curling around the backs of her thighs, and Casey couldn’t quite keep in a squeal of surprise as he gave her a tug, and she slid down the mattress until her back end was settled on his lap. She squirmed to get comfortable for a moment until he settled a hand over her sex, twirling a thumb around her clit and pressing a fingertip to her entrance before letting it delve into her damp heat.

He thrust his finger into her only a few times before he pulled it out, curling his hand around his cock instead, holding it steady as he guided it to her entrance.

The head of his cock pushed through the velvet soft folds of her sex, bumped against her entrance, and then he was inside her. They sighed softly, simultaneously, and he kept pushing inwards slowly, inch by inch.

Casey waited until he was fully sheathed within her before she reached up, both hands curling around his shoulders. Atticus’s hands pressed against the small of her back, lifting her as she pulled herself upwards until she was upright, sitting in his lap, his cock still fully sheathed inside her.

Neither of them moved for a moment, and then his grip around her middle tightened, and he lifted her, slowly at first until she used her hands on his shoulders to push herself up, encouraging him to go faster. Before long, she was bouncing on his lap, steadily faster and faster. Her arms tightened around his shoulders, and he began lifting her faster, each lift followed by a sharp, downward slam as he lowered her to his lap once again.

Everything felt more and larger and brighter, as if a current was being run through every single one of Casey’s nerves. As the sensation built, it became rapidly apparent that their current position demanded a bit more grace and balance than she was in a position to utilize just then.

Casey fell back with a gasping moan, and Atticus followed her, his grip on her hips making sure his cock stayed in her. He rose up on his knees and hoisted her hips off of the bed, most of her weight instead bearing down on her shoulders as he kept pounding into her. The room was quiet, save for their heaving breaths and the damp sound of skin slapping against skin.

Her voice was getting louder as heat built in her belly, coiling like a spring that was getting tighter and tighter, until it released. Her entire body went tense, her thighs squeezing around him, her hands fisting in the sheets, and her head tossing to the side as her back arched off of the bed until she was bent into a perfect bow. She came with a long, low moan that was more of a gasp.

Atticus’s rhythm slowed as Casey gradually went limp, though he kept thrusting. It wasn’t long, though, before his rhythm began to stutter, until at last he managed four more erratic thrusts before he came.

For a few moments, there was stillness, save for the heaving of their chests as they caught their breath. For a few moments, there was peace, save for the way they panted into the silence. And then, slowly, Atticus pulled away, his cock slipping free of her, and Casey could feel their combined fluids beginning to drip to the mattress. She shuddered slightly, but in the best way.

The mattress bounced slightly as Atticus flopped down beside her on his belly, folding his arms on the bed to lean his chin on his forearms, head tipped to the side so he could look at her.

It was quiet still, but that was alright. It was a comfortable sort of quiet. Casey saw no need to break it immediately. Instead, she appreciated the pleasant soreness and reached her arms over her head and stretched her toes towards the foot of the bed until her back cracked. With a content sigh, she went limp again, and the two of them continued to bask in the silence.

Eventually, Atticus wondered, “Want to go see if the chef’s still here and willing to make us dinner?”

“Yeah, sounds good,” Casey replied, slowly sitting up. “Shower first, though,” she decided, glancing down to the mess between her legs. It wasn’t really something she wanted to drip across the floor.

Atticus hummed in agreement and began the laborious process of sitting up.

It was a brief shower, just for the sake of freshening up. Afterwards, unwilling to muster up the motivation to actually get dressed again, Casey simply pulled her panties back on and then pulled on Atticus’s shirt. She only buttoned the top half of the buttons.

Watching the way the pale fabric clung to her, still damp and only getting more so as her hair dripped dry, Atticus didn’t seem to have any complaints about her theft of his shirt. In fact, he seemed quite content to put a t-shirt on along with his pants from before, and just watch her as she led the way to the kitchen, her hips swaying with each step.

Honestly, it was sort of nice to know she could get that sort of reaction out of him.

It was even nicer to find out that the chef was still around, and though he playfully hemmed and hawed and made a fuss about it, he was still perfectly willing to throw something together for dinner.

And if he was at all curious about why Casey was leaning around the doorway instead of just stepping into the kitchen, he was enough of a gentleman not to bring it up.

The night was quiet when Casey and Atticus retreated to his suite for the night. Atticus went to bed before her, as he usually did, leaving Casey to browse on her laptop in his sitting room until she started yawning.

Slowly, carefully, she made her way into his bedroom and quietly crawled into the bed, moving as cautiously as she could so as to avoid waking him up.

He moved as she lay down, flinging an arm over her middle haphazardly, and she froze. It didn’t sound as if he had woken up, though, and she relaxed into the mattress. Slowly, she let her eyes drift shut.

By the time she was asleep, she had almost entirely forgotten about the strange encounter in the woods earlier that day. Or not-quite-encounter, considering how minor it had seemed at the time. Honestly, most of that day already felt as if it had happened days ago. And it all seemed so small. Noises in the woods were normal, right? Sure, she had never really lived in the woods before, but she knew enough to know that they weren’t the perfectly silent bastions of peace and tranquility that they were always shown as in movies.

Whatever she had seen and heard, it was probably nothing to worry about, and with that thought, she let herself drift off.

Casey woke up reluctantly when she heard something tap at the window, just to pull her pillow over her head and try to drown the noise out. It continued, louder and far more insistent, tapping over and over and over again.

Finally, Atticus stirred and woke up, sitting up on one elbow to look towards the window. He heaved a sigh, his chest shifting against Casey’s back, and with a low, “I’m coming, keep your feathers on,” he sat up, and the mattress rose as he got out of bed.

Casey cracked an eye open to watch as Atticus approached the window, tossed the curtains wide, and opened the window. With a slightly rumpled croak, Lydia stepped inside, her feathers fluffing out slightly as she perched on the windowsill for a moment. She flew over to the bed, landed on the bedframe just long enough to drop something small on the bed, and then hurtled herself towards the bathroom.

Finally, Casey sat up, dragging a hand through her hair and shaking it out of her face. She cocked her head to the side in curiosity as she picked up the object Lydia dropped while Atticus pulled a pair of pants on.

“Good news? Bad news?” she wondered, holding up the ring. It had a simple band, broadening out to wide expanse with a black sigil on a backdrop that looked like diamond set into the top of it. Prodding it briefly revealed the sigil and backdrop could be flipped upside down, making it appear that the ring was just a smooth band of silver. “Ambivalent news?”

Atticus opened his mouth to reply, only for Lydia to breeze out of the bathroom, human-shaped once again and wrapped in a towel, in lieu of any actual clothing (which were, presumably, in the garage). “That’s a hunter’s ring,” she answered, and Atticus scowled at her as she took the wind from his sails.

Atticus held his hand out, and Casey dropped the ring into his palm. He inspected it for a moment, looking slightly bemused, before he pointed out, “Most hunters don’t even wear these anymore. If they do, it usually means they’re trying way too hard, or their families have been hunters for a few generations now and the ring is still being passed down.”

“Is it, like… taboo or something for hunters to wear them now?” Casey wondered, pulling the sheet around herself as she leaned forwards to peer down at the ring.

“Not particularly, but clearly, we recognize them, which means it can make it hard to hide from their actual targets,” Atticus answered dryly.

Casey picked it up, turning the sigil back and forth. “So, a hunter wearing one of these…”

Lydia cleared her throat. “Is either a fresh, baby-faced newbie who we probably don’t need to worry about, or they’ve been at it for a while and probably know about eight ways to kill all of us off the top of their head. And we have no real way of knowing which is which right now.”

“Where’s Branson?” Atticus wondered as Casey dropped the ring back into his hand. He turned away for a moment to drop it into a drawer in his bedside table.

“Taking another lap of the property,” Lydia replied. “Said there was definitely someone here, but he hasn’t run into them before. He’s just making sure they aren’t lurking somewhere.”

Casey stretched out a leg from under the sheet, prodding at the side table with her toes. “Why would the hunter just drop that? I mean, assuming it actually fit, it seems weird that it would just… I don’t know, fall off.”

“Didn’t you mention that you saw something shining?” Atticus wondered. “Whoever they are, they might have realized that you saw their ring and dropped it before they ran off.”

Lydia reached over and prodded at Atticus with two fingers. “Your online following is expanding,” she informed him dryly. “You’ve got crazed fans following you home.”

“And spying on my wife,” he deadpanned, his expression neutral.

“I’m not even involved with this bear stuff,” Casey pouted, falling over backwards on the bed once again.

“You’re involved with this bear,” Lydia pointed out brightly, punching Atticus’s shoulder as she said it. “That’s good enough for them. Were-animals keep that stuff secret usually; no one has any way of knowing whether you’re a bear or some other animal or just a regular human.”

Casey grumbled to herself, folding her arms over her chest beneath the sheet. The logic made sense, but that didn’t mean she had to appreciate it. “So, what now?”

“There isn’t much we can do yet,” Atticus returned, shrugging loosely. “We don’t know who it is. Branson could try to follow the scent, but that could still take a while, and that implies he doesn’t lose the trail.”

“So, there’s someone hunting you like big game, and there’s just… nothing to do about it,” Casey stated blankly. “What the fuck.”

“Nothing to do for the moment,” Atticus replied, though he seemed no more satisfied with the situation than she was. “We’ll figure something out. Assuming we need to. Whoever the hunter is, they may simply decide to drop it. After all, the most likely options were ‘skilled professional’ or ‘hapless wannabe.’”

Casey grumbled for a moment more before she finally sat up again, hands tightening in the top of the sheet to hold it up. “Alright, fine. But I’m still going to feel super weird about being out and about in the yard after this.”

“Everyone’s going to feel super weird about you being out and about in the yard after this,” Lydia pointed out reasonably. “I mean, I doubt anyone’s going to lock you in the house or anything because that’s super creepy, but don’t get us wrong; no one is actually happy about any of this.”

That was, strangely, a weight off of Casey’s shoulders, knowing that she wasn’t overreacting.

“I’m going to get dressed,” Lydia declared, before she hoisted the towel slightly higher around her chest and sauntered out of the room, her footsteps padding away and down the stairs.

“Not a bad idea,” Atticus remarked, “though I suppose a shower first wouldn’t be remiss.”

“We could shower together,” Casey suggested, smiling coyly. “Being rich as all hell is no excuse to waste water,” she reasoned, one hand rising, palm towards the ceiling as she shrugged.

Atticus found her logic compelling, though they wound up wasting water regardless as their shower wound up being far longer than it needed to be.

Casey tugged curtains closed as she walked, venturing from Atticus’s suite to her own wrapped in a towel. She could open the curtains again later, and in the meantime, no one was going to see an inch of her without her clothes on.

In her sitting room, after she was dressed, the towel sitting in a heap on the floor and the room dim with the lights off and the curtains drawn, Casey sat down heavily on the couch and finally took a moment to really think about everything that was going on. There was a hunter—someone clearly dangerous based on intent alone, regardless of their actual skill level—scoping out the house and watching Casey. Someone who wanted Atticus and his kind dead, and was spying on Casey to see where she fit in that.

Thinking about it, she could feel a knot of nausea building in her stomach. She ignored it for the time being. It was no time to start panicking.

She flopped over to the side, sprawling out on the couch and rolling onto her back to stare at the ceiling. A clock ticked in the background. It was peaceful, and she contemplated falling right back to sleep there, but her thoughts were too busy chasing each other in circles, and she knew it would never work.

She scrounged up her phone from a pile of laundry and dialed Jason’s number. He answered on the third ring, grumbling incoherently because he liked to sleep in on his days off, so really, who had the gall to call and wake him up, and his wife would hear about it. If he was even aware of what he was saying, Casey would be incredibly surprised. His entire muffled, mumbled tirade came to an end with an irritated, “Whaaaaaaat?”

“So, I’m being stalked,” Casey informed him. She waited a moment for his spluttering to come to a halt before she confirmed, “Yeah. Stalked.”

“What the fuck?” Jason demanded, sounding considerably more awake. Casey could hear some rustling in the background as he got out of bed. “Like, followed by a stranger stalked?”

“Is there another kind?” Casey wondered bemusedly.

“Fuck if I know.” His words were broken by a yawn that ended with his jaw cracking. “What happened?”

“I was out skating yesterday because I had nothing to do, and I could swear I saw something in the woods, so I let Atticus know, and he had his security check out the property.” Technically true, even if Lydia and Branson weren’t actually security. It was easier than trying to explain everything else. “They found a really weird ring in the area, so we know there was someone there, they probably don’t mean well, and that’s about it.”

“Really weird how?” Jason wondered, slightly muffled by the sounds of rustling and clattering in the kitchen.

“It had some sort of, like… sigil or crest or whatever on it, and it could be flipped upside down. Real secret society level bullshit, I was totally getting flashbacks to all my great-grandpa’s old Masonic kitsch,” Casey explained, and she levered herself up off of the couch again to start pacing across the room.

There was silence on the other end of the line, before finally, Jason asked slowly, “Was the ring silver? Or mostly silver?”

Casey blinked. “Yeah,” she answered carefully. “How did you know?”

“One of the regulars at work wears one like that. She was in the office while I was telling a couple of coworkers about your ‘he turned into a bear!’ story.” Something thumped on the other end of the line as he put something down. “But you’re okay?”

Rather than answer the question, Casey whined, “Jason, you told people about that?”

“What?” he asked, bewildered. “It was funny! How was I supposed to know the resident rubbernecker was going to decide she just had to get a closer look?”

“Who was it?” Casey sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose between two fingers.

“Uh… Georgia Carmichael. Rich bitch from the other side of the city. Your husband probably knows her. Don’t all rich people basically know each other?” Jason sounded like he was sulking by the end.

Casey hung up the phone and tossed it onto the couch. Sure, she wasn’t surprised that Jason and Annie hadn’t believed her story about Atticus being a were-bear, but she hadn’t actually expected either of them to mention it to anyone else. She definitely hadn’t expected that to be the cause of her acquiring a new stalker.

Dropping her face down into her hands, she sat down heavily, groaning as she thought over the mess. The most difficult part of this new life was supposed to be pregnancy and dodging paparazzi, not dodging prospective murderers. She hadn’t signed up for the specialized murderers.

But at least now, she had a name to attach to the ring. She could let Atticus know about that so he could point Lydia and Branson in the right direction. And later, she could yell at Jason and make sure Annie hadn’t mentioned it to anyone else. The last thing anyone needed was for the problem to unexpectedly double.

And she was quitting her job that day. She made an executive decision while she was sitting on the couch. She had enough stress going on and didn’t need to carry on adding service industry stress on top of it. She was only human, after all, and it wasn’t like she needed the money. If she really got that bored, she had nothing but time to find a better job later on.

She took a moment to compose herself before she got to her feet again.

“I have heard of her,” Atticus remarked once Casey finished speaking. “Her family as a whole, rather. I haven’t met any of them, but a few of them move in similar circles.” He didn’t seem satisfied with whatever else was going through his mind.

“What do you know about her?” Casey prodded, leaning forward slightly, expectantly. “There has to be more to it than just that.”

“If they’re the people I’m thinking of,” Atticus carried on carefully, “then this isn’t a new hobby for her. Her family has been at it for a very long time.”

Casey wilted slightly before she folded her arms over her chest and slumped, shoulders rounding forwards. “So, she knows what she’s doing,” she translated, and her expression wrinkled with distaste. “That’s just perfect.”

Atticus leaned forward, kissing her forehead. “Don’t worry. I can handle this,” he assured her. “It’s impossible for her to find any reason to go after you—you’re a regular human—so you don’t have anything to worry about.”

“That doesn’t actually make me feel any better,” Casey groused, scuffing the toes of one foot against the ground. “I would rather not have her looking into anyone. And Jason’s the one who told her.”

“After you told him,” Atticus added blandly.

“It was a lot to swallow at first!” Casey protested, throwing her hands up in exasperation. “You can’t just turn into a bear in front of someone and not expect them to mention it!”

Atticus held his hands up, somewhere between surrender and pacifying. “Just put it out of your mind,” he advised her. “If it turns into a problem, then we’ll let you know. Until then, just let me, Lydia, and Branson deal with it.”

It wasn’t an answer that Casey was particularly pleased with, but she couldn’t actually think of anything she could do to help just then. With a reluctant sigh, she nodded in agreement.

Annie answered her phone on the second ring, greeting Casey with a cheerful, “So, did you sleep with him?”

Casey blinked. She had actually forgotten about that conversation entirely. She cleared her throat. “Well, yeah, but that’s not what I called about.”

“Sounds ominous,” Annie decided. “What’s going on?”

“Have you told anyone else about that whole ‘he turned into a bear’ thing I brought up?” Casey asked, once again pacing back and forth across her sitting room. One day, she was going to wear a rut into the floor.

Annie snorted, a gust of static rushing to Casey’s ear. “No. Thought about it. It’d be a hell of a story.”

“You can’t,” Casey informed her flatly.

“Aww, afraid of a little embarrassment?” Annie cooed. “Where’s your adventurous spirit, huh?”

“My adventurous spirit shriveled up and died,” Casey returned in a bland deadpan, “when Jason told everyone at work and garnered me a new stalker for his efforts.”

There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment, until finally Annie said, “Please tell me you’re shitting me.”

“I shit you not,” Casey replied. “I have a new, very wealthy stalker because Jason decided the story was just too funny for him to keep his mouth shut. So, if you tell anyone, I’m going to never speak to you again.”

Annie cleared her throat. “Got it. Strange story is never to see the light of day. Has the stalker done anything horrible?”

“You mean other than following me around the property?” Casey asked flatly. “I mean, that’s not exactly great.” She didn’t give Annie a chance to reply. “But no. She hasn’t done anything, like… blatant.”

There was some quiet grumbling on the other end of the phone, as if Annie had pulled the phone away from her mouth to avoid being heard. When she cleared her throat again, it was with the receiver back in front of her mouth. “You won’t get any trouble from me,” she assured Casey. “I won’t mention it. You just stay safe, alright?”

“As best as I can,” Casey sighed. There was a pause, and finally, “And just so you know, he’s great in bed.”

She hung up midway through Annie’s answering screech.

Being job-free wasn’t so bad, really. Casey wasn’t sure why she had avoided it for so long. Every day of the week was one where she was allowed to sleep in. True enough, entertaining herself was a bit of an endeavor, but she was pretty sure she could learn to have hobbies. Other than skating, she started with some of the most obvious things: exploring the property.

There was just so much space and so many things living on the estate. One of her walks brought her within spitting distance of a herd of deer. They watched her placidly for a few moments before they moseyed on their way, passing close enough to her that she could have reached out and touched one if she felt so inclined. Evidently, living in relative isolation on Atticus’s property hadn’t bestowed upon them anything resembling a fear of humans.

The first time she found a camera, though, she was… less than impressed. It was tucked into a tree, hidden in a hole in the trunk and aimed at the house. Casey never would have spotted it except that a woodpecker had taken a rather intense disliking towards it and tried to dislodge it. Carefully, Casey shimmied up the trunk to pull the camera out of the hole. She carried it back to the house to leave it for Atticus to see if he could get anything useful out of it.

She spent the rest of the afternoon searching the area as carefully as she could to find anything else that might have been left behind. Her efforts turned up two other cameras in strategically hidden locations.

Occasionally, she could forget about everything that was going on and just enjoy the fact that the property consisted of acres upon acres of largely untouched forest. Aside from the land that had been cleared to put up the house and the gardens around it, basically none of the land even looked as if it had been within leagues of human beings. Casey was pretty sure just breathing the air had added a few decades to her lifespan.

And then, something else would happen to remind her that not everything was pristine forest and that a great deal of the rest of the world was still shit.

There were footsteps every so often, dogging Casey from a distance. Every time she tried to find a culprit, she came up empty handed. Either she was going crazy, or the hunter was very good at camouflage and Casey simply didn’t have enough experience in the woods to pick out a hidden figure.

She was fairly sure she wasn’t going crazy, though, because she learned to realize when she should start listening if she wanted to hear whoever was following her.

Everything around her would get so much quieter, as if the birds and the bugs and the frogs and everything else had decided to vacate the area. As if the natural inhabitants of the woods could tell that of the two human presences, only one of them actually meant no harm to anything.

She could have just stayed inside, she supposed. But for one thing, she would legitimately go crazy from boredom and cabin fever. For another thing, she wasn’t going to let Miss Carmichael win. Casey had never been particularly confrontational, that was true, but the idea of letting a stranger chase her into the house like a skittish puppy made something in her soul rebel. She wasn’t going to stop doing what she was doing when she wasn’t the one doing anything wrong.

Some things in life were just infuriating. She could have sworn she left her helmet sitting on the porch, along with her rollerblades and the rest of her gear. And yet, there she was on the porch, looking high and low, and it was nowhere in sight.

After nearly a half an hour of searching for the wayward helmet, she stalked her way down to the garage to see if she could find a bike helmet in there that might fit her.

She nearly tripped over her own helmet, just sitting very innocently off to the side of the driveway. She picked it up and stared at it, blinking slowly. And as her anger slowly mounted, she very nearly pitched the poor helmet across the yard.

It was like they had a poltergeist, determined to shuffle things around and drive everyone insane.

She didn’t throw her helmet, though. She tucked it under her arm and trudged back to the porch. Anger be damned, she was not going to let some bitch with a vendetta scare her out of keeping herself in shape. Little Miss Mighty Hunter could just watch Casey skate and try in vain to find a way in which it offered any proof at all as to were-animal activity.

Casey straightened up from the toilet and scrubbed the back of one hand across her mouth. She reached her other hand out to flush the toilet. The bathroom still smelled faintly of stomach acid and vomit, though, so after washing her hands and rinsing her mouth out at the sink, she pulled a can of air freshener out from under the sink and sprayed it all throughout the bathroom.

The stress of the entire situation was getting to her, leading to nearly daily incidences of puking her guts up in the toilet. She hadn’t mentioned it to Atticus. He already seemed harried about everything else.

Casey had informed Atticus of the cameras and of some of the stuff outside being moved, but she hadn’t planned on demanding any sort of information from him. Presumably, he would tell her if she needed to know anything or if there was actually something she could do.

And then, she made her way back to her suite to get showered and dressed one morning and found her bedroom window open and everything on her bedside table shuffled around. She bit back the urge to shriek in outrage, instead slamming the window shut and going on a careful search to make sure that nothing had been taken. She found that the drawers of her coffee table in the sitting room and the knick-knacks on the bookshelves had been rifled through and moved around.

It was a step too far. Casey could be patient, but there was only so much she was willing to put up with. She used her shower to calm down and dressed in a flash before storming back to Atticus’s suite and stalking inside.

He was just finished getting dressed when she entered his bedroom like rolling thunder, and he honestly looked slightly alarmed at the look on her face.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“She was in. My. Room,” Casey enunciated carefully. “My window was open, and all of my shit was shuffled around. I don’t care if there’s nothing I can do right now. You’re at least going to update me on the situation and explain to me why she’s so caught up on me when I’m not even a were-animal.”

Atticus sighed out a slow breath and agreed far more easily than Casey had expected. “Alright.” He motioned her back out to the sitting room and followed her out. Once they were both sitting on one of the couches, he explained, “We haven’t found any traces of her in her day-to-day life. Apparently, she’s on vacation in Puerto Rico, but we haven’t been able to find any records to support that. She’s just gone off the radar, I guess, so no one disturbs her while she scopes us out. As for why she’s focused on you…” Atticus trailed off, his expression distant for a moment before he shook his head and dragged his focus back to the moment.

“There are two likely reasons,” he explained. “Hunters tend to think that were-animals are unlikely to associate with non-were-animals. That’s complete bullshit, but it’s what they think. So, she could be looking for evidence that you are actually a were-animal, or if there’s some hidden method to turning a human into a were-animal. Or, if she’s planning something, she could be looking to use you in her plan somehow. Since going after the small human woman would be safer than going after the large man who can turn into an even larger bear, and it would give me incentive to cooperate with her.”

Casey groaned and let her head fall back against the back of the couch. “So, either I’m a science experiment or I’m bait,” she summarized. “Just fucking lovely.” She kicked her feet against the ground. “So, what happens now?”

“Branson’s going to see if his pack can help patrol the property at night,” Atticus replied. “Lydia might be able to scrounge up a flock. All we can really do right now is try to get more eyes on the situation.”

Casey nodded slowly. It wasn’t an ideal answer or even a particularly good one, but if it was all they had for now, then she wasn’t going to complain about it.

Slowly, she levered herself to her feet and stretched, arms reaching over her head. “I’m going to go punch something that won’t break,” she offered.

Atticus offered a crooked smile and gestured her towards the door with a flourish. “You have fun with that. If something does break, you can probably get away with it if you hide it under the rug fast enough.”

She offered him a thumbs-up as she left.

She had to make a detour to the bathroom to empty her stomach on the way.

“Alright, so, let me get this straight,” Annie mused slowly, as Casey paced back and forth across her usual stretch of floor in her sitting room. Annie sounded thoughtful as she spoke. “You keep puking, and you’re convinced it’s related to stress,” she repeated. “And it’s happening basically every single day. We’re on the same page so far?”

“Yeah,” Casey returned slowly. Frankly, she wasn’t sure why it apparently took quite so much brainpower to understand, but she wasn’t going to say that. She had some semblance of self-preservation instincts still.

“Despite the fact that part of the deal for you moving in and marrying Atticus is that you make a very good go at getting pregnant,” Annie carried on in the same slow, rational tone.

Silent, Casey blinked at the wall.

“Has it just not occurred to you that it might be morning sickness?” Annie wondered, sounding as if she was stuck somewhere between amusement and bewilderment.

Casey continued to blink at the wall, until finally she managed a small, “That had slipped my mind, yeah.”

“You think a pregnancy test might be a good idea?” Annie wondered dryly. “Just, you know… in case you’re wrong about the whole ‘stress puking every single day’ thing.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Casey returned faintly. “I’m going to call you back later, alright?”

“Talk to you then,” Annie returned, her voice laced with fond exasperation. “Let me know what the results are.” And before Casey could hang up, Annie just managed to shout in a rush, “And remember, you still owe me details about getting busy together, you promised!”

Casey rolled her eyes as she hung up and tossed her phone aside.

She joined her phone on the couch a moment later, staring up at the ceiling silently.

Lydia escorted her to the store the next day, and though she seemed slightly suspicious, she didn’t actually ask any questions about what Casey was buying. She did try to sneak a peek in the bag a few times, but she gave up good-naturedly when Casey simply stuffed the shopping bag in her purse.

Though she was pretty sure that was why she got dragged to five other stores before they returned to Atticus’s house.

Casey waited until that night to open up the cardboard box and dump the pregnancy test into her hand. She did her business quickly in the bathroom and set the pregnancy test on the counter to wait, pointedly looking anywhere but at the innocuous little thing as she brushed her teeth, washed her face, and put on her pajamas.

It took only a few minutes, but it seemed to take an eternity before the test showed a result.

Casey picked it up and stared down at it, blinking slowly at the positive result. Oh, sure, she knew store-bought pregnancy tests weren’t exactly foolproof. It was possible it could be a false positive. But combined with everything else she knew about the situation, she was willing to take the result at face value.

She was pregnant. She was going to have a baby. She was going to be a mom. She knew that had been the idea from the beginning, but it hit her all at once just then.

She had never put much thought into being a mother before. Bringing kids into her life when she could barely afford to put food in her cupboards hadn’t appealed to her. But just then, as she realized that everything she had originally worried about with regards to having kids wasn’t a problem—that her child would grow up loved and cared for and with everything they could ever need or want—that tears began to silently slip down her cheeks.

She was going to have a baby, and her child would be able to have the perfect childhood that she hadn’t been able to have.

She was laughing—gleefully, slightly manically—before she even knew it.

Casey practically sprinted to Atticus’s suite, only to remember once she got there that he wasn’t back from work yet. Groaning, she threw herself down on the couch in his sitting room and decided she was just going to wait right there for him to get back. It wouldn’t be too long after that, anyway.

Time seemed to pass at a crawl as Casey watched shadows shift across the ceiling, waiting with something that didn’t resemble patience in the slightest. She shifted and squirmed and fidgeted until eventually she got back to her feet to start pacing across the room.

When at last she heard Atticus’s footsteps approaching the suite, she snapped to attention, facing the door with her hands clasped together in front of her.

Atticus paused as he entered, head cocked to one side in bemusement as he looked at her. “Is everything alright?” he wondered, and Casey could only imagine what the look on her face was like just then.

“Perfect!” she replied quickly—probably a bit too quickly—and she bounced on the balls of her feet. Her mouth worked soundlessly for a moment as she tried to think of the best way to get the words out.

“…Are you sure?” Atticus asked, his expression screwing up in slightly concerned bewilderment.

“I’m pregnant,” Casey replied, spitting the words out, because by that point, she was pretty sure she wasn’t going to think of any sort of more poetic way to phrase it.

Atticus blinked at her. Casey stayed quiet, giving him a moment to let that revelation sink in. “You’re sure?” he asked after a moment, his words slow and careful.

“Positive,” Casey returned. “I’m pregnant,” she repeated.

Slowly, Atticus grinned. He closed the distance between them quickly, and Casey squeaked as he practically scooped her off of her feet to kiss her, crushing their lips together. They met clumsily, teeth clicking together and noses bumping, but they found their balance soon enough, tipping their heads to find a better angle.

The kiss was slow, but there was nothing leisurely about it. It had a certain intensity to it, as if Atticus was trying to breathe her in, in her entirety.

They parted slowly, still close enough together that the tips of their noses touched, and for a moment, all they could do was stare at each other. After a few seconds, Casey cracked a smile. “So, I guess this is good news.”

“Very good news,” Atticus confirmed as he set her back down on her feet, though he stole another kiss just for good measure before he did so.

Casey straightened up, opening her mouth to say something as she did, though she closed her mouth with a click as she noticed Atticus’s expression shift, concern sliding onto his face.

She cocked her head to one side. “What’s wrong?” she asked slowly, a hand on his forearm sliding up to his shoulder.

“Don’t go spreading it around,” Atticus advised cautiously. “The fewer people know, the better for now. I don’t want that information getting back to our most recent unwanted guest.”

Casey’s eyes widened as realization dawned, and she nodded slowly. “Right,” she agreed quietly. “Got it.” There was no reason to give the hunter any more leverage than she already had, after all. Better to just keep her in the dark for as long as possible.

Casey looked down at her stomach, fingers splaying across the fabric of her shirt. She had expected pregnancy to come with complications. Of course she had. This was not one of the complications she had been expecting. But she was adaptable. She would be alright.

“I’ve been given a babysitter,” Casey summarized after Branson finished speaking.

He rolled his eyes and folded his arms across his chest, shifting his weight to one side as he did. “A bodyguard,” he argued.

“Semantics,” Casey stated bluntly.

“Look, we just don’t want anything to happen to you,” he replied, trying for a tone that sounded appeasing. “I promise, I’ll be discreet. You’ll hardly even know I’m around.”

“Aside from the fact that you’re a dog the size of a large pony,” Casey drawled. “But yeah, sure, alright. I’m sure I’ll never even notice you.” She crossed her arms, and her shoulders rounded as she slumped. “Why can’t Lydia play nanny?”

Branson cleared his throat, and his hands fell to his sides for a moment, just long enough for him to link his hands together behind his back. “Lydia is a bird,” he pointed out, as if Casey had someone forgotten about that. “A very large bird, but a bird nonetheless. While she would definitely be able to spot any trouble, she’s not exactly big enough to tackle the problem to the ground.”

Casey cocked one eyebrow. “Aren’t you supposed to avoid doing that with hunters?” she wondered blandly. “Since they apparently like to do whatever it is they do when you’re animal shaped.”

Branson waved the topic off with a flippant flick of his wrist. “She’s unlikely to do anything really bad until a full moon.” When Casey’s eyebrows simply rose higher in response, he carried on to explain, “We’re sturdy. Killing us generally takes a lot, since most people are not actually good enough shots to land a perfect headshot from a safe distance. Which means hurting us when we still have the capacity to change back will probably still result in us doing just that out of spite, because if we’re going to die, we’re going to saddle our killer with the appropriate murder charges.” He shrugged. “So, it’s generally more convenient to just avoid actually hurting us until the full moon.”

“Ah.” If Casey didn’t sound entirely like she grasped what he was saying, well, it wasn’t a lie. “So, just… reasons,” she summarized flatly.

“Reasons,” Branson agreed, his tone dryly amused. “Anyway, I promise I’ll stay out of the way. No one wants anything to happen to you is all.”

With a slow sigh, Casey relented. “Alright, fine.” It made sense, she supposed. And it was only temporary. Sooner or later, they would deal with Georgia, and she would be a nonissue, and Casey wouldn’t need a babysitter anymore.

Even so, she was not thrilled at the prospect.

Branson kept his word, altogether. He stayed out of the way. He lurked at a distance when Casey was outside on the property, and he wasn’t there when she was in the house, of course. When she went into town, occasionally he escorted her in his human form, largely for the sake of convenience, and sometimes he escorted her while shaped like a very large wolf who happened to be pretending to be a very large dog. He didn’t interrupt anything that Casey was doing unless she specifically called on him, and he wasn’t particularly bothersome.

But still, Casey knew he was there. She knew she was being watched; she knew that she had a babysitter at all times. She knew it was for a reason—a good reason—and that everyone meant well, but it still didn’t sit well in her chest.

She was resigning herself to the idea of just living with it until they happened to trip over a way to get rid of Georgia, however long that was, when an idea occurred to her. Why couldn’t they involve the actual police? They didn’t need to tell the whole truth, after all. They just needed to catch Georgia trying to break into the house.

“Do we still have those cameras I found?” she wondered one night at dinner, steering the last few bites of her meal in circles around her plate with her fork.

“Yeah,” Atticus replied, and he arched one eyebrow. “Taking up spying?” he wondered dryly.

“Reverse-spying,” Casey returned primly. “I’m going to set them up in some of her favorite places to look, and I’m going to get Lydia to help me hide them, since I figure if she can’t spot them even if she knows they’re there, then there will be no chance that Georgia will be able to see them when she isn’t expecting them to be there.”

“Okay,” Atticus returned slowly, largely just to signify that he was following along. “Why?”

Casey leaned her elbows on the table and propped her chin up with both hands. “You can’t go to the cops about her being a hunter, because then you would need to spill the beans about being a were-bear,” she mused, “but you’ve sort of lost track of the bigger picture. Trespassing is trespassing. Harassment is harassment. Assault is assault.”

She shrugged, shoulders rising but her chin still in her hands. “Get footage of her trying to break into the house or whatever and give that to the cops, and you won’t even have to mention the word ‘bear’ at all.”

Atticus blinked at her, and after a moment, he huffed out a breath of laughter. “I suppose I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“I pride myself on being a breath of fresh air,” Casey returned pleasantly, bringing a hand to her chest as she said it. “I’m always happy to remind you when you have your head stuck too far up your ass to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

She ducked to the side as Atticus flicked a baby carrot at her.

It took two days for Casey to learn how the cameras worked well enough to be sure she wouldn’t make a mess of them and to be sure that any potentially incriminating footage had been erased. By the time she was ready to start setting up the cameras around the outside of the house, they were basically clean slates, as if they had never even belonged to Georgia, and Casey was comfortable saying she was a master at using them.

Hiding them properly was another story. There were only three cameras, but hiding them properly still took hours of trial and error, as each time, Casey swore they were invisible, Lydia would unerringly land beside them and give them a hearty tap with her beak, even if she was inside during the hiding process and had no idea where Casey was going.

But finally—finally!—Casey managed to get all three of them adequately tucked away so that even Lydia had to admit defeat, and all three of them were still angled towards what had seemed to be Georgia’s favorite places to gather information.

Casey was less than pleased at the fact that one of those places was her bedroom window, but that detail was at least less intimidating when she wasn’t sleeping in there at all anymore.

The next day, there was no noteworthy footage on the cameras.

Nor the day after that, or after that, or the next three after that. It was slightly aggravating on one hand, but Casey wasn’t going to complain about a shortage of breaking and entering attempts. Even so, she kept checking the cameras every morning, downloading the footage onto her laptop and perusing it.

And finally, she got what she was looking for.

On two of the cameras, Georgia popped in and out throughout a four-hour portion of the night, largely just observing the house. It seemed pretty innocuous—mild trespassing that would likely get her a scolding by the authorities and nothing else, save maybe a fine—but the third camera was a bit more damning.

Right there on the monitor, plain as day, Casey watched the footage of Georgia slipping the window lock, heaving it open, and clambering inside. For almost a solid half hour after that, there was no activity except for Georgia occasionally walking past the window from the inside, but eventually, she climbed back out and beat a hasty retreat.

Casey did not enjoy watching the footage. It made her uncomfortable in a very visceral way, knowing someone with malicious intent had been that close to all of her things, and just down the hall from her and Atticus. But she had the footage, and that was the most important part.

Casey had never spent all that much time around police officers. She had never been in a police station before. She slunk through the doors like a frightened cat, and it took a bit of asking around before she was shown to someone to whom she could actually hand the footage.

The officer seemed exasperated at first, like he heard the words “someone keeps breaking into the house” and immediately assumed she was just panicking over nothing. Granted, she was a known figure suddenly, so she supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised at strangers looking at her and deciding she was too rich to have any real concerns; clearly, she was just trying to pull his attention away from actually important work for the sake of her own whims.

But then, he actually watched the footage, and his tone changed very quickly.

Casey spent most of the evening in the station, answering questions about the situation and explaining that Georgia had been scoping out the property for days at that point, and that they had even found cameras. When asked if she still had the cameras, Casey shrugged and said she trashed them in a rage after finding them. The officer seemed aggravated by the response, but he didn’t seem to actually blame her.

When she eventually stepped out of the station, Branson was curled up asleep on the sidewalk waiting for her, and he woke up with a jolt when she prodded him with her toes. After that, the trip back to the house was uneventful.

By the time Casey made it back to the house that night, she was frazzled and tired, but it had worked out. With the newly presented proof that Georgia Carmichael was not on vacation and was most definitely not behaving herself, the police were going to do what they could to track her down.

Casey decided to keep the cameras set up in the yard anyway. Contacting the police wasn’t going to magically make Georgia evaporate or anything like that, and Casey refused to be taken off guard. As it was, she was barely spending more than the absolute bare minimum amount of time in her suite, just in case Georgia had left something in there and no one had spotted it yet.

After that, she supposed all that was really left to do was to wait for the police to get in touch with them to offer an update on the situation. It had gone rather well, all things considered. Casey didn’t even have to mention the word “bears.” It turned out that breaking the law was breaking the law, even if there were were-animals secretly involved.

Casey slept well that night. Just knowing that she had told someone and that something was going to be done was a weight off her shoulders.

When Casey woke up the next morning, she did so very reluctantly. It was early. Early enough that the sun was only just beginning to rise. Atticus gave her shoulder another shake just to make sure she was actually awake.

She sat up slowly, squinting at him, only half awake. “Why am I up?” she mumbled, scrubbing one fist over her eyes. Atticus’s expression was fond as he looked at her.

“Because I wanted to talk to you,” he answered wryly, “and I wanted to do so before I left for work.”

Everything seemed normal enough, but there was something off about his tone, and Casey asked fuzzily, “What’s wrong?”

Atticus cleared his throat. “I think you should stay in the house for a few days,” he stated after a moment, foregoing dressing his words up in favor of simply getting to the point. “In case there’s some sort of blowback from going to the police.”

Slowly, Casey’s eyebrows rose, and she opened her mouth to protest, only to pause and close her mouth with an audible click of teeth when her thoughts actually caught up with her.

She had no real self-defense skills to speak of. She didn’t know how to use any weapons. In theory, she knew she could figure a gun out—point, pull, repeat—but it wasn’t something she would be remotely comfortable with. The idea of murder was not one that sat well with her.

She also couldn’t say it was entirely out of the picture for Georgia to try something drastic once it became obvious that she was on the police radar, and if that happened… well, it wouldn’t be Casey getting hurt. It would be Branson, since he was the one in charge of following her around and keeping her safe.

As much as she wanted to protest being kept inside—and Atticus wasn’t even making a demand, but rather a request—she knew she didn’t have a leg to stand on. If she went gallivanting out the door because she didn’t want to feel like a child, she would be acting like a child and potentially putting someone else at risk for her own sake.

She wasn’t comfortable with that either.

Slowly, Casey sighed out a breath and flopped forward, faceplanting on her pillow. For a moment, she simply stayed there, face buried, until she slowly pried herself off the bed just enough to sit up on her elbows.

“Alright,” she agreed glumly, her tone caught somewhere between rational and sullen. “I’ll find something to do around the house.” Granted, she didn’t have much faith in being able to do that, considering previous attempts had mostly left her feeling stir-crazy with a case of cabin fever. But even so, Atticus had a good point, and if a bit of boredom could keep everyone a bit safer, then she would just suck it up and put up with it.

It felt like the longest day in history. There was just nothing Casey could think of to do. She could only browse around on the Internet for so long before she got bored or got a headache or a case of eye strain, and while there was a fully stocked library, even that offered only limited entertainment; Casey had never been one to keep her nose buried in a book nonstop. She didn’t dislike reading, and she had a pile of books she intended to read; she just didn’t really want to just then.

As a matter of fact, she didn’t really know what she wanted to do, as if agreeing to stay in the house had sucked every idea out of her head like a siphon. So instead, she sprawled on the floor in the living room on the ground floor, staring at the ceiling with her hands clasped together beneath her head.

At least until Lydia leaned over her, peering down at her. She had one eyebrow cocked and a look on her face that said she was supremely unimpressed.

“Are you going to stop being a whiny baby sometime today?” she wondered blandly, folding her arms over her chest.

Casey scowled up at her. “I’m not being a whiny baby. I haven’t even said anything.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “No, you’ve just been moping since you got up. Are you really that unimaginative that you can’t think of anything you want to do? In a house this size?”

Casey’s scowl intensified. “I didn’t really have the time or money to build any non-work-essential skills before,” she pointed out. “And I can only read for so long before I get tired of it for the day.”

Lydia lifted a hand, pinching the bridge of her nose between two fingers. When she stepped back, it was so she could look upwards, as if she was beseeching some sort of deity for patience.

“You’re not an idiot, and you’re not inept. Learn how to do something. If you don’t have any hobbies that don’t involve roller skates, then acquire a few. No one’s going to stop you, and it’s not like you’re short on time.”

Casey stared up at her and slowly pushed herself up onto her elbows. “Like what?” she asked slowly, eyes narrowing slightly, as if it was supposed to be some sort of trick.

Lydia rolled her eyes so emphatically it almost looked as if they were going to fall right out of her head. “You’re on your own when it comes to finding out what you’re interested in,” she stated flatly. “I wash my hands of your sulking.” Just for effect, she brushed her hands together as if to rid them of invisible dust before she turned on her heel and left the room.

Casey flopped back down on her back, intent on sulking for a while longer. Though the longer she stayed there, the more Lydia’s words chased themselves in circles around in her head.

She supposed, just maybe, she was being a bit of a child, annoyed that no one was just volunteering to entertain her. She was even thinking like a child, acting as if adulthood meant it was too late for her to actually learn new things. She had all the time in the world and an Internet connection; she could probably learn anything she wanted.

She stalled out for a moment as she tried to decide where to start, casting around the room as if it would help her.

Her gaze landed on the piano on the far side of the room, tucked against the wall. It was an unassuming vertical piano, its wood stained a reddish-brown color. Its bench was unpadded, and it looked ancient, but she had seen Branson playing it a few times, so she figured it was safe to assume it was well tuned.

She heaved herself to her feet and fetched her laptop from the library where she’d left it. There were tutorials online for how to do anything from making a hardboiled egg to hiding a body. She was pretty sure she could find music lessons without much of a hassle.

When Lydia eventually peered into the living room again, Casey didn’t bother to look up and was only actually aware of her by the sound of her footsteps. She needed to focus. She had never played a piano before, and even just holding her hands in the proper position made her feel as if she was going to mess everything up.

Lydia made no comment on it. She didn’t say anything about it as Casey rewound the tutorial she was watching to replay the same part half a dozen times in a row. She didn’t say anything about how Casey only hit the proper note or played the proper chord with about thirty-three percent accuracy.

It was a start, at least. She could, presumably, just look for a new venture a day until she had enough things she wanted to stick with to keep a day filled.

If Lydia and Branson thought Casey’s shopping lists were odd, they made no comment on it. Lydia just dutifully supplied her with a large spool of hemp twine, beading wire, and enough beads to make an entire dress out of them. That wasn’t the plan, of course, but she appreciated the variety.

Her first attempts were simple as she figured out the various knots and weaves and braids for turning the twine into bracelets and necklaces. After that, they only got a little more complicated, as she simply put a single bead in the middle. Her first un-botched attempt, with a bead like a pastel-colored owl in the center, and fitted around her neck like a choker. Maybe it was a silly thing to be proud of, but fuck anyone who wanted to laugh.

Atticus did seem slightly bewildered when he got home and immediately Casey accosted him to fasten a similar bit of jewelry around his wrist, though it had a simple metallic sphere rather than an owl.

And from there, it felt pretty natural to use the beading wire to make slightly more traditional, non-twine-based jewelry. She set the first attempt that she was proud of aside for Annie, the metallic, slightly iridescent dark beads gleaming in the light. They complimented the larger, triangular shaped purple bead that dangled from the center well. Her sister didn’t get nearly enough good things, and Casey was more than happy to try to rectify that.

(She contemplated making something for Jason, but then she decided she was still annoyed with him, and he could just live without any presents.)

Branson supplied her with her eclectic list of baking ingredients. Baking was something she had always had some idea of how to do; if she wanted baked goods, it was easier to just mooch ingredients from her friends and neighbors or buy them in bulk and then make the treats herself. It made more sense than buying a single cookie from a bakery for the price of an entire bag of flour, after all.

She wanted to expand her horizons, though. Why limit herself only to chocolate chip cookies when she could make basically whatever she wanted? And if she accidentally set a few of the more bizarre attempts on fire the first few times, well, no one needed to know about that.

(“Why do I smell burning?” Branson wondered several hours later, because of course he could still smell it. Casey ushered him from the room to let her work.)

The first time she presented Atticus, Lydia, and Branson with a finished product that she was enthusiastic about—some sort of tart filled with custard and stewed berries with a layer of powdered sugar on top—and they nearly went into raptures over it, she considered it a job well done and added it to her mental list of things that she had to make again in the very near future.

It was late. Atticus had gone to bed a few hours ago, but Casey couldn’t sleep. She had been nauseous on and off for most of the day, and the feeling hadn’t gone away just because she had decided it was time to go to bed. She paced through the house, up and down the stairs, in and out of rooms. Every so often, she poked her nose into a corner out of curiosity, just to see if she could find anything interesting hidden away.

She was getting ready to turn in, resigned to a night of just staring at the ceiling while her stomach roiled uncomfortably, when Branson padded past her, paws nearly silent on the floor. She hadn’t even known he was still at the house, but she supposed she wasn’t surprised. He and Lydia hardly ever seemed to leave if they weren’t at work.

She made to follow him, only to grind to a halt when he peered over his shoulder at her and shook his head once. Slowly, Casey pointed towards the nearest window, her expression questioning. Branson nodded once and trotted towards the stairs. Casey followed him at a small distance, stopping halfway down the stairs to watch him push the knob of the front door down with one paw, until the door clicked and swung open. He shouldered it open further, stepped out, and grabbed the knob in his teeth to pull the door closed behind him.

Silently, Casey sat down on the stairs and waited, watching the door as she waited for Branson to come back and give whatever news he was going to give. She wasn’t actually sure what was going on, so she couldn’t even be sure how long she could expect to wait.

Ten minutes passed, and then fifteen. As the twenty-minute mark approached, she heard a sharp bang and a high-pitched, canine shriek from outside. She shot to her feet, only to grab the banister in a white-knuckled grip to ground herself. What was she expecting to do? She had no idea what was going on.

She turned around, intent to head up to Atticus’s room to wake him up, but she only made it up two steps before Lydia turned the corner at the top of the stairs and bolted past her. If she listened, she could hear rustling coming from Atticus’s room as well.

Turning around once again, Casey watched as Lydia made it to the front door and wrenched it open, only to nearly leap out of the way as Branson barged past her. He kicked the door shut with one large hind paw, stumbling slightly, as it appeared that one of his front legs was slightly out of commission.

Atticus announced himself by demanding, “What the fuck is going on?” as he stormed down the stairs.

Branson spared a moment to growl at the door, his ears pinned back and his hackles standing on end from the base of his head all the way down his back to the base of his tail. When nothing attempted to burst through the door, he gradually relaxed and sat down, though his ears remained flattened against the top of his head and he still vibrated with tension.

He transformed without any pomp or circumstance, as worrying about the fact that he was naked seemed a little uncalled for just then. Still sitting on the ground, though now cross-legged, he cradled one arm to his chest and turned to try to get a look at the bleeding gash on his shoulder.

Jerking back into motion, Lydia turned and headed for the nearest bathroom, presumably to get a first aid kit, and Branson didn’t answer immediately, instead silently stewing in the events that had just come to pass, whatever they were.

He waited until Lydia returned with a first aid kit before he said anything, and when he did, he sounded more offended than anything else, as if he couldn’t quite believe the gall of what had just happened.

“The bitch shot me.”

Branson waited until Lydia was done cleaning, stitching, and bandaging the gash (and he was provided with a pair of pants) before he explained what had actually happened. He grumbled the entire time, like a toddler sitting on a doctor’s exam table, and Casey half expected Lydia to present him with a lollipop when she finished.

It wasn’t a particularly serious injury, thankfully. All joking about his grumbling aside, Casey wished no ill will upon Branson, and she was glad that he was largely okay and in one piece.

“I smelled her a while ago,” he explained, once they all gravitated into the living room. “All the footage we’ve got so far has sort of implied that she only sticks around for, what, a few hours at most? So, I figured I waited plenty long enough for her to be gone, and I could go out and see what she had been up to. But she was still there, and she heard me coming, I guess, and she took a shot at me.” He gestured to his arm, slightly unnecessarily. “And I guess she’s either a really lousy shot or I startled her, since she only managed to graze me, and then she probably bolted because she figured my racket was going to wake up everyone else.”

“She wasn’t wrong,” Atticus pointed out drolly. “Did you see what she was up to that it took her so long?”

“I think,” Branson continued carefully, “she was setting up a nest of some sort. Some place to hide out.”

“For what?” Casey wondered, brows furrowing in confusion. “Why would she suddenly decide she needs to stick around for a while?”

“The full moon is in two days,” Lydia answered. “The one night a month when hunters can kill us without worrying about us turning back into people and saddling them with murder charges.”

Atticus sighed and dragged a hand down his face. “I got this house so I wouldn’t need to pick up and go somewhere else for the full moon,” he grumbled, though his irritation was short-lived.

“So, what does this mean?” Casey wondered, fidgeting back and forth in her seat. She had been vaguely aware that they were forced to transform on a full moon—they had alluded to it a few times—but they had never actually talked about it before.

Atticus shrugged in a manner that seemed like a silent “what can you do?” and answered, “We go somewhere else for the full moon. It’s not as if we’re short on options; I just liked the convenience of being able to stay in my own backyard.”

Casey nodded, slightly distracted. After a moment, she asked slowly, “Can I come, too?”

They were all going to object. She could tell immediately by the looks on their faces. She opened her mouth, voice raising as she carried on before any of them could get their objections out.

“She won’t know where we are, so it’s not like I’ll need to worry about Georgia just swanning on up to us. And besides,” she added with a careful lilt, preparing to break out the big guns, “do you really want me here by myself if she realizes none of you are on the property and tries to come inside?”

There was silence for a moment as they all pondered that thought. Atticus caved first, shoulders slumping. He lifted a hand and dragged it down his face. “Alright,” he sighed. “You can come. I’ll fill you in on anything you’ll need to know in the morning.”

Casey nodded quickly in response and let the topic drop, determined not to push her luck. Besides, it was late enough that it was early, and she was pretty sure she would finally be able to get some sleep.

It was only another twenty minutes before they all trailed off to bed. It was a fitful night, but Casey did manage to fall asleep eventually, and while it was nothing particularly restful, she supposed that was better than nothing. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, as the saying went.

Casey decided in the morning, very quickly, that she should not have agreed to have the conversation in the morning. Atticus had to work. Which meant it was an early morning for him. Which meant he had to wake Casey up at the crack of dawn again in order to talk to her about the full moon field trip.

“On the whole, we shouldn’t be much different than any other night. Some were-animals can go a bit feral on full moons, but it seems to affect certain species more than others. Lydia and I are generally no different than any other night,” he explained as Casey yawned and blinked at him. “Branson will probably go off in his own direction early in the night, but if he doesn’t, I would advise you at least keep a healthy distance from him. Usually, he’s fine, if a bit testy, but if he’s startled or taken off guard, he may very well try to take your hand off without even thinking about it.”

“Fun,” Casey returned in a deadpan. “Is it going to be some, like… super gross, gory transformation?”

Atticus gave her a slightly perplexed look, head cocking to one side slightly. “You’ve seen me transform before,” he reminded her.

“That wasn’t during a full moon,” Casey protested, folding her arms over her chest. “I wanted to make sure it wouldn’t be any different.”

“Ah, no, the transformation part remains fairly standard,” he assured her wryly.

“Where are we going, anyway?” she asked, running a hand through her hair and glancing at the clock. It was so early.

“There’s a state park an hour and a half or so away,” he answered. “I imagine we shouldn’t run into any trouble if we head there, and there will be more than enough space for Branson and Lydia to go their separate ways. Would you like to go back to sleep now?” The last was asked with a fondly exasperated smile.

“Yeeeeessss,” Casey replied, drawing the word out with something like desperation.

Shaking his head, Atticus gestured grandly to the bed. Casey toppled back down onto her pillow, and she was pretty sure Atticus laughed at her, but she wasn’t entirely sure, since she fell back to sleep basically instantaneously.

It wasn’t until later that day that it really sank in that she had willingly volunteered—nay, demanded—to follow her husband and his friends into the woods while they were forced to turn into animals for several hours. It was a strange thought, and it took a few minutes for her to convince herself that she hadn’t dreamed the conversation or imagined it in some sort of half-asleep stupor.

But Atticus mentioned it at dinner that night, so presumably it had actually happened. It was surprisingly easy to let it slip from her mind, though. She finally had other things to keep herself busy, and on the whole, it wasn’t the strangest thing that had happened. And given all the movies she had seen about werewolves needing to transform on the full moon (even if they neglected to mention that they could also just transform whenever they felt like it), she couldn’t even say it was a huge shock.

The conversation that morning seemed to be all anyone had to say on the topic, and Casey couldn’t think of anything to ask about it, so she saw no reason to bring it up again. It seemed like the sort of thing that could only really be done justice to with firsthand experience.

Of course, with that in mind, time seemed to crawl. Casey threw herself into her newly accumulating hobbies until she had a slightly worrying collection of jewelry and no idea what to do with it, there were three kinds of muffins in the kitchen, and she could play her way through “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on the piano.

When the day arrived, the four of them piled into Atticus’s car. Branson almost looked offended when Casey shouted, “Shotgun!” and claimed the front passenger seat, but Atticus did not contest her claim, and so Branson climbed into the back with Lydia.

Considering she didn’t have a car and rarely left the area, an hour and a half in a car seemed like a long time to Casey. Thankfully, clothes that were comfortable for trekking through the woods in for hours on end were also comfortable when sitting in a car.

The drive was quiet, though not uncomfortably so. Branson played on his phone while Lydia stared fixedly out the window, daydreaming about who-knew-what. Atticus’s attention stayed focused on the road, and Casey braided twine together in her lap. All in all, the hour and a half felt reasonably short.

Which was likely a good thing, considering everyone else seemed antsy by the time the car was parked again and they were all spilling out of it. Casey wondered what it felt like, but she kept the question to herself.

There was no one else there, or at least no one else in the parking lot. So, there was no hesitation before the three of them began to strip down, tossing their clothes into the car again. Casey sort of preferred it when Branson and Lydia still felt sort of modest around her. She figured there was supposed to be a limit on how many naked people who were not her husband that she was supposed to be exposed to. And really, that was not a problem she ever expected to have before this entire fiasco began.

When they transformed, though it was true that it was the same as last time, it was still strange to see the way they warped and shifted, like they were being shaped by a sculptor who couldn’t quite decide what it was that he wanted to do.

Casey followed them into the trees afterwards, and just as Atticus had predicted, Lydia spiraled into the air and took off, and Branson broke into a sprint almost immediately and bolted away.

After a moment, watching Branson disappear into the underbrush, Casey wondered, “Will they remember where the car is?”

Atticus huffed out a breath that was maybe supposed to be a laugh, or as close to one as he could get just then, and nodded his head once before he carried on. Casey loped after him for the first few steps before slowing to a more leisurely pace once she caught up.

It was a nice night, at least. The sky was almost entirely cloudless, so the entire world was bathed in silver moonlight. Without the lights of the city around, it seemed as if the moon was bright enough to swallow the entire world, and the only thing keeping her and Atticus from falling into the sky was the canopy of trees above them.

Moonlight dappled through it in spots and lines, as the top of each tree seemed curiously unwilling to touch the branches of any of the neighboring trees, leaving perfect dividing lines between the individual treetops. It was pretty in a strange sort of way. Casey couldn’t quite resist taking a few pictures with her phone.

When at last Atticus slowed, it was in a patch of ferns, a single pool of moonlight landing in the middle, falling unfiltered through one of the few holes without any tree coverage. Heaving a sigh, Atticus tossed himself down to the ground, rolled over, and began squirming back and forth on his back.

It took Casey a moment to realize that he was scratching his back, and once she made that connection, she couldn’t quite prevent the whoop of laughter that escaped her before she could clap a hand over her mouth. She wheezed fitfully behind her hands, trying to pretend she wasn’t laughing and failing impressively at that attempt.

Slowly, Atticus turned his head to look at her upside down, blinking at her. His eyes narrowed slightly, and he rolled back over and heaved himself back up onto all fours. He took a step towards her, followed by another, and Casey began to back up as he got closer.

To no avail, though. He closed the distance between them without any issue and knocked her backwards onto the ground simply by prodding her with his nose. She opened her mouth to complain, only to pause when he yawned theatrically and flopped down, resting his head on her chest.

Casey squirmed fitfully beneath him, but it was no use. She was stuck until he decided she had learned her lesson and would let her go. And she couldn’t even properly sulk, since she couldn’t slump while she was on the ground, and she couldn’t fold her arms over her chest when his head was on her chest.

Instead, because she was a mature adult, she resorted to grabbing one of his ears and gently but steadily pulling on it until he got fed up and let her go, lifting his head off her to let her squirm her way out from under him. She patted the top of his head afterwards, right between his ears, and snorted out a laugh when he prodded at her with his nose in something that seemed like mock offense.

(It was a strange thought, to look at a bear and know he was being sarcastic with her. She was willing to wager most people didn’t get to have that experience.)

It wasn’t quite the start to the night that Casey had been expecting, but then again, maybe it was exactly what she should have expected.

Atticus hoisted himself back to his feet, and Casey fell into step behind him as he carried on walking. To her knowledge, there was no specific game plan for the night, and if she asked, then Atticus wouldn’t be able to give her an answer until after the fact.

She had never been a huge fan of surprises—they had frequently meant bad news growing up—but she supposed she could get used to them. But even that was assuming they did anything that could even be called a surprise. It seemed entirely possible that they would just spend the night wandering through the woods until it was time to head back to the car.

And that, too, was something Casey could be okay with.

The number of trees lessened as they meandered, until there were more shrubs than actual trees, and the ground got rougher and rockier. Casey wouldn’t say they left the woods entirely, but the woods did thin out considerably for a stretch, though she could see where it began to thicken again on the opposite side with her naked eye.

There was a rushing, babbling noise not far off, and it took Casey until they were almost upon it to identify it as a river. It wasn’t exactly a noise she was familiar with; even roaming around Atticus’s property as thoroughly as she had, the biggest source of water she had found was a pond, and the only moving water she had stumbled across was a stream no wider than a surfboard.

She approached the edge of the water carefully, leaning over the edge where the dirt dropped away to look down at it. Reaching a hand out, she grabbed the trunk of a narrow tree for balance, growing partially sideways over the water, some of its roots bared from where the dirt had fallen away entirely.

As she watched, a leaf drifted down to land on the river’s surface and float away, and a fish swam past. Not enormous but not small, and there was nothing really unique about it—it looked about as stereotypically fish-like as it could—but the fact that it was bigger than a kitchen spoon and wasn’t in an aquarium was a bit of a novel concept just then.

Atticus wandered a ways along the water’s edge until he found a section of the bank that was more of a gradual slope into the water. He waded in until he was standing nearly up to his belly in the water, and Casey watched him with bewildered interest.

She recoiled a step in surprise and nearly tripped over one of the tree’s roots when, without any warning, Atticus surged forward, plunging his face into the water. When he pulled his head out of the water once again, it was with a fish caught between his teeth, flapping and wriggling in distress for a few moments before it went limp.

Right. Bear. Carnivore. She probably should have seen that coming. She shook her head slightly and turned her attention elsewhere so she didn’t need to watch him tear the fish to shreds, and so she didn’t need to watch him catch and eat two more after that, though she could hear the splashing as he plunged into the water after them.

Thankfully, there was no shortage of things to observe to keep her distracted. A fox was watching them cautiously from the opposite side of the river before it darted away once it realized Casey had spotted it. An owl hooted ominously from somewhere in the trees, always remaining stubbornly out of sight no matter what direction Casey turned. She didn’t even realize that Atticus had finished eating until he sidled up next to her and prodded her with his nose, pointing off into the distance with his muzzle once he had her attention.

They didn’t cross the river, and for that, Casey was glad, but she was happy she got to see it, at least. They turned and ventured back into the trees.

It would surprise no one to hear that Casey was not exactly a nature expert or a survivalist. She knew basically nothing about any of the plants surrounding her. She knew something about poison ivy having three leaves, and she could recognize when a tree was an evergreen or when it was not an evergreen, but her knowledge got no more specific than that.

As such, she took pictures of everything. Every type of leaf, every flower, every berry, every shrub and plant. She didn’t try to sample any of it, of course. She had more common sense than that. But if any of it was edible, well, she wanted to know that for future reference. It seemed like it might be the sort of information that would add a little something extra to any future full moon excursions.

Every so often, Atticus watched her as she finagled a branch into a better angle to get a picture of it, and though his expressions were a little hard to gauge in his current form due to being largely nonexistent, she was pretty sure he looked amused. She couldn’t really help herself; she just wanted to know more. She was in the middle of this life now, and she wanted to know all she could about it, even if it was just something as simple as the plants.

Besides, it would probably be at least a little satisfying if she could identify which of the plants and trees growing on Atticus’s property were the same as in the forest, though Atticus’s woods leaned far more towards prickly trees, rather than leafy trees.

(Thinking about it, the lower, thicker branches and the constant carpet of needles probably helped Georgia go unseen. It was a slightly irritating thought, and Casey ushered it away. She was in a good mood, and she didn’t want to think about such things.)

Casey lost track of time for a little while as she enjoyed the sights. Every so often, Atticus would draw her attention to something in particular, she would snap a picture of it, and it seemed to become something of a game as he searched for some of the strangest treasures the woods had to offer, as if he was trying to impress her. She couldn’t deny that it was working, though, and it was strangely endearing on top of that.

For a time, she managed to forget to some extent that the rest of the world actually existed; it was just her and Atticus and the woods in every direction, and she couldn’t think of a single complaint about it.

She was supposed to be coming up with hobbies. Maybe this could be one of them. The thought made her chest feel warm in a slightly foreign way, and she figured that meant the thought deserved deeper consideration.

As was generally the case, though, good things eventually had to come to an end.

Hearing the peace of the forest abruptly interrupted by her cellphone ringing, Casey ground to a halt, sneakers slipping in the mud for only a moment before she caught her balance and pulled her phone out of her pocket. She didn’t recognize the number, and she answered it with a cautious, “Hello?”

(She spared half a second to marvel about the fact that she still had cellphone reception, even if it sounded like the voice on the other end was being gargled through a kitchen blender.)

“Is this Casey Grevieux?” the voice on the other end of the line asked, and it was vaguely familiar.

“Yeah,” she returned slowly. “Who’s this?”

“Apologies, Mrs. Grevieux. This is the police chief.”

Casey drew in a sharp breath, and Atticus cocked his head, looking at her over his shoulder. Casey waved a hand at him in no specific gesture, though he seemed to understand the intent of “I’ll explain in a minute” as the police chief continued talking. With some reluctance, Atticus turned his attention back to drinking from the stream.

There had apparently been a lead on Georgia Carmichael’s location, and there had even been a sighting, though she had dropped off the radar again before she could be taken in. The chief just wanted to keep them up to date, and Casey managed as polite a “Thank you” as she could before hanging up.

Atticus turned to look at her again, large head once again cocked curiously to one side. Casey sighed out a slow breath. “Georgia knows we sicked the police on her now,” she stated. “She’s probably going to do something we really don’t want her to do.”

Atticus heaved a grumbling sigh and flopped down flat on the ground. Nodding once, Casey sighed. “My thoughts exactly.”

She had been hoping for an uneventful night, full moon aside. Or maybe even for good news. She really should have known not to expect that much with the way everything else had been going.

There was nothing they could do just then. It wasn’t even that late into the night yet; they had hours yet to go before they could return to the house, and even then, there was no guarantee that they could actually do anything.

(Though they had no doubt that Georgia would be at the house at some point that night. They would need to check her budding nest to see if she left anything worthwhile there.)

Even when she wasn’t doing anything herself, it felt as if Georgia was toying with them. Like she was playing some game where the only goal was not to let anyone else have any of the pieces. Casey was getting more than a little fed up with it, but the fact still remained that she couldn’t do anything just then.

Instead, she followed Atticus as he meandered aimlessly, careful to stay behind him to walk in the paths he cleared through the underbrush, his sheer mass crushing the foliage flat. If he had a goal in mind, he gave no indication as to what it might be and it wasn’t as if Casey could ask. The night was warm, though, and the woods were alive in every direction. Casey supposed she was alright with a bit of mystery.

That was all they did, really. They spent the rest of the night wandering, occasionally looping back through an area they had already passed through, evident only by the flattened plant-life. Every so often, a crow cawed from above, and Casey would look up to see an enormous bird perched on a branch above them. It always flew away too soon for Casey to really gauge if it was big enough to be Lydia, but she assumed it was her.

At some point, deep into the night, Casey ground to a halt when she heard howling in the distance, the sound traveling so far so clearly that it was as if it was coming from right beside her. A series of howls answered it afterwards, and she wondered if any of Branson’s pack members were in the woods with them or if he was simply communicating with the local wildlife. In either case, she figured it was pretty cool.

The sound was haunting but beautiful, and Atticus cocked his head up to listen until the last note faded away. It seemed an accurate representation of the forest as a whole after darkness fell, haunting in its isolation but beautiful in its peace.

Casey found herself wondering when she became so poetic, and she decided that maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. Sometimes, poetry was really the only proper response.

When silence fell once again, save for the chirping of insects and bats, Atticus and Casey carried on walking.

It seemed like the night passed too quickly before Atticus was turning and heading purposefully along in a single direction, cutting across old paths every so often. Casey jogged along behind him as he finally moved at something other than his leisurely, lumbering pace, evidently intent on his new direction.

As they approached the edge of the trees once again and the parking lot became visible, Casey understood. If she squinted, she could just see the beginnings of the sunrise along the eastern horizon, the ink dark sky lightening to dusty silver. The night was almost over. Atticus yawned and lay down on the ground beside the car, his muzzle resting on his paws as he waited. Casey sat down on the hood of the car, staring into the east with something like wonder on her face.

Ten minutes later, Lydia fluttered out of the trees and landed on Casey’s shoulder. She barely fit, but evidently, she decided that was an unimportant detail and instead occupied herself with absentmindedly preening a strand of Casey’s ponytail.

The sky was turning all sorts of shades of gold and pink and lilac by the time Branson trotted out of the woods to join them, and that seemed to be the cue that the night was over. Atticus heaved himself back to his feet, and Lydia hopped down from Casey’s shoulder to glide gently down to the ground.

They transformed and got dressed without a fuss, and after that, it was time to go. Casey explained the phone call in the car; no one seemed particularly surprised.

The drive back to the house seemed to go so much slower than the drive to the park. Granted, they had been awake all night, Casey supposed, so at a guess, she would say that being tired had something to do with it. She stared out the window, watching the trees blur past. No one said anything, and she was pretty sure Branson and Lydia spent at least half of the ride dozing in the backseat.

It had been a decent night, though. More enjoyable than Casey had expected, at any rate. The news they got hadn’t been ideal, but at least it hadn’t managed to ruin the rest of the night. As strange as it seemed to say, Casey was pretty sure she could come to look forward to nights like that in the future, whether they were on the property or somewhere else.

But it seemed a bit early to think about things like that. They still had a problem they needed to deal with, after all, and it was an issue that deserved their full attention. And as it turned out, once they made it back to the house, it was a problem that was very keen on making itself known. Because of course, they weren’t allowed to just have five minutes to rest. That would make everything too easy.

(Casey was pretty sure she was getting more cynical. She would need to try to put a cap on that at some point, she wagered.)

The window into Casey’s suite was open when the car pulled to a halt in the driveway. It was the first thing she noticed as the car got closer to the house, and she pointed it out quietly. Everything else seemed too quiet, though she was willing to bet that, at least, was just in her imagination. She glanced furtively around the car to see Atticus, Branson, and Lydia all looking quietly put out by the situation. It was gratifying, in a strange way, not to be the only one fed up with the entire ordeal.

If only it would just stop happening so they could all get on with their lives like normal.

Branson held up a hand, silently telling the rest of them to wait as he got out of the car. He disappeared into the garage, and a moment later Casey could just barely hear the sounds of claws clicking across concrete.

For a few long minutes, they simply sat in the car, waiting. Either for Branson to come back or for some sign that something was wrong.

Finally, after just enough time that they were all beginning to get uncomfortable, Branson emerged from the garage again, shaped like a human but wearing only a pair of pants. He lifted one hand and ushered them towards the house with it before he turned to finish getting dressed.

The three of them in the car all let out an audible sigh of relief before they got out of the car to head back inside.

They met up with Branson in the foyer, and he wasted no time before he explained, “She was definitely here, but she didn’t limit herself to Casey’s suite this time. I followed her smell throughout basically the entire house.” That would explain why it took him so long to come back out, at least. “Nothing was violently overturned,” he continued, “but she was definitely looking through a few things. You’ll need to check to make sure she didn’t steal anything.”

“Why don’t we check her nest first?” Casey suggested, wringing her hands together. “I mean, she was pretty clearly putting it together so she could spend the full moon on the property. She might still be there.”

“Probably not,” Lydia replied, glancing down at her watch. “But she might have left something behind. The cops are onto her, and her plans last night fell through. She might be getting desperate.”

“Is desperate good or bad?” Casey asked slowly, eyes narrowing slightly.

“Yes,” Atticus returned wryly. When Casey swatted his shoulder with one hand, he elaborated. “Good because she’ll be more prone to make mistakes, bad because desperation can drive people to do crazy or stupid things.”

Casey opened her mouth to reply, paused, and slowly closed her mouth, head cocked to one side as something occurred to her. “So, what if we lure her out, then? I mean, I don’t want to kill her or anything, but what about a trap?”

“What sort of trap?” Atticus asked cautiously.

“We set the cameras back up,” Casey began, “and let them catch her in the act of trying to kill one of you.”

Atticus’s eyebrows rose, and he tipped his head slowly to one side. “You’re going to need to elaborate on that one a little bit.”

Casey ran a hand through her ponytail and then resumed wringing her hands. “So, we know she uses a gun. She plans on attacking from a distance. We all know where the cameras are. She doesn’t; she never found them or I doubt she would have just left them alone. And if it’s pitch black out, then between the dark and the trees, if you catch her attention as an animal but then turn back into a human farther away, it will be too dark for her to tell at first.”

Lydia’s expression brightened slightly with realization. “Lure her into trying to shoot you near the cameras, where it will look like she’s trying to murder the property owner, rather than hunting a bear.”

Casey nodded rapidly.

“Haven’t we been over that hunters tend not to try to kill when it’s possible for their quarry to turn back into a human?” Branson wondered blandly.

“We already agreed that she’s probably desperate,” Atticus pointed out, catching on. “The cops are onto her, she knows it, and the next full moon is a full month away. She might risk it if she thinks it’s the only chance she’ll get.”

Branson wrinkled his nose. “Having already had a close call, I’m bowing out,” he decided. “If you lunatics want to dance around in front of her gun barrel, be my guest. I’ll stand by to offer first aid when it fails horribly.”

Casey swatted the back of one hand against his ribs. Heedless of that, he turned and wandered farther into the house, leaving them to their planning.

Though they all admitted it wasn’t an ideal plan, it was all they had just then, and Atticus volunteered to play bait. Branson had already pulled himself out of the pot, and they weren’t going to force the matter. Lydia wasn’t an option; even with limited visibility, Georgia would notice when Lydia went from flying to running and come up short.

Once Atticus was outside, Casey was supposed to give it ten minutes and then call the police to report that there was a trespasser on the property and she was pretty sure that trespasser was trying to kill her husband. A report that would, in all likelihood, have the police heading to their house posthaste.

No one was going to turn on any of the outdoor lights that evening, just to make sure the yard was as dark as possible. Casey wracked her brain for other ways she could actually help, other than setting the cameras back up, but she was fairly sure all she could really do was wait.

Waiting for night to fall was more nerve-wracking than it had ever been before. It should have been a simple thing, just keeping herself entertained until then, but that was easier said than done when she knew what was coming and that there was really nothing she could do other than make the phone call. Knowing that didn’t mean she had to be happy about it.

She sat at the piano and prodded randomly at keys, but her thoughts were elsewhere, and she couldn’t focus long enough to string the notes together into anything coherent. Not that she actually knew any coherent songs, so she supposed it was a moot point.

She had already set up the cameras with Lydia’s help, and Lydia and Atticus had gone out to make sure he knew where the cameras were. There was even a pair of pajama pants stashed away near the cameras, so if they were lucky, they wouldn’t need to explain to the police why Atticus had gone to investigate a trespasser without any clothes on. They were as prepared as they could be, Casey supposed, but a lot of the idea was still left up to chance.

Maybe it was immature, but she would have been more comfortable if the idea had been someone else’s, rather than hers. But it had been her idea, which meant if it failed, that blame landed squarely on her shoulders.

She dragged the flat of her hand from one end of the piano’s keys to the other, and the cacophony lead to Atticus poking his head into the room to stare at her in quiet bewilderment. She waved him off, offering just a halfhearted, lopsided shrug as an explanation before she pushed the bench away from the piano and stood up.

Maybe she just needed to wear herself out. She wandered from room to room, peeking into corners and drawers and cupboards as she went from the ground floor to the top floor and back down once again, wandering in laps throughout the house. She felt like a caged panther as she paced, like she was just waiting for someone to open the gate and let her out.

By the time sundown arrived and stars were beginning to appear overhead, Casey ceased pacing to instead stare out one of the windows, as if she would actually be able to see anything through the dim light and the branches.

When Branson wandered back out of wherever it was he had gone to sulk to inform them that their guest had arrived on the property, Atticus stepped outside and transformed, leaving his clothes on a pile for Casey to gather up as he moseyed his way into the woods.

Casey looked down at her phone to check the time and set an alarm to go off in ten minutes, and she resumed staring out the window. She knew Lydia was out there somewhere, and she knew the crow would have a much higher chance of seeing if anything was going wrong, but she felt compelled to stand guard anyway.

Ten minutes seemed to pass in the blink of an eye, and Casey turned the alarm off and dialed 911. She didn’t even need to fake it to get her voice to tremble as she explained that the woman who had been stalking them for some time was on the property, her husband had gone out to check things out and hadn’t come back inside yet, and she was pretty sure her husband was in danger.

It wasn’t wrong, after all. She just neglected to mention that the danger was partially manufactured.

With the assurance that the police were on their way, Casey turned her attention back to the window and listened for the sound of a gunshot. As she wondered what she might find after that sound, she tried to keep the worst of the contemplations at bay with rather limited success.

Atticus had always been fond of his property. It was beautiful. It was dense enough and large enough that it generally offered something like privacy, other than the occasional intrusion by paparazzi. So, it was rather disconcerting to wander through his own woods and feel like he wasn’t welcome, as if something was going to come barreling out of the darkness at him at any moment. At the same time, that feeling seemed absurd; he knew he was larger than anything that might come at him.

Even so, he kept his pace sedate. He had to seem casual. He couldn’t look like he had a purpose or like he was on a mission or the hunter might know he was up to something. He had to seem like he was just going for a nighttime stroll.

When he came upon her nest, he slowed, venturing towards it carefully. He wasn’t sure if she was in it or if she was somewhere else in the woods, though he got his answer as he lumbered closer to the nest and he heard a shotgun being racked. He ground to a halt for a split second, ears swiveling in the direction the sound came from, and as Georgia pulled the trigger, he surged forward at a sprint, narrowly avoiding being hit.

He turned to face her again, and his mouth gaped open as he roared, teeth bared, but his posturing lasted for only a moment before he turned and started loping again, moving at a pace that seemed convincingly enough like he was trying to get away from her while still letting her keep pace with him reasonably well. He couldn’t lead her anywhere if she lost track of him, after all.

Every so often, his ears swiveled in her direction, making sure he could still hear the muffled sounds of her boots through the pine needles. Just as expected, she never wavered as she followed him.

He heard her shotgun rack once again, and he ground to a halt and cut sharply to one side, just in time to hear the gun’s pellets impact the trunk of a tree. He heard a crushing sound as her boots slid through the needles as she changed course, but after that, she was practically glued to him once again.

He was going to need to lead her towards the cameras soon. Even as a bear, running took energy. He could only do it for so long without slowing down, even if he wasn’t running at his top speed. If he tried to just lead her in circles forever, she was going to catch up to him, and he wasn’t looking forward to what would happen after that.

He could hear her fumbling with something behind him and the sound of shotgun casings being dropped as she lost her grip on them while she ran. She didn’t stop to pick them back up, and evidently, she did manage to load the gun, as Atticus heard it rack once more.

Once again, he lunged off to a side, and he heard the sound of pellets striking the trees again, followed by a muffled, frustrated, “Fuck.”

Apparently, he was getting on her nerves. He found himself childishly satisfied by that knowledge, and it gave him the energy to keep running for a little bit longer. If she wanted to catch him, she was going to need to work harder than that.

The cameras were close by, and while it was a comforting thought, there was still one detail keeping Atticus from running straight for them. Georgia was too close behind him. Even in the dark, she was likely to notice the shift if he didn’t put more distance between them before he transformed.

He heard a quiet, “Come the fuck on,” and it was like music to his ears as he circled halfway around a tree and doubled back around, staying near the camera trap but not quite going through it.

He could hear sirens in the distance, though, so he knew he only had so much time. He just had to wait until she tried to shoot him again, he figured. It would most likely offer the best chance for him to lose her. Not entirely, of course, but enough to transform without being completely exposed.

It took some time, and he thought maybe she was actually bothering to be careful with her ammunition. But it wasn’t something he needed to worry about.

He turned, looping through a trio of trees and picking up speed as he heard her fumbling with her shotgun once again. She had to slow down to do so, or else she would just drop the casings on the ground again. It offered a chance for him to pull farther ahead, putting enough space between them that he could transform without her seeing him do so.

He surged forward, breaking into a sprint for a moment, until he transformed between one stride and the next, four feet leaving the ground and only two feet meeting it again.

Just outside the area the cameras were monitoring, he slowed just enough to grab the pajama pants that had been stashed nearby. Awkwardly fumbling with them, he managed to hop into one leg and then the other without coming to a complete halt, and once they were on, he burst into a sprint again, straight into the camera trap.

He heard her shotgun rack a short distance away, and he dropped to the ground, lying flat on the pine needles, one hand covering his head, as she pulled the trigger. The pellets sailed harmlessly over him.

Cautiously, Atticus sat up and turned over, looking back the way he came just in time to see Georgia stumble into the camera trap. She ground to a halt when she saw him, blinking at him stupidly as if it had completely fled her mind that he might transform at some point.

She waffled in place for a moment, and then Atticus lunged for her. Considering he outweighed her by more than a small margin, she landed on the ground on her back, all of the air leaving her lungs in a rush.

Even as she wheezed beneath him, she tried to knee him in the ribs, but she couldn’t work up enough power for it to have much of an effect on him. He pinned her leg with one of his own and grabbed her arms, slamming them down to the ground. Her shotgun left her grip, tumbling away across the ground, coming to a stop well out of Georgia’s reach. Without it, there was essentially nothing she could do against him.

Atticus shoved her over onto her belly. He pulled her arms behind her back and held her wrists together, and he sat on her, keeping her pinned regardless of how much she squirmed.

Soon enough, when Atticus looked in the direction of the driveway, he could see the red and blue lights of police cars, and the sirens were loud and clear. Georgia struggled harder, shoulders jerking as she tried to wrench her arms free and legs kicking fitfully, but it was all to no avail. Atticus remained unmoved.

Eventually, as footsteps became audible even muffled through the pine needles, Georgia stopped struggling. There was no point, and presumably she realized that. She went limp beneath him, though he didn’t relinquish his hold on her wrists.

Considering the house was a bit off the beaten path, it wasn’t unexpected when it took some time for the police to show up. Casey could hear the sirens first, and she waited until she could see the lights flashing as they came down the driveway before she hurled herself at the front door, threw herself outside, and ran to the driveway to meet them.

She was summarily guided to a safe place and told to sit down and wait until the coast was clear, and the officers spread out into the woods to look around.

They didn’t need to look for long before they found Atticus, sitting on Georgia’s back to pin her to the ground. Her shotgun was on the ground just out of reach, and as he pointed off into the distance, he said, “She set up some sort of tiny fort up there. You can’t really miss it.”

One officer went in that direction while the other two dealt with Georgia, cuffing her hands behind her back and hauling her to her feet. They collected the shotgun, and with Atticus explaining roughly where everything had happened, they even managed to find some spent casings and a few of the pellets before they began to drag Georgia back towards the driveway, where the trio of police cars waited for her to be loaded into one.

Without waiting for any sort of signal, Casey abandoned her seat by the garage to once again meet the group, tossing herself at Atticus and wrapping her arms around his middle as soon as she saw him. He wrapped his arms around her in return and nearly crushed her to his chest, but the embrace remained rather brief. They still had police officers and an attempted murderer to deal with, after all.

As Casey thanked the officers profusely and graciously handed over the footage from the security cameras, she took a moment to finally get a look at Georgia as she was loaded into the back of a cop car. She hadn’t been able to before; the security cameras filmed in infrared, so everything in the footage was in shades of green. It was sort of disappointing to realize that she just looked like an average woman.

Her clothing was clearly expensive, but there was nothing particularly noteworthy about her face. She was an average height. She was only slightly tan. Her brown hair was pulled back in a practical bun. Her eyes weren’t even an interesting shade of brown. All the trouble she had caused them, and she didn’t even look like a monster. She looked like a PTA mom. She looked boring. It was a little anticlimactic.

She was perfectly calm as she was loaded into a car and the door was closed, and she remained perfectly calm while she was in the car. It was as if she had already simply accepted the situation. Her plans had fallen through, and she was facing the consequences for them. Casey supposed she could admire the fortitude. She could, but she didn’t. Mostly, she was just sort of disappointed that Georgia didn’t seem broken up in the slightest.

The knowledge that she would be going away for attempted murder soothed her irritation admirably.

Everything seemed to happen in a flash after that, until eventually the police were on their way again. They would be in touch, of course. There would likely be a court case. But who knew? They did have footage of Georgia attempting to shoot Atticus with a shotgun on his own property. Casey found it hard to believe she would simply be able to talk her way out of something like that.

But for that night, at least, there was nothing left for them to do, and Casey and Atticus made their way back inside.

Unsurprisingly, they found Lydia wrapped in a blanket in the foyer, gleefully explaining everything to Branson like a pair of gossipy schoolgirls. Casey couldn’t say she was shocked. She paid them fairly little attention, though, instead grabbing Atticus’s hand to pull him towards the stairs. She was tired, and it was time to go to bed.

Atticus followed her without complaint, and soon enough, both of them were gratefully falling into bed. They both deserved a good night’s rest.

That was the theory, at any rate. That wasn’t how it worked out. Half an hour later, Casey still felt too wound up to actually sleep, as if she was going to try crawling out of her skin at a moment’s notice. Too much had happened, and she couldn’t get her thoughts to slow down long enough to tune them out.

Finally, she rolled onto her side to face Atticus, heaving an aggrieved sigh and asking, “Are you still awake?”

“I am,” he answered without any delay. Evidently, he was having just as much trouble getting to sleep as she was. Casey felt slightly better about herself, knowing that.

She sat up, the blanket pooling around her, and Atticus watched her curiously, presumably wondering if she was going to get out of bed or not.

She did not. She did, however, pull her shirt over her head and drop it over the side of the bed. She kicked the blanket the rest of the way off and sat up on her knees to shimmy her sleep pants and her panties down her thighs until she could kick them off as well, letting them land on the floor wherever they happened to land. She could always collect them later.

Atticus didn’t need to be told what she had in mind. She didn’t even need to use the words “we should wear each other out.” He simply sat up on his knees to tug his boxers off.

They were both naked in short order, and Casey offered him a slow, sly smile before she lay back down, her head on her pillow. Her eyebrows rose expectantly, and she lifted a hand to beckon him closer with two fingers. Atticus wasted no time in crawling towards her, and Casey spread her legs as he got closer so he could kneel between them.

As he leaned down, she sat up, and their lips met in the middle, sliding together hurriedly. Already, their hands began to wander, Casey’s palms sliding down his sides until she could get them on his ass, and Atticus’s hands kneading her breasts.

He ran his thumbs over her nipples until they hardened beneath his touch, and finally, the kiss broke so he could instead duck his head. He circled the tip of his tongue around one nipple for a moment and then closed his lips around it, flicking his tongue over it and using just a hint of teeth. At the same time, he tugged and pinched the other nipple between two fingers, until he switched. By the time he lifted his head away from her chest, Casey was sighing beneath him, and her sex was already red and wet.

Atticus’s cock was hard already, fully erect, and Casey expected him to hoist her into his lap again as he curled his hands around her hips. Instead, he urged her to roll over onto her stomach and then hoisted her hips up off of the bed as he sat up on his knees again, until she was balanced on all fours. One hand left her hip, and she looked over her shoulder at him to watch as he wrapped a hand around his cock to line himself up with her sex.

The head of his cock breached her entrance slowly, but the rest of his cock followed all at once, one swift thrust leaving him fully sheathed. Casey gasped, her elbows nearly buckled, and her head fell forward to hang between her arms. There was no chance for her to adjust, as that was the pace he kept up, pounding into her hard and fast. With both hands around her hips again, he pulled her back to meet each thrust, until Casey was moaning long and loud with every thrust, shameless and carefree.

It didn’t take long before she knew she was getting close. She opened her mouth to say something, but all she managed was a stuttered, “I-I—” before it broke off into another series of panting, gasping moans.

Atticus seemed to get the point, as one of his hands left her hip once again, instead reaching around her and between her legs. Casey drew in a sharp, nearly desperate breath as he began to stroke her clit, and from that point, she was gone. Her arms buckled, leaving her leaning on her elbows with her face buried into her pillow as she moaned. Her hands clenched in the bedding, her back arched, and her entire body went taut as she came.

There was no reprieve, though, as Atticus kept pounding into her and kept stroking her clit. And soon, through the tingling of overstimulation, she could feel herself getting excited again.

She didn’t last quite so long the second time, but through sheer stubborn willpower, she managed to hold out until she could feel the rhythm of Atticus’s hips beginning to falter as he got close to the end. With a deep sigh, Casey came a second time, and after only a few more thrusts, Atticus found his climax as well. His hips kept moving for a few seconds afterwards as he worked himself through his orgasm, though the rhythm was erratic and he slowed to a gradual halt.

For a drawn-out moment, they stayed right where they were until, slowly, Atticus pulled out of her and let her go. Gracelessly, Casey flopped down on the mattress in a boneless heap, and Atticus huffed out a breath of laughter. Not wanting to flatten her, he forewent her method of sprawling out in favor of moving over to lie down beside her. Not with any amount of grace, though, as once he was free of the risk of landing on top of her, he simply dropped down to the bed. The mattress bounced slightly when he landed.

Neither of them moved after that for a few moments, until finally Casey shuffled across the bed, pressing herself close to his chest. They were both sweaty and sticky, and she was pretty sure they both qualified as ‘a mess,’ but he wrapped an arm around her and pulled her closer, and she couldn’t bring herself to want to sit up just then. She could take a shower in the morning. It’s not like she was going to have anything pressing that she needed to do.

She didn’t bother reaching for the blanket; Atticus was warm enough that she didn’t really need one. Slowly, she let her eyes drift closed. The world seemed to go out of focus around her, and it seemed like she fell asleep between one second and another.

She dreamed of being somewhere dark and warm and soft, as if she had crawled into a bear’s den and curled up with the den’s occupant. She felt safe in a way that had never been afforded to her before, as if the world could start falling apart and the sky could crumble from above them, but as long as she stayed in that den, she was safe. It was a feeling she wasn’t accustomed to, and one she never wanted to let go of.

She dreamed, after that, of a toddler with a mop of brown hair and dark, dark eyes, staring up at Casey and laughing as she taught the little girl how to walk. Maybe there was more to the dream, but Casey recalled nothing beyond that. And she was alright with that; the girl seemed like the only important part, though she could barely even remember what the little girl looked like in the morning. She just remembered that, dream or not, she had loved that little girl with all of her being.

She pondered the thought for a time before getting out of bed to shower, wondering if perhaps it was an omen. Her mother had sworn up and down that she’d had a dream and had known exactly what Casey would look like, but Casey had always just assumed it was a tall tale, a way to make it seem more exciting than it truly had been.

But she supposed it wasn’t important. In a few months (well, more than a few), her child would be born, and she would love that child regardless of any of the details. That, she decided, was the most important part of it all.

It was going to be a good day, she decided. Even if nothing out of the ordinary happened, it was going to be a good day. There were beautiful things in the world, she was free to experience as many of them as she wanted, and they were all free of the looming danger that had been lurking around the mansion finally.

Her mood wasn’t even ruined when she realized that she was, indeed, quite a mess once she was in the shower. It was actually almost impressively gross, but she couldn’t bring herself to be annoyed about it. Whether or not it turned out to be a good day, it had most definitely been a good night, and she couldn’t think of a single thing she would have done differently about it.

That made her seem overwhelmingly sappy, and she knew that, but she also couldn’t bring herself to care too much about that either. Sometimes, it was good to be a little bit sappy, as far as she was concerned just then. Sometimes, that was just the right way to look at the world.

HAPTER 15

“You’re all over the news.” Annie sounded as if she thought she was actually offering any sort of unheard of news. “You and your hubby.”

“I do have the Internet,” Casey returned blandly. “Television, too. Occasionally, I even look at a newspaper when I’m in town.” It happened more often lately, as she no longer needed a babysitter everywhere she went, though Lydia frequently went with her just for old time’s sake.

She couldn’t see her sister roll her eyes, of course, but she was pretty sure it happened as Annie sighed, “Don’t be a bitch about it.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway. I take it this means your stalker problem is over, what with the stalker in question being in prison? Everyone still in one piece over there?”

“Over and done with, and everyone is just fine,” Casey confirmed pleasantly. She adopted a light, airheaded tone as she added, “Who would have thought that getting rid of a stalker would be such a relief?”

Annie snorted out a laugh in response. “You maybe want to give Jason a call at some point?” she asked.

Casey huffed out a breath. “I knew you had an ulterior motive.”

“Yes,” Annie confirmed. “He’s been driving me nuts asking about you. I keep telling him you’ll get in touch with him when you’re ready to, but can you throw the guy a bone, please? For my sake?”

Casey heaved an overwrought sigh. “I’ll think about it,” she deigned to compromise, very magnanimously. “No promises that it will be a pleasant conversation if it happens, though.”

“Hey, pleasant, unpleasant, I don’t care. I just want him off my case.”

Casey coughed against one hand to mask a laugh. “You’re too kind. A saint, truly.”

Annie made a sarcastic ‘pfft’ noise that sounded more like a particularly emphatic burst of static, and when she spoke again, she adopted a lofty, holier-than-thou tone. “It is both a blessing and a curse to be as charitable, kind, and gracious as I am. It is not an easy job, but it is one I’m willing to do for the good of the world.”

Casey was quiet for a moment before she finally stated flatly, “You are full of so much bullshit. Like, a truly impressive amount of bullshit. No wonder your hair is brown.”

“Oh, ew,” Annie whined. “That was just a low blow.”

But one Casey was always willing to make. Looking nothing like her sister came with a few perks, and even under pain of death, she doubted she would give those perks up. They were some of the joys of sisterhood.

Their conversation meandered from there, as it always did. The only new topic was Annie gushing about everything she would like to do once she was officially an aunt. Casey had never been a huge fan of baby talk with any of her coworkers in the past, but coming from her sister (and about her own future baby), it was surprisingly endearing.

Casey did call Jason eventually. With some hesitation, admittedly. It had been longer than she had ever gone without talking to him, and their last conversation hadn’t exactly ended on great terms. True enough, she knew he hadn’t meant any harm, but the fact remained that harm had still resulted from his compulsive need to try to bring wealthy people down a peg.

Casey was willing to bet her left leg that if she had still been poor when she told him about Atticus turning into a bear, he would have laughed at the story and then promptly forgotten about it two days later; he would have felt no need to spread it to other people to get them to laugh at her too.

And it was that knowledge that was the hardest to deal with. She supposed she couldn’t even say that he had meant no harm. He probably had, just subconsciously, and socially rather than physically.

But they had known each other for too long to let that last conversation be their last conversation. She made sure she was home alone when she called, not wanting anyone else listening in. If it turned into a screaming match, then she didn’t want to have an audience for it. It seemed like an unlikely outcome, but she wasn’t going to deny the possibility of it.

The phone rang twice before Jason answered with an excited, “Casey!”

“Jason.”

“And, angry voice. O… kay. Hi,” he offered more sedately.

“Yes, angry voice,” Casey returned dryly. “I’m assuming you’ve seen the news. It has taken this long to clear up the problem that you started because you couldn’t resist making me sound stupid in front of strangers.”

“It was an accident!” Jason insisted sharply, immediately. As if he had any right to be offended after the entire mess he had caused, whether he meant to or not.

“You didn’t mean to cause any real trouble,” she corrected. “But it wasn’t an accident.”

Jason mumbled something incoherent on the other end of the line. Casey didn’t need to hear the actual words or see his face to know that he was pouting.

“And I’m not even sure I believe that,” Casey carried on, sighing slowly. “I mean, I know you didn’t mean to put me in danger,” she added, almost as if she was reassuring him, “but I don’t know if I believe that you didn’t mean for there to be any trouble. You wanted people to laugh at me.”

“It was a funny story,” he protested weakly.

“We’ve been friends for years,” Casey pointed out, “and you’ve threatened to punch people for me for looking at me funny. You’ve never encouraged anyone to laugh at me.” When she didn’t get a reply, she kept talking. “You wanted me to look stupid,” she reiterated. “You wanted to pile on the gossip. Just like you couldn’t just be happy for your sister when she got married.”

When she still didn’t get a reply, she sighed and said, “I think we need to take a break from each other, Jason. It will probably do us both some good.”

She didn’t give him any time to reply or protest before she hung up the phone and put it back in her pocket.

She couldn’t say she felt better after that, but she would have been a bit concerned if she felt better after having that sort of conversation with someone who had been her best friend. But even so, it was something of a relief, so she was willing to say it had been the right move to make.

Maybe eventually, they would fix whatever had broken between them. Maybe they wouldn’t. Casey couldn’t predict the future. But for the moment, she had done what she could.

Casey missed Jason at first. He had been her best friend since they were children. He had been by her side through thick and thin, and he had helped her deal with a lot when she didn’t think she could. Of course, she missed him at first.

But she knew him. She knew him better than anyone else did, most likely, except for maybe his wife. She knew him well enough to know that their problems weren’t going to go away. He was never going to be alright with her being rich. It would never sit well with him, he would never stop being passive-aggressive about it, and he would probably tell other “funny stories” at the first chance he got without even realizing it. She wasn’t going to give him any more chances to cause another accidental catastrophe somewhere down the line, especially when it might put her child in danger.

She missed him at first, but she was a grown woman, and she knew when it was time to let him go. She wrote him a very healthy check, because she still cared about him and if she could help him get out of that dumpster that doubled as his apartment, then she would, and she wrote him a letter. It said a lot of things, but mostly it said goodbye.

When Atticus found her crying in the library, of course he started fretting. Casey laughed it off, scrubbed her face dry, and assured him that she was fine.

“I’m just doing a bit of spring cleaning,” she assured him. “It’s a little more intense than I thought it would be.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked slowly, coming closer to the chair she was sitting in as he asked.

Casey offered him a damp smile and shook her head. Later, perhaps, but just then, she didn’t want to explain everything.

He stroked a hand over her hair and left, giving her some privacy to gather her composure again.

She didn’t know if Jason ever read the letter. She didn’t know if he ever planned on cashing the check. She never got a reply from him. Truth be told, she hadn’t been expecting one.

She supposed she was alright with that. A bit more closure would have been nice, but she could be content with what she had.

It took a few days before she told Atticus about it in any detail. He hadn’t known Jason, but he had at least known how close Casey had been to him. And though he knew of Jason’s accidental involvement in the ordeal with the hunter, he was sympathetic nonetheless, and he listened for hours as Casey got nostalgic, telling story after story of nonsense that she and Jason had gotten up to in high school and college.

She felt better afterwards. Clearer, as if the sun had finally come out on a foggy day. She still missed him—she suspected she would for a rather long time—but she could acknowledge that she had done what was best for her and for her family and that she didn’t need to feel bad about that.

There were so many doctors’ appointments involved with being pregnant. Casey had known that from a logical standpoint, but knowing it in theory and experiencing it in practice were two very different things. It felt like every day either Annie or Lydia were escorting her to a doctor’s office to make sure everything was going as it was supposed to be, to make sure there were no complications and that the baby was developing properly.

None of it was helped by the fact that she was in the public eye. As soon as her baby bump really began to show, there were pictures. They weren’t even flattering pictures; they were specifically taken to make it look like she could easily be mistaken for having eaten a six-course lunch.

Lydia patted her back and encouraged her to ignore it, and for the most part Casey did, though she did make note of the names of the particularly obnoxious photographers. She was sure she could do something to make them feel bad about it at some point. And she wouldn’t even regret it. Because honestly, if someone’s first reaction to seeing a pregnant woman was to think ‘how can I make her look unattractively fat for money?’ then she had no sympathy for them.

There were good parts about being pregnant too, of course. Lydia, Annie, and Atticus fussed over her as much as they were allowed to as soon as she really began to show, and even Branson didn’t seem entirely immune, his already impressive protective instincts getting even more impressive.

Casey was flattered, in a strange way. She knew the attention was technically directed towards her baby, but she was still the center of that attention. It made spending so much time in clinics almost bearable, knowing that everyone else cared so much.

Even with everyone at her beck and call, more or less, being pregnant was not a walk in the park. If she stepped outside, she was swarmed by cameras, but she refused to just sequester herself in the house until the baby was born (besides, she couldn’t do that even if she wanted to, considering her substantial amount of doctors’ appointments). She was garnering a reputation as an uncooperative bitch because she refused to answer any of the questions shouted at her from behind a camera.

It felt like everything was swollen from the amount of fluid she was holding. Her day-to-day discomfort only got more intense as her belly got bigger and bigger. Even long after the first trimester, her bouts of nausea never completely went away. She already loved the baby growing in her belly, but the little tyke was not making Casey’s life easy.

But she supposed that was just… parenthood. Parents put up with what seemed like an unending amount of shit for the child, and if the child was even aware of a third of it, then it would be impressive.

She was slightly surprised that her sex life actually survived most of the pregnancy. She was pretty sure Atticus didn’t find her size in and of itself attractive (Casey certainly didn’t), but he was instead just so excited about what it meant that they never had any issues having sex, even if they had to cycle through positions to find which ones were still comfortable.

THE FINAL HAPTER

It was winter when the baby was born. There wasn’t really anything painless about giving birth, but everything went as well as it could be expected to go, and afterwards, Casey was tired but unharmed and healthy. The baby, too, was healthy. A bit smaller than Casey had expected, but she was pretty sure that was mostly because she had expected the baby of a were-bear to be larger than average.

She was a little girl, not too pale and with dark, dark eyes. And when she was clean and Casey could really get a look at her, the wisps of hair on her head were brown. Her name was Harmony, and from the instant her parents laid eyes on her, she had both Casey and Atticus wrapped around her tiny fingers.

Casey had expected to lose more sleep after having a baby. And to some extent, she did, but not nearly as much as she had expected. It wasn’t that Harmony was a particularly quiet baby, but rather that it took a village, and Harmony actually had one.

Lydia and Branson were not spared her hypnotic effects, and they, too, were powerless to deny her anything. If she started crying, it was a tossup whether Casey, Atticus, Lydia, or Branson would get to her first.

It was a relief, really. Casey’s daughter was about as loved and as safe as she could possibly be.

And if it also meant that Casey could roll over and go back to sleep content in the knowledge that her daughter would still be tended to at three in the morning, well, she wasn’t above doing so every so often. She figured it was a respite she had earned.

Harmony was about two weeks old the first time she met her aunt Annie. Annie couldn’t afford expensive toys and she hadn’t wanted to ask Casey to buy toys in her honor—that had seemed to be rather against the spirit of the whole thing—but she had two working hands and she could follow instructions. So, when she showed up, it was with a plush, fluffy bat that she had made with instructions printed off the computer and supplies scrounged up at the goodwill.

Harmony took to the little bat immediately, or at least that was what Casey assumed it meant when she stuck the end of the bat’s wing in her mouth and proceeded to drool on it. Annie seemed flattered.

And for most of that afternoon, Casey did not have access to her child, as Annie asked to hold her and then simply refused to hand her back. Even when it was time for Harmony to eat, Annie held the bottle.

While part of Casey was anxious, the rest of her was just thrilled. Harmony was in safe hands, and it wasn’t as if Annie was actually taking her anywhere.

Harmony was about a month old on a night when Atticus was in the woods for the night, wandering around as a bear. While ordinarily Casey would have joined him, she didn’t really want to go stomping through the brush with an infant in her arms. So, she supposed her full moon excursions were over for a time.

It was on that night when Harmony turned into a small, fuzzy brown bear cub and squalled as if she were being slowly skinned alive until Casey scooped her up to sooth her. She had no idea how she was supposed to go about holding or comforting a bear cub, but Atticus wasn’t exactly there for her to ask, and even if he had been, he wouldn’t have been able to answer.

Casey made it work. It took some coaxing, but she still got Harmony to take a bottle, and finding the proper way to hold her only took a little bit of trial and error.

When Atticus came back inside shortly after sunrise and found Casey curled up asleep on the couch in the downstairs living room with a bear cub fast asleep on her lap, he laughed so hard that Casey snapped awake.

She blinked at him sleepily until everything that was going on caught up with her, and when she asked slowly, “What were you saying about the low, low odds of this happening?” Atticus only laughed harder, until he was melting down the wall to sit on the floor.

It took most of the day, a great deal of squalling, and some more hysterical laughter from both Branson and Lydia before Harmony figured out how to change back again.

Casey probably should have expected it when Harmony’s reaction to that knowledge was to change shapes all the time, every day, as often as she pleased. It was a tossup whether she would be bear-shaped or baby-shaped at any given moment in the day.

Atticus assured Casey that she would grow out of it eventually, and in the meantime, it was a fairly harmless quirk.

Casey had never actually asked him if his household staff was aware of what he was, but after that she rather suspected that they were in on the secret if he was that laid back about the matter.

There were a few stranger occurrences after that. Like waking up in the middle of the night to hear a noise like a stampede, and to see a bear cub come tumbling into the room, followed shortly by a very large wolf. Branson offered Casey a brief glance before he carefully herded Harmony out of the suite again and gently picked her up by the scruff of the neck before carrying her back towards her room.

As Casey rolled over to go back to sleep, she made a mental note to replace the current crib with one a bit harder to escape from. No one needed a bear cub racing around the house at three in the morning.

Not surprisingly, it was rather hard to keep anything an infant did a secret when infants had no sense of secrecy, propriety, or avoiding doing certain things in public. It took about a week before Annie stopped by to visit and found Casey chasing a bear cub in a diaper and a jumper around the kitchen table.

Annie nearly fainted when that bear cub turned into her niece. And after a half an hour of staring at a wall and a very strong cup of coffee, she apologized profusely for not believing Casey’s story about Atticus.

When Casey mentioned the incident to Atticus that night, worried that he might be annoyed that someone else knew about her being a were-bear, he mostly seemed slightly put out at himself that such a turn of events hadn’t occurred to him before. It didn’t look like it even occurred to him to be annoyed about it.

Casey watched as Lydia swooped down from the roof of the mansion to land in the grass. The actual yard around the mansion was small and the grass was patchy from the trees blocking so much of the sun, but it was still enough space to let Harmony crawl around without worrying about losing her in the woods. (Maybe it was a slightly absurd concern, but it was a concern of Casey’s nonetheless.)

The crow jigged back and forth from one foot to the other, spreading her wings and rustling her feathers as part of her impromptu dance. She waited until Harmony was giggling before she launched herself into the air once again, spiraling higher and higher into the air until she dipped into a dive.

Harmony squealed out a laugh, brighter than sunlight, as Lydia swooped low over her head. When Lydia came in for another dive, Harmony reached up, giggling all the harder as her fingertips brushed Lydia’s belly as she passed.

Sitting cross-legged in the grass just a few feet away, Casey smiled quietly as she watched. She had never been particularly good at making friends. For the longest time, her only friends had been her sister and Jason. To think that she had Atticus, Branson and Lydia, Casey could hardly believe it. She had a family again, and for once she didn’t need to worry about anything happening to it. Her family was healthy and happy and safe.

Lydia dove two more times before she came in for a landing on Casey’s shoulder. She still barely fit, but she didn’t care about such trifling details. With a low, crooning croak that sounded mildly curious, she bonked her head against Casey’s temple.

Casey snorted. “Just letting my thoughts wander,” she replied. “I’m being a sentimental sap.” The last was added in an almost conspiratorial whisper.

Lydia croaked quietly, as if to promise not to tell a soul. She leaned over to close her beak around a strand of Casey’s hair that had come lose from her ponytail, preening it absentmindedly.

Casey watched as Harmony crawled into a small patch of sun and transformed. The cub kicked her way out of her clothes—Casey dreaded the day that her bear form got considerably larger than her human form—and curled up, falling asleep in the sun in no time.

Shaking her head slightly, Casey resigned herself to being stuck outside for a while. She stopped moving when Lydia croaked in affront and prodded the side of Casey’s head with her beak.

At least it was a nice day out, and she had good company. And she would be willing to bet that she would have even more company before long. That almost made up for the knowledge that Harmony would most likely be up for half the night.

(If she was lucky, she could con Branson into dealing with that little problem for her. He probably wouldn’t mind.)

“So, she just… turns into that whenever she feels like it,” Annie observed slowly, watching as Harmony romped in a circle in her bear form, pausing occasionally to chew on one of her toys with tiny, needle-sharp teeth.

“Not just whenever she wants,” Casey corrected. “She does it when she’s upset or startled sometimes, too. Or in her sleep, occasionally.”

“How are you ever supposed to get a babysitter or a nanny for her?” Annie wondered faintly, as if she was still convinced that she was actually stuck in the middle of some elaborate dream and had no idea how to wake up.

Casey shrugged, unconcerned. “It’s not like I need to go to work anymore, and we’ve got friends. Besides, I’m pretty sure the staff are aware of the whole… thing. Plus, I’ve got you, too.” The last was added very matter-of-factly. If Annie thought she had a choice in the matter when it came to occasional babysitting duty, she was incredibly mistaken. She didn’t seem to have any objections. (Granted, based on the slightly spaced-out look on her face, it was entirely possible she hadn’t noticed that Casey had volunteered her for babysitting duty. Either way, Casey was willing to take it as agreement.)

Annie nodded slowly, but she still looked like she didn’t fully comprehend the situation. Cautiously, she asked, “So, are you going to turn into a bear too, now?”

Casey snorted. “Ah, no,” she replied, and she cleared her throat behind one fist. “That’s not the way it works, apparently. If you aren’t born a bear or another animal, then you don’t become one. You can just… help pass the genes along.” She gestured to Harmony with a flourish.

There was silence for a moment, save for the sounds Harmony occasionally made. She turned back into a human, rolled about for a moment, and decided she didn’t have nearly enough fine motor control that way before she transformed once again.

(Thinking about it in those terms, Casey supposed she could understand why Harmony was so fascinated with her ability to transform; human infants could do basically nothing while bear cubs were comparably remarkably capable at a reasonably small size.)

“This is so surreal,” Annie observed, reaching down to pat the top of Harmony’s head. Harmony latched onto her wrist with both front paws and proceeded to chew on her aunt’s watch. It was cheap and easily replaceable, so Annie saw no reason to stop her. Besides, the tooth marks added character.

Casey leaned over to pat her shoulder. “I thought so too,” she replied. “Especially considering Atticus stressed how unlikely it would be for this to happen.”

“For what to happen?” Annie asked, most of her attention still focused on Harmony, even as she relinquished the watch again and instead turned in a circle, getting comfortable on the floor and curling up to go to sleep.

“Her being a were-bear,” Casey elaborated. “Apparently, the odds of me giving birth to someone actually capable of transforming were really slim, since I’m not a were-bear, and as far as we’re aware, I’m not related to any.”

“You always did have a thing for standing out,” Annie returned dryly, tracing the tips of her fingers over one small, rounded ear.

Casey stuck her tongue out at her. “You’re getting us confused again,” she protested. “You were always the attention whore.”

Aghast, Annie brought a hand to her chest as she scoffed, “Me? Oh, no, no. It was definitely always you swinging from the chandeliers and banging pots and pans.”

“Oh, please,” Casey snorted. “As if we could ever have afforded a chandelier while we were growing up.”

Well, it was a valid point, at least.

“Not quite how I expected things to go,” Casey remarked casually one night, pacing back and forth across the dining room with Harmony cradled against her shoulder. She was shaped like a human for a change and nearly asleep, though she burbled out a few nonsense noises every so often.

Branson leaned against the table, a cup of coffee cradled in his hands despite the late hour. Casey had learned not to expect anything resembling sense from his sleep schedule.

“No complaints, though?” he wondered over the edge of his mug, and while he sounded casual enough as he asked it, Casey wasn’t fooled. She knew Branson would chase her off in a heartbeat if he thought she was going to be bad for Atticus. Considering Harmony would stay with Atticus in such a situation, even his love for the little girl wouldn’t prevent him from doing something if his protective instincts were triggered.

It was, on the whole, a trait of his that Casey appreciated.

Smiling crookedly, she shook her head. “Nope,” she answered simply. “None at all.” Because really, what else was there to say about the topic?

Harmony was six months old when Casey decided she was done just sitting around the house entertaining herself whenever she wasn’t with her daughter. She still wanted to be there for Harmony—that wasn’t in question—but she wanted something to do that was actually productive.

She broached the topic to Atticus, and that was when he decided to let her be a part of his business. Not the antiquities business but the travel agency. It would be a lot of busy work, filling in names and numbers and places, but it meant she could be productive while still staying in the house and keeping Harmony close at hand, and she was eager to be a part of it.

She took to it well. It wasn’t particularly exciting work, but she knew she was helping to do good things; she was helping to keep people safe from a fate that had nearly befallen her family. And someday, maybe, she could be more involved in the other aspects of the business, though she could understand if distressed were-animals weren’t so keen on getting help from someone who wasn’t just like them. She’s not sure she would have appreciated that if she were in trouble and in their shoes.

Regardless of how the work went in the future, she was content with the way things were going. She was glad she was helping and that she still had time for herself and for her daughter (and all without being exposed to anyone, other than Atticus, who wanted to grab her ass, which was also a very large improvement).

Everything had turned out so much better than she had expected it to. Though she was cautious to say it, she was pretty sure her life was perfect.

And then, Lydia opened the front door to come inside, and Harmony scampered out the door, four-legged and furry and still tangled up in her clothing, and Casey amended that statement as she ran out the door to chase her daughter down; not quite perfect, but as close as she could get.

* *

Hey sexy. Thanks for reading, you are the best!

This book is from the “Bears With Money” series and all the other available books are listed below.

Go grab a bear with money right now and collect them all!

You are a star!

Amy x

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