Shifting the Night Away (35 page)

While Jonathan was joyous, triumphant even, the others seemed to cower in his mind’s eye. They knew he was angry about the position they’d put him in, by both kidnapping Mara and setting the shifter leaders against their kind.

Thieving and shifting in public, hmmm?
His disapproval echoed out over the psychic link they shared.
We’ll talk about all this later.

“Riker.” Stepping forward, Daniel held out his hand for him to shake. Though his throat and ribs still ached from the werelion’s jaw, Riker grasped it firmly and shared a long moment of mutual silence with the other man.

“No hard feelings over my win, I hope,” he said.

“The rules are the rules. Your fight is far from over. We’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

Kip stepped forward to say her peace. “And if the feds get on our trail, you’ll wish you’d rolled over and played dead today. The bloodbath will be bad for us all.” Her eyes briefly strayed over to Mara, who she looked at with some measure of significance.
Watch your back if you’re going to bed down with a human. Her weakness will be yours.

Riker ignored her. “We’ll be going home, if you don’t mind. My girl and I have some catching up to do.”

As they turned away, hand in hand, he felt Darren’s voice in his head.
For whatever it’s worth, I’m sorry we endangered her. I didn’t think we had a choice.

Squeezing Mara’s hand, Riker drank in the sight of her beautiful face.
If you had succeeded in your attempt to harm her, you would be dead. I would’ve made sure of that myself.

***

His apartment seemed different in the light of day—whether he acknowledged it was his or not. I could tell he took no joy in living here, but I still wasn’t sure I understood why.
Questions, questions.
I had too many of them to count. I started to ask my first one—when exactly did he become a shifter—when a jaw-cracking yawn split my face.

“You should rest,” Riker said, kissing my forehead gently. “I’ve got to take a shower and get a fresh change of clothes. But you’ll be safe here. I promise.”

Glancing around, I noticed once again that the furniture in his apartment didn’t quite seem to fit his style. “One question first: whose apartment is this, and why do you live here?”

Sighing, he led me over to the couch, where we both sat down. “Are you sure you want to know? It’s a long story.” There was weariness in his eyes.

“I want to know everything I can about you. If you’re willing to tell me.”

Lacing his hand through mine, he took a measured breath. “When I was a kid, my parents died.” I opened my mouth to console him, but he hushed me. “It was a long time ago now, and I don’t need your pity.”

“Still, I’m sorry,” I said.

“I know.” Clearing his throat, he went on. “Like any unwanted teenage boy, I was put into the system. It wasn’t great. I bounced from foster home to foster home, getting labeled with words like ‘troublesome’ and ‘rebellious.’ Half my foster parents were just in it for the government handouts, and the other half thought they were fucking angels for taking care of other people’s messes like me. As soon as I was old enough, I ran away.

“The streets weren’t kind to me, of course.” From the far-off look in his eyes, I could tell Riker was recalling memories he’d buried. I squeezed his hand. “I survived for as long as I could, but pretty soon I had two options: starve, or join a gang.”

I sucked in my breath. “Is that what those tattoos are about?”

He smirked at me, a bit of that rebellious front coming through. “No, princess, they’re not crime-related. Not really. But I’ll get to that.

“We weren’t drug dealers or murderers; we were thieves. An older man led us, named Pierce. At the time I thought he was a god, but really he was just some 30-year-old loser hanging out with a bunch of abandoned teenagers. He called us a family, said we’d stay together through thick and thin. And I believed him.”

He was silent for a long moment, so I prompted him. “Then what happened?”

“He brought us to the Cave of Sorrows.” His voice was rough with the past. “We needed more strength, he said. We’d go in together. I didn’t want to, but it was clear I wouldn’t have a choice; we either jumped into the notoriously deadly water, or we’d be kicked out of the ‘family.’ So I jumped. Every day since I wish I’d been brave enough to walk away.”

“You were young,” I said, holding back tears at the thought of his pain. “What choice did you have?”

“Not much.” Clearing his throat, he continued. “For a while, everything was wonderful. We were part of a larger community, and we felt invincible. After surviving instead of dying, what could go wrong? I grew up with my closest friends at my side. But our leader, Pierce, kept looking for more and more power. And he found it, along with more money, and more… things.”

He waved his hand around, indicating the lavishly decorated penthouse apartment we sat inside. “It never seemed to end with him. Eventually I’d had enough, and so had a few of the others. We wanted to leave. But he wouldn’t let us.”

“He sounds like a real tyrant,” I said.

“Yes. And much more than that. He told us that we could leave the clan, after one more job. But that job was for a politician who’d done something horrible.” I noticed the shame in his eyes, and felt for him. “It isn’t my proudest moment, but I decided I could go along with anything he wanted, as long as he let us go. It seemed like a fair price to pay. But when we got there, the job was… not what I expected. There’d been a witness, you see, and the politician wanted her taken care of.”

“Oh my god.” Horror filled me as I realized what he meant.
He can’t have gone through with it.

“She was just a child, Mara. I couldn’t let it happen. But Pierce was determined—he had a lot riding on this job. He said we’d have someone on the inside to protect us, in case the feds ever came after shifters again. So I had to stop him, and in the end…” His voice was quiet, low. “In the end, I killed him.”

Our hands were still laced together, so I could feel the slight tremble go through him. I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry. That must have been awful.”

He nodded, straightening up and shaking himself off like he was leaving the past behind. “It was. The worst part of all of it, though, was that the others looked to me for leadership after that. I wanted nothing more than to leave the clan forever, but they insisted I needed to step into the void left by Pierce’s absence. And I could feel it: the power that had once been his alone was passed on to me after I killed him. I’d become the strongest shifter among us by default. It disgusted me.”

“So you left.”

“Yes. I told them to give me a few years to live a normal life. I assumed that while I was gone, they would straighten themselves out and find a new leader, but clearly that didn’t happen. In the meantime, the only place I had to live was… his.”

I looked around us in dawning horror. “All this was his?”

“Most of it.” Riker sighed. “I tried to sell the place, but no one else seemed to want it. The apartment, most of the things in it, all the money he had… I never wanted them to be mine. I don’t even touch his bank account. I’d rather be broke than profit off the things he did.”

“But surely it wasn’t all bad,” I said, trying to find some hope in the horror.

“The bad far outweighs the good.” Looking at me, Riker searched my face as if trying to read my thoughts. “Do you hate me now? After everything you’ve seen and everything I’ve told you, I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t.”

I pursed my lips. “Hate you? No. It changes just about everything I thought I knew about this city when I first moved here, but I don’t hate you. It’s not your fault.”

An entire weight seemed to lift off his shoulders at my words. “I promise that from now on, I’ll keep that whole world separate. The beast is not who I am, Mara. You’ll never have to see a single shapeshifter for the rest of your life if I can help it.”

I hesitated as I chose my next words. “Riker, I don’t think you
can
keep that separate. That world is a part of you. Knowing about it means knowing you.”

His fingers slipped from mine and he turned away from me, a dark expression on his face. “So that’s it. We’re over.”

I shook my head. “No, whatever this is, I need to see it through. I have to find out if we can have something. Somehow, I feel like we can.” Reaching out, I turned his face back towards me, my fingers on his chin. “Maybe it’s time for you to give in to your inner nature instead of denying it. Isn’t running away what got you here in the first place? And it didn’t work. If we’re going to try and have a relationship, you should be who you are with me, Riker. All of you.”

Leaning forward, he kissed me. This kiss was powerful, strong; it felt like the promise of something new.

“You’re amazing, Mara,” he murmured against my lips, his eyes swirling between green and yellow. “Truly fucking amazing.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Ever After

Riker’s bathroom, which I hadn’t seen my last time here, was a literal heaven on earth. I spent a moment deciding between the jacuzzi and the shower; looking longingly at the spa jets in the jacuzzi, I reached over to turn the shower on. The jacuzzi looked like it would take an hour to fill with water.

“Take as long as you need,” Riker said, as he pulled plush towels out of the linen closet.

“What about you? Don’t you need to wash all that blood off?”

He chuckled. “There’s another bathroom, princess. It is a penthouse suite, after all.”

“Oh.” I colored lightly, realizing some part of me had been hoping to share the shower with him.
He’s tired and injured, not horny,
I scolded myself internally; there was plenty of time to get physical after we’d both recuperated from our ordeal. “Thanks.”

As he passed me on his way out the door, Riker leaned down and kissed my cheek. “I’m glad you’re safe, princess.”

“Me too. When you were fighting that other guy, I thought…”

“That I was about to bite it? All an illusion. I’m stronger than I look.”

He looked pretty strong to me. Stepping out, he closed the door behind him and left me by myself for the first time since this whole ordeal started. Without the distraction of my own safety or anyone else’s, I felt all the fears and anxieties of the last twenty-four hours crash down on me. Shoulders curving, I sat down on the edge of the jacuzzi and let tears of fear and relief fall down my face.

I’m alive,
I told myself, grateful for everything. It seemed strange to realize I still had school, and homework; that I’d have to go home to the dorms before long.

“Nora!” Realizing in horror that she was probably worried sick for me, I shot out of the bathroom to find Riker talking on the phone just outside. “Riker, I need to call my roommate. She must be worried sick.”

“Nora? She’s right here.” Smiling, he handed the phone over to me. “I was going to let you relax in the shower for a while before I told you I called her. I’ll be in just the other room if you need me.”

“Nora, it’s Mara,” I said into the receiver, mouthing my thanks to Riker as he left the room.

“Thank god! When I went to the police station to report you missing, they acted like I was overreacting. One of the officers even insisted you were probably sleeping off a hangover somewhere.” My best friend sounded more than a little irked at the suggestion. “I’ll never go to BCPD for anything important again, I swear. Some officer named Rico practically told me to go fuck myself.”

“Well, I’m glad we didn’t need to involve the police. Are you okay?”

“Me? It’s you I’m worried about! And I’m okay. Looking forward to seeing you again. When will you be home?”

I glanced longingly towards Riker’s large, beautiful bathroom and the jacuzzi inside. “I might take a bit of a break from classes. Riker and I are…”

“Back together, I’m guessing.” She didn’t sound thrilled.

“Yes, pretty much. And we have so much to talk about. But I don’t want you to worry about me. I just had a bit of an adventure.”

“Okay. Well, can we meet up today? I can bring you your cell phone and purse.”

I’d forgotten all about my stuff. “Of course. I’ll have Riker call you with the address here. And Nora? Thanks for worrying. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”