Chapter 1 – Crashing Down

Seattle, Washington

"My God, Nika," said her younger brother Dimitri, as she opened her apartment door and he caught a whiff of her scent. "You actually mated him, after all?"

His horrified gaze traveled down to Veronika Medved's midsection, where her already generous curves had grown even curvier over the past few months. "And you got pregnant?"

Dimitri's face bleached, and his already pale cheeks went completely colorless under his carefully trimmed dark stubble. His gray eyes were wide, fringed by sinfully long black lashes, and at the moment, he looked much younger than his twenty-one years.

Nika had always gotten along well with Dimitri, but right now, he was the last person on Earth that she wanted to see.

And damn her parents anyway, for making her baby brother do their dirty work!

"It happened before we broke up!" she protested as panic flooded her system, making her heart pound and her stomach churn. "Ash told me that since he usually worked from home, he'd take care of any babies we had, and I could just continue my studies…"

The enormity of Dimitri's presence here, in her Seattle refuge far from the rest of her family at the other end of the country, suddenly hit Nika.

Mama and Papa knew that I was hiding something!

She bent and curled around herself, feeling as if she'd just been gut-punched.

Don't throw up, she begged her traitorous body. Please. Not now!

"But Mama's already got another mating arranged for you after you graduate med school…how long did you think you could hide this?" Dimitri asked slowly.

"Another—oh, God, Mitya. I can't! You know I can't! I didn't mean to defy them! It just…happened." Nika heard how small her voice sounded, and hated herself for it.

But it was true. She had found her mate last summer and bonded with him. Even though they had been separated for months now, that bond had not faded. She could never mate anyone else while Ashton Swanson lived.

Before Dimitri had knocked on the door of her small one-bedroom student apartment near the University of Washington campus, where Nika was in her final year of medical school, she'd been thinking about her plan of attack for her postgraduate residency applications and to which teaching hospitals she should try applying.

And trying to figure out whether she could really do a residency as a single mother with a baby.

She couldn't afford full-time childcare, not without asking for a bigger allowance, and that would mean having to explain herself to Mama.

But the very last thing Nika had been expecting in the middle of a gloomy Pacific Northwest February day was a visit from a member of her family. She hadn't gone home since last summer's fiasco, not even for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Part of that had been her simmering rage at her parents and what they'd forced her to do. But most of it had been a desperate attempt to hide the truth from them…that it had already been too late for her when they issued their edict forbidding her to mate-bond with Ash.

Oh God, Ash. I'm so sorry, she thought, for the thousandth time since last summer. I never meant to hurt you like that. But I couldn't tell you the truth either. You would have tried to challenge Papa and gotten yourself killed.

Dimitri shook his head. "'Doesn't matter if you meant to get mated or not. Now that you're mate-bonded to that guy, you're useless to our clan. Mama is going to order Papa to dispose of your mate. And the baby too. And you, if she's angry enough not to care about selling you off to the highest bidder."

He looked sick as he spoke the truth they both knew.

Nika shuddered as his words confirmed her deepest fears.

Bear shifter clans were traditionally matriarchal, with dominant males who served as protectors…and enforcers, when needed. Mama and Papa hadn't raised the Medved clan to the top of the shifter food chain by gentle diplomacy. No one had ever told Nika the details, but she could guess the ugly truth.

"What are you going to do now, Nika?" Dimitri looked as trapped as she felt. "You know I can't lie to our parents when they ask about you. They'll read my scent and body language in an instant! And they know something's up, because they sent me all the way out here to check up on you. "

Nika knew she couldn't stand and fight. She was trapped in her human form until her baby was born. If she shifted while pregnant, she would lose the baby. That was the cruel reality of being a female shifter.

And even if she hadn't been pregnant, she knew she didn't stand a chance in direct confrontation with Papa…or even Mama. Both of them were bigger, stronger, and tougher than she was…and they always worked as a team.

They wouldn't show a disobedient child—much less a rebellious one—any mercy.

"I have to run," she told Dimitri in a hushed voice. "It's my only option. I have to get as far away from here as I can."

Which wasn't very far. Her passport was sitting in a safety deposit box back at the family's bank in New York City, and her checking account was nearly empty, waiting for the next deposit of her monthly allowance to cover rent, living expenses, and tuition.

Dimitri nodded solemnly. He reached into the back pocket of his tight jeans and pulled out his wallet. Without hesitating, he flipped it open and pulled out all his cash.

He stepped over the threshold of her apartment and pressed a wad of twenties into her hand. "Take it, Nika. You need it more than I do."

Nika looked down at the bills in disbelief, then went up on tiptoes and kissed his cheek.

"Thank you," she said, her throat tight. She hesitated, then forced herself to open her fingers and offer the money to him. "But I don't want you to get into trouble for this."

Dimitri shrugged. His mouth firmed into a familiar, stubborn line, and he closed his hand firmly around hers, forcing her fingers to close around the bills.

Then his arms came around her and he hugged her hard. "Oh, Nika," he whispered. "I'm scared for you."

I'm scared for me too.

She hugged him back and breathed in his familiar scent, overlaid with a trace of expensive cologne. Dimitri wouldn't be able to protect her from their parents' wrath, but it felt good to know that she wasn't completely on her own yet.

"I'll have to tell Mama and Papa about your mating…and the baby," he said, after a long pause for consideration. "But I don't have to call them right this second. And I don't have to tell them I helped you. I'll call them, uh…tomorrow afternoon. Maybe closer to dinnertime."

That gave her twenty-four hours of reprieve.

She buried her face against the soft, padded leather of his dark red motorcycle jacket. What am I going to do now? Where can I go?

"If you run, don't use any of your cards," he warned. "Before I left New York, I overheard Mama putting a tracer on all your accounts."

So much for buying a plane ticket with my credit card, Nika thought, followed immediately by another, more painful thought. I'll have to drop out of med school now.

Despite her family's wealth and influence, it had taken blood, tears, and a lot of sweat to get into one of the country's top medical schools here at UW.

And she was so close to finishing…so close to being in a position where she could go somewhere and live a life that Mama and Papa couldn't just wreck on a whim.

They had already ruined one good thing in her life—her mating with Ash—and now they were going to drive her away from the only other thing that mattered: her dream of becoming a doctor.

If she tried to escape, she would be completely alone and without any real resources. But what was the alternative?

Her hand slid down to press against the pronounced curve of her belly, and she felt the flutter of her baby moving inside her. I can't go home to New York. I can't.

She desperately wanted to ask Dimitri to run away with her, but she knew she couldn't put him in a position of choosing between her and their parents.

Nika clung to him a moment longer, marshalling her strength. Then she stepped back and looked up at her brother.

He was taller than she was, with a bear shifter's muscular, broad-shouldered build and with the same black hair, fair skin, and clear gray eyes that she saw every day in her mirror.

"Thank you," she said softly. "I won't forget this. If it's a boy, I'll name the baby after you."

"Cool! It would be fun to be Uncle Dimitri to a little Mitya." Nika's brother smiled crookedly at her. "Don't tell me where you're going, but if you can, let me know you're safe, okay?"

"I'll try." Nika swallowed hard.

Dimitri turned to leave. A moment later, the apartment door shut behind him.

Nika stood where she was for a long moment, holding onto the wall next to the doorframe for support. She was shaking, and her knees felt wobbly.

She concentrated on breathing…in, out…in, out…until the shakiness passed, leaving only the acid bite of terror in the back of her throat and an unsettled churning in her stomach.

I have twenty-four hours. Can't waste any time. I've got to pack, and then I've got to get out of Seattle, she thought.

Nika turned, still leaning against the wall for support, and took a long look around the tiny apartment she'd called home for the last seven months.

She surveyed her eclectic collection of IKEA bookshelves and second-hand furniture too old to be new and too new to be considered vintage. Can't pack those in a suitcase.

Combined with knickknacks she'd received as presents and some that she'd bought herself at various street fairs, her place would have given Mama's interior designer a heart attack.

Nika didn't care. This place was entirely hers. Her furniture. Her books. Her stuff.

This is stupid, Nika thought, as she felt her eyes stinging. Her vision began to blur. I've got real life-and-death problems now, and here I am, crying over stupid cheap furniture and this ugly run-down apartment. Stupid pregnancy hormones!

She swiped viciously at her eyes and marched into her bedroom to begin packing her clothes and a few treasured items.

Where am I going to go now?

Even as she thought it, she knew. Given Dimitri's warning, she knew she couldn't risk a phone call or an email message, not with Mama on the alert and tracking her.

Ash. I have to go to where Ash is living and warn him about the danger we're in.

* * *

Bearpaw Ridge, Idaho

"You fixin' to be sensible this time, Ash?" Justin Long asked gently in his deep Texas drawl.

The rangy sabertooth shifter didn't take his eyes off the road, where the dark asphalt of the highway was rapidly disappearing under wind-driven flurries of snow.

Justin was driving one of the Grizzly Creek Ranch's big pickup trucks to the scene of a fire at a farm on the other side of town. Both Ash and Justin had received alerts a short time ago on their first responder app.

All the volunteer firefighters of the Bearpaw Ridge Fire Department had the app installed on their phones. Linda Barker, the town's 911 dispatcher, used it to send the firefighters the details of emergency calls that came in, including incident information and driving directions to guide them to the scene of an accident, medical emergency, or fire.

Sitting next to Justin in the pickup's passenger seat, Ash Swanson looked at his stepfather.

"What are you talking about?" Ash asked, puzzled.

"You keep taking risks like you've been doing, and you're going to break your mama's heart." Justin shook his head in slow reproof.

Justin was wearing his Stetson hat today, along with his firefighter's bunker pants and a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt. His bulky, insulated firefighter's jacket and helmet were stowed behind him in the extended cab, as was Ash's firefighting gear.

He added, "And the hearts of a lot of other folks around these parts."

It had only been a few months since Justin had moved from his home in the Texas Hill Country and joined the all-volunteer Bearpaw Ridge Fire Department, and barely six weeks since Justin had married Ash's mom Elle Swanson.

But in that short time, Ash had figured out that the soft-spoken Texan shifter frequently noticed things that everyone else missed.

And sometimes he got things completely wrong. Just like now.

"I'm not—" Ash began to protest.

"Everyone else seems to think that when you do somethin' crazy, you're just bein' competitive with your brothers," Justin interrupted smoothly. "But I figure that there's something else goin' on. Maybe something to do with the fact that you smell like you're mated, but you ain't dating or livin' with anyone." He sighed. "I've asked Elle but she just shakes her head and doesn't want to talk about it."

Ash tried to suppress the tiny jolt of happiness at Justin's observation that he still smelled like Nika. He scowled and wished that his—stepfather? Mom's husband?—would mind his own business.

It had been months since Ash and Nika had seen each other.

Twenty-seven weeks, three days, and four hours, to be exact, since Nika called me and told me she'd changed her mind about mating me. When she told me that she didn't want any further contact between us.

That memory still made him feel as if he'd been stabbed in the heart.

"Just try not to kill yourself on my watch, okay?" Justin continued.

He hesitated and gave Ash a sideways glance from his striking blue-green eyes.

He added quietly, "You need to talk about something…anything, I'll listen. And keep whatever you tell me in confidence. Sometimes it's easier to unload on someone who hasn't known you for your entire life." The corners of Justin's mouth twitched upwards in a not-quite-smile.

"Thanks, Justin. I appreciate the offer," Ash forced himself to say.

He turned away from his new stepfather's questioning gaze and stared out of the window at the driving snow.

Even if I wanted to spill my guts to Justin, what good would it do? No one can help me. I'm screwed, and it's my own damn fault.

Ash had spent the last seven months living with the knowledge of just how badly things had gone wrong. It surrounded him like a smothering black cloud.

Last summer, he'd been on top of the world. His drive for success had earned him his first million before he graduated from college, thanks to his wildly successful online game, Hunter's Blood, which was a "naked and afraid" survival game in a wilderness filled with physical threats and predators. Now he was well on his way to becoming a billionaire.

And his work as one of Bearpaw Ridge's volunteer firefighters had earned him the respect of his family's friends and neighbors. They treated him like a grown man now, instead of "Elle's youngest boy."

There was just one small problem. He was a bear shifter who couldn't shift.

For a long time now, he and the rest of his family had been hoping that Ash might just be a late bloomer. He had hoped so, too, especially since he occasionally felt the stirring of something other, deep inside him.

Most shifters experienced their first shift by the time they hit high school, and lot of them shifted while they were still little kids. Ash's little nephew Matthew had shifted at the age of three, and his cousin Patrick's daughter Olivia had shifted before she could even walk.

Ash was well into his twenties now, and no matter how hard he tried to bring the other up to the surface so that he could shift into bear-shape, nothing ever happened. He'd stopped trying to shift a while ago.

He tried to tell himself that he was okay with that. He still had a bear shifter's enhanced senses and preternatural strength, after all.

After he graduated from college, Ash had continued to work from his headquarters at the Swanson family ranch, employing a staff of remote software engineers and testers located all over the country. Things ran pretty smoothly via email, IM, Skype, and conference calls, with the occasional company-wide face-to-face meeting held in Seattle, Silicon Valley, or Las Vegas.

And then there was his wonderful, talented sister-in-law Steffi, an alum from Silicon Valley's Copper Shark Systems, who had quit her lucrative telecommuting gig with CSS to take on the role of Marketing Director for Grizzly Creek Games. Steffi had used her huge network of contacts to find and hire a large staff of social media experts, and with her help, Ash had propelled Hunter's Blood into the gaming stratosphere.

Last summer, he had spent a lot of his free time house-hunting online for properties in the Seattle area. Nika was coming up to her final year at UW's med school, so they'd been planning to live in Seattle while she finished up her schooling and did her residency.

Then he had found out the hard way that no shifter woman wanted a shifter mate who couldn't actually shift.

These days, Ash only left his house to do his chores around the ranch. He buried himself in work on a major and completely revised version of Hunter's Blood.

A lot of people's jobs and well-being relied on him these days, and he didn't want to let them down.

He had successfully faked his way through all the family holiday gatherings. Between his rambunctious niece and nephew, Justin's proposal to Mom at Thanksgiving, and their Christmas wedding, it had been easy for Ash, who was naturally soft-spoken, to fade into the background and avoid uncomfortable questions from his family about his mated-but-alone status.

His mom actually seemed to be in comfortable denial about the situation, occasionally encouraging Ash to reactivate his ShiftMatch online account.

The only time Ash really felt alive was when his smartphone sounded the first responder app alert, and he was headed out on a call for the BPRFD.

Like right now, as he and Justin were racing from the ranch to a house fire reported on the outskirts of town.

It was a bleak winter day, with a strong storm sweeping straight down out of Canada, driving thick snowflakes against the pickup's windshield. The wipers and defrosters were all working at full power and only barely winning the battle against the steady drift of white.

As they drove. Ash's blood pounded through his body. The familiar adrenaline spike of impending danger sharpened all his senses, leaving the taste of steel across his tongue. He felt completely awake and alert.

This mattered. Saving the lives of his family's friends and neighbors mattered, even if his own life was mostly gray and useless now.

The last of the short afternoon's light had faded into a gloomy twilight when they pulled off the highway and into the Ornelas Organic Dairy's long gravel drive.

The wind had picked up since they’d left the Grizzly Creek Ranch, and the smoke streaming from the farmhouse's windows was a flat dark banner parallel to the snowy ground.

As they rolled up the dairy farm's long drive, Ash looked around for the tanker truck and realized that he and Justin were first on the scene.

"Shit," he said, twisting around to grab his fireman's coat and helmet from behind the seats.

He and Justin had brought their turnout gear and SCBA—self-contained breathing apparatus—gear, but they wouldn't be able to do much without the BPRFD's trucks, hoses, and ladders. "Where is everyone?"

"Right behind us, son," Justin answered calmly as he reached for his own gear.

He had apparently caught sight of the fire engine's flashing lights speeding down the highway an instant before Ash saw them too.

Ash let out a breath of relief.

His older brothers Mark, Evan, and Dane were also volunteer firefighters for the BPRFD. Mark and Dane had had been bunking at the town's small firehouse this week, so they could drive the fire engines out to calls if needed.

His other brother Evan lived in town with Steffi, and Ash knew that Evan would have made a dash for the firehouse, located three blocks away from his apartment, when the alert sounded.

As Ash stepped out of the warmth of the pickup into a blast of wind and flying snow that slashed him in the face and down the open front of his firefighter's jacket like a sword made of ice, he saw Ernesto "Ernie" Ornelas, his wife Teresa, and their three teenagers huddling in the shelter of the large barn that stood about twenty-five yards from their house.

The Ornelas family had all made it out of the house, thank God.

They were in their pajamas and wrapped in an assortment of quilts and blankets. All of them looked half-frozen and utterly miserable, but uninjured.

The ladder truck's flashing red strobe light illuminated the house's white siding like some hellish rock concert as it rolled up the driveway and came to a stop behind the pickup truck. Right behind the ladder truck, Ash saw the tanker truck coming up the Ornelas' driveway, with his second-oldest brother Mark behind the wheel.

And trailing behind the fire engines came the BPRFD's brand-new paramedic van, driven by Fred Barker, the fire department's long-time EMT.

Within moments, all six volunteer firefighters had donned their protective gear. Fred immediately went over to the Ornelas family with an armful of shiny silver thermal blankets and his suitcase-sized first aid kit.

"Is anyone else inside?" Fred asked them urgently.

That was the most important question. It would direct the firefighters' plan of attack.

Ernie Ornelas shook his head. He and Teresa both looked blank-faced with shock. Teresa was clutching a stack of photo albums in her arms like a baby.

"I'll take the roof," Ash said quickly as his oldest brother Dane began to raise the fire engine's ladder and maneuver it into place.

Ash's offer earned him a sharp look from Justin, but Bearpaw Ridge's newest volunteer firefighter didn't protest. They all knew that it was standard firefighting procedure to try to cut a hole in the roof of a burning house as soon as possible.

The ventilation provided by a well-placed hole gave the firefighters their best chance of controlling the fire by drawing the flames and keeping them confined to a single spot inside the structure.

The hole would also serve as a chimney, allowing the smoke, heat, and toxic fumes inside the structure to vent and improving visibility and conditions inside the burning building once the firefighters made their way inside.

"I'm goin' too," Justin said.

Justin thinks I'm suicidal. But I'm just trying to protect them.

It was the same equation that Ash performed on every call before volunteering for the most dangerous job. If something happens to one of the others, how many mates, children, parents, and other loved ones will they be leaving behind?

And the answer was the same as always: too many. As a childless man abandoned by his mate, Ash was the most expendable member of the BPRFD, and he knew it.

If he didn't have a mate or children to protect, then Ash was determined to protect his fellow firefighters, who not had only children, but in Fred's case, grandchildren too.

Ash slipped his arms though the shoulder straps of the backpack frame that held his air tank and settled the wide plastic SCBA mask over his face.

After graduating from university, Ash had taken a vacation in Cozumel that had included scuba-diving lessons. He remembered how weird it had felt to put on a diving mask and breathe from a regulator without donning the rest of his turnout gear…and to move around without a single trace of smoke visible, just colorful fish darting through the clear turquoise waters over a coral reef.

Ash drew a deep breath, assured himself that everything was working fine, picked up a pair of axes, and headed for the ladder.

Someone clapped him on the shoulder as he grabbed for the short ladder built into the side of the truck.

"Take care, y'hear!" Justin shouted. "Or your mama's gonna have me skinned!"

His voice was barely audible over the steady roar of the fire engine's motor and the mechanical whine of the ladder hoisting into place.

Ash couldn't help grinning at the sudden mental image of a sabertooth cat rug in his mother's Victorian parlor, and he gave Justin the thumbs-up before beginning his climb.

As Ash began to ascend the engine's main ladder, he saw that Mark and Evan were busily unrolling hose from the tanker truck. Good. They needed to be ready to begin spraying as soon as he'd ventilated the building.

Justin began climbing up the ladder behind Ash.

Ash reached the top of the ladder and surveyed the roof for the best place to cut the ventilation hold. The dairy's farmhouse was over a hundred years old, and the roof was covered with asphalt shingles, maybe several layers of them.

Up here, high above the ground, it was easy to believe that he was all alone in a wilderness of wind that drove freezing needles through every tiny gap in his gear. Ash's hearing was muffled by the Darth Vader-like sound of his respirator, and his peripheral vision and sense of smell were both blocked by the face mask of his SCBA gear.

He located the spot he needed and stepped off onto the roof. It was wet and slippery beneath his boots.

Ash lifted his heavy axe and swung downwards with all his shifter-enhanced strength.

Justin arrived and moved into position to help Ash open a triangular ventilation hole.

Ash was just raising his axe for the next blow when he saw the roof shingles beneath Justin's boots suddenly sink under the sabertooth shifter's weight.

Shit!

Ash knew what was about to happen, but his bulky, half-frozen coat and bunker pants slowed him down. It felt like slow motion as he dropped his axe and lunged forward to push Justin out of danger.

His stepfather went down, pinned on his back like an upended turtle by his heavy air tank. He slid perilously down the slope of the wet roof.

Ash heard Justin shout something, but the words were hopelessly muffled by his respirator mask.

An instant later, the section of roof beneath Ash collapsed with a loud groan of overstressed timber.

As he plummeted down into thick smoke, Ash's only feeling was relief that Justin was going to be okay. It would be too cruel if his mother were widowed a second time.

Something hit Ash hard across his midsection—probably one of the attic joists—and knocked the wind out of him. A stabbing pain lanced through his chest and side.

Broken ribs, he thought. He realized that there was a pretty good chance he wouldn't survive this.

As he fell, Ash tried desperately to hold onto his SCBA mask and the life-giving air it represented. But then the unwieldy tank on his back caught on something. For an instant, he dangled helplessly in a dark, smoke-filled space. He flung out his arms, frantically groping for something to hold onto. But there was nothing.

All his struggles did was dislodge him from his precarious perch.

Ash began to plunge into the smoke again. The mask ripped away from his face, and something hit his helmet hard enough to rattle his teeth and make him bite his tongue.

The last thing he remembered was someone yelling his name from somewhere far above him.

Then he hit the floor head-first, and everything disappeared.