BAD BOY ROMANCE: DIESEL: Contemporary Bad Boy Biker MC Romance (Box Set) (New Adult Sports Romance Short Stories Boxset) (104 page)

And now suddenly her life was reduced to a black cave in the middle of a tangle of trees with no one to talk to, shifters hunting her, and no electricity. The thought made her want to cry.

As if Bruce knew it he pulled her closer to him and wrapped his arms around her.

“We’ll figure this out, okay?” he said. “There’s two weeks and I’m sure we’ll find a way to sort this out before then. Just hang tight for me, okay?”

Jenna sighed with a shudder and then forced herself to nod.

Bruce kissed her on the forehead and then turned around, walking back out toward the entrance of the cave.

“Where are you going?” Jenna asked.

“It’s almost nightfall. I have to go out soon. The pack will want to meet, and then I have to hunt. I haven’t had a chance to last night, and if I don’t do it often enough I lose control.”

“You’re going to leave me alone?” Jenna asked and she was aware of the panic in her voice. Her voice sounded thin and high. Bruce’s face softened and he walked closer to her again.

“Nothing’s going to happen to you here. You’re going to be perfectly fine, and I’ll be back as soon as the sun comes up. And the upside is neither of us have to work tomorrow so we can spend the day together.” He smiled. “That’s something we haven’t really been able to do.”

Jenna nodded and he hugged her before he turned back to the entrance of the cave.

“Don’t worry,” he said one more time. “I love you.”

He walked outside where the night was starting to thicken, the blue of the sky getting darker and darker until it swallowed all the color round it. Jenna walked to the cave entrance and crossed her arms over her chest. The air up in the mountains was chilly. She looked into the trees all round, but Bruce was gone.

She wasn’t worried so much about the other animals coming to get her. After all, if she were dead she wouldn’t really know about it. What worried her was life, living up here all alone. What worried her was the fact that she kept thinking she had Bruce, just to lose him again. It had happened on their wedding night, and it had kept happening since.

She didn’t know how she was going to deal with that. Bruce was scared of losing her but that would only be one time. She had to lose him over and over again.

Chapter 3

The village drew Bruce like it never had before, now that he was forced to leave it. When he’d just come to the Syracuse Mountains, following a story that there were survivors out here that would take him in, he’d hoped to be isolated. He’d found the cave and made it his home after the Family had accepted him as one of their own. He’d been lower down in the hierarchy then, with Lori and the wolves above him.

He’d hated living in the cave. After a couple of weeks he’d been so sick of the emptiness, tired of living like an animal, that he’d decided to go down to the village. He’d just needed to see people.

And he’d fallen in love with Williamsburg and the people in it that seemed to care so much. He’d fought with the Family until they’d agreed to let him live among the humans, and he’d left the cave and gone down to the place where he felt at home.

That had been five years ago. Since then he’d been up to the cave only a handful of times to store things he didn’t use in the village, or to recover if something particularly bad had happened, like his fight with Stephen to rise in the pack that had taken him two days to heal from, and then his fight with Lori that had taken another week.

Other than that he’d hated the cave because of its seclusion. And now he was making Jenna stay there.

He told himself it was to keep her safe. If she didn’t stay away from people, any people, Tara was going to kill Jenna. Her word to leave Jenna alone until full moon was already very untrustworthy and Bruce didn’t know how long it would last.

He needed to hunt. Jenna would be safe in the cave. It was virtually impossible to get there, even the other shifters hadn’t tried it. He thought about the boulders and how he’d thought it was impossible for a human to get over them, and Jenna had made it, but he pushed the thought away the moment it took shape in his mind. She was going to be fine.

He was going to make sure that it was fine. He would know if she was in trouble. Even as he was walking he could feel the bond with her, tell what she was feeling, where she was, if she was okay.

He shifted into a bear when he was out of the thick and tangled trees and able to move around more easily. He tracked down a couple of nocturnal creatures and ate them, feeling the power of their blood surge through his veins. The power of the feed was different than his power to shift. It was controlling power that gave him the ability to keep the bear in check. To Bruce that power was a lot more valuable than being able to change into a bear in the first place, and have the sharpened senses and increased power.

Then again, without the bear in him, he wouldn’t have needed to ability to control it.

For the first time in the fifteen years Bruce had been a bear, able to shift form, he wondered what his life would have been like if he were just a human. Where he would be now, if he would be disappointed.

But he shook that off too, because thinking like that, trying to hold on to his humanity too much, that was just as dangerous as embracing the animal. Without balance it was easy to go crazy.

When Bruce had had enough the moon was still high in the sky. It was already fuller than the night before, still just a strip, but every night it crept closer to full moon. It was still just under two weeks, but Bruce felt like his time was running out. He had to make a plan to get Jenna safe from Tara, and to keep the Family and himself safe from the Assassins, all at the same time.

He hadn’t want to admit it to himself, but he didn’t know how that would be possible. If Tara had a heart maybe it would have been easier. There were stories of other shifters taking up with humans, and being able to ward off the Assassins despite it.

But Tara was cold-blooded and murderous. It wasn’t going to work.

He made his way slowly around the mountain, weaving in and out of trees and working his way up until he reached the plateau. The others were around, he could feel them. Usually he would have gone there straight away, but the fight to keep Jenna safe had taken too much out of him, and he wanted to be in control around Tara.

It was ironic, because Tara’s role as alpha was to help keep her pack in control, not that they had to be controlled around her. But Bruce didn’t like the idea of being at her mercy. She didn’t have anything like that.

Dwayne and Cleveland were in the circle of power with Tara, talking about something. The conversation fell quiet when Bruce approached, making him think they were talking about him, but he let it slide.

He walked to the alpha and joined the group. The power in the ground was subdued, but it was there – a fine prickle that ran up Bruce’s legs. It would get stronger the closer they got to full moon.

All shapeshifters had a circle of power, somewhere they could go and lose control, somewhere someone else could wield that power.

Bruce stood with the three members of the Family, and neither of them said anything. A moment later Lori walked out of the trees and her scent traveled to them on the wind. It was wild and reckless, and Bruce knew she’d been a bear until seconds ago, too. Stephen and Rosa glided out of the trees a moment later, like they’d been summoned and they were both still in wolf form. Stephen shifted as he walked and he made the transition, which was awkward in any case, seem almost elegant. Rosa was less in control and she stopped, letting the beast drain away while Bruce watched her.

When she was a human, too, she joined Stephen before they both took their places in the circle.

“I’m surprised you didn’t bring her with you,” Tara said to Bruce. It was a hostile way start to the meeting. If it was an indication of how things were going to go, Bruce didn’t really want to be there, but he wanted to be at every meeting from then on.

He wanted to know which shifters were missing so he would know if Jenna was in danger. He wanted to know what was said or ordered. He wanted to know how much they still regarded him as part of the Family.

“She’s not a shifter, I didn’t think it appropriate,” Bruce said. Tara snorted.

“Nice of you to take that into consideration,” she said in a sarcastic voice and Bruce suppressed a groan. “You didn’t seem to think that was a problem when you mated her and put her under your protection. You didn’t think that was a problem when she found out about you and endangered the pack.”

“I know you’re upset, and I said I was going to fix it,” Bruce said, trying to get Tara to stop. The atmosphere in the air was building into something ugly and he wanted to stop it from getting any worse.

There was a moment of silence.

“This is not just about the fact that you’ve put all our lives in danger by letting a human being in,” Tara said and her voice was lower, warmer, but Bruce also knew, more dangerous. “This is also about the pack loyalty. Since you’ve started with your escapades, thinking about only yourself and how you feel about those damn people of yours, things have gotten out of hand.”

She looked around the circle, making eye-contact with every one of them. “With all of you,” she added.

“It’s not like we don’t know who we want stand behind,” Lori spoke up. “You know we’re loyal to you.” She was looking at Tara with a face that didn’t back the words that came out of her mouth. “It’s just hard to stick to the rules and follow you blindly when the rules don’t apply all round.”

So that was what the problem was.

“I don’t have an issue with it,” Stephen said and Rosa nodded because she always seemed to agree with him. “This is just another phase. This happened twenty years ago, too. Every twenty years there’s a human that gets too close, and it’s this big problem, and then we kill them and its over.”

Stephen shrugged like it was no big deal. Bruce thought back to Jenna’s father that had been killed in the mountain by wild animals.

“You’ll agree with anything Tara says because you’re a suck up,” Lori snapped.

“Don’t you talk to him like that,” Rosa said, leaning forward so she looked like she was going to attack. With her almost-perpetually glowing eyes it would have looked threatening if she wasn’t so small in comparison to Lori’s size.

“Don’t stick up for him, Rosa. Just because I can’t challenge you without going through him doesn’t mean I won’t.”

And Bruce believed Lori because she would attack anything. Her size as a human didn’t matter to her.

“That’s enough,” Tara said and the pack fell quiet like a couple of squabbling children when mom spoke. “I agree that loyalty in the pack is questionable.” She glanced at Cleveland as she said it. The shifter didn’t blink or break eye-contact with her. He looked calm and collected and faced her straight up, like he had nothing to hide. “Just know that if your loyalty is elsewhere, I can’t promise my protection when you need it most.”

Tara would never officially kick someone out of the Family. She needed to collective power too much. The more people there were, the more power she could draw from when she needed it. It was one of the perks of being alpha. It was also one of the weaknesses. An alpha gained a lot and sacrificed a lot in that position, all at the same time.

“I’ve taken her away from the village, and she’s in no contact with the humans. You don’t have to worry about her influencing them, and I doubt the Assassins would find her without finding us, first.” Bruce had said that last bit with enough confidence to fool the Family, but he wasn’t convinced himself. He knew what the Assassins were capable of. He knew they were strong.

Dwayne could find Jenna if he knew what to look for. There were others, too. Others like him that worked for the enemy.

“I don’t like it,” Lori said again. Bruce wanted to say that if they had to go by something she actually liked they wouldn’t get anywhere at all, but he kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t about to get into another round with her. She was bloodthirsty, he could smell it on her.

She hadn’t hunted nearly enough and Bruce didn’t feel like being her next kill.

“What are you planning on doing about it when the time comes?” Tara asked Bruce.

“About what?” he asked like he didn’t know what she was talking about.

“About the human, knowing. If the Assassins are on us, what will you choose? The Family, or the human?”

Bruce knew exactly what Tara was asking. This wasn’t just loyalty, where his heart lay. This was about whether or not he would kill her to save himself and the other shifters. And he wasn’t ready to answer that question yet. Not because he didn’t want to get into trouble with Tara, but because, put like that, he just didn’t know.

Tara looked at Bruce for long enough that he resisted the urge to squirm, and he had the feeling that she knew what he was thinking, that she knew he didn’t know which one he would choose. He would never be able to sacrifice the Family. They were horrible as far as people went, selfish animals and a lot of it was barbaric. But they’d been there for him when he’d had no one else, and no matter how much they didn’t work together as a real pack, they understood him. How many people could he say that about? He couldn’t say it about Jenna.

But he couldn’t lose her, either. She was his everything, she’d come to be the reason why he woke up in the morning. The reason he fought to stay in touch with his humanity and not let it get lost under the weight of the animal inside of him. She was the sunlight that lit up his darkness, and she loved him even after she found out that he was a monster.

How could he choose between them? But he knew that at some point, a choice had to be made. He couldn’t have both worlds.

“What news do you have about the Assassins?” Tara asked Dwayne, pulling Bruce out of the depressing spiral of his thoughts.

“They’re still not leaving, but so far they haven’t made any moves. They’re not coming closer, either.”

Tara looked out from the plateau into the darkness. The Syracuse Mountains stretched out to the side and below the plateau, and somewhere below was the valley. Bruce could see the twinkling of lights coming from Rhodestown on the horizon.

“That’s not good,” Tara said. A breeze picked up and all the shifters turned their faces toward it. “They’re waiting for something. They know something.”

Bruce had to agree with that. The Assassins weren’t the kind of people that stayed in one place unless they had some kind of lead. It was just impossible to know what it was. Not even Dwayne could reach them with his mind. The psychics sent out feelers and blocked anything that would be more than just a search. Dwayne could do that for the Family, too, but he wasn’t as strong as some of the Assassins.

He couldn’t block all the minds in the Family to the penetration of another psychic’s abilities.

“I think we need to move before full moon,” Tara said, turning her head pack to the Family.

“What?” Bruce asked. He had a horrible, sinking feeling in his gut.

“We need to take out the village. They’re too much of a liability, and we can’t afford to leave the mountains now. Where would we go?”

Bruce opened and closed his mouth, looking for the right words, but they didn’t come.

“There aren’t too many of them. If we go in all at the same time we can do it.” Lori was on board with the idea.

“There are women and children down there,” Bruce finally managed.

“So? The Assassins can read a kid’s mind just as well as any adult.” Tara sounded business-like about it. She was talking about killing off an entire village like it was just another thing on her to-do list.