Page 34 of A Bear's Mercy

Charlie turned white, then bright pink, her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.

Finally, she managed to speak up.

“Why’d you save me if you knew I was going to shoot you?” she asked.

Because you were in the alone in the woods and you weren’t afraid of me, he thought. Because you thought you were doing the right thing, and because the second I saw you I knew I’d fight every wolf in Cascadia to keep you safe.

Kade shrugged.

“Instinct, I guess,” he said. “Once the wolves were gone I could tell it was a tranq rifle, not the real deal.”

He made the mistake of looking Daniel in the eyes. The other man was smirking, just a little, and Kade knew why: he was brave enough to face down any number of physical threats, but wasn’t about to tell Charlie how he really felt.

“Sorry,” she said. “God, this is such a mess. I can’t believe how wrong the team was about everything.”

“I can’t believe they sent you in there alone with such bad information,” said Kade. “You should probably be dead right now.”

“It’s pretty strange,” Daniel chimed in. “Usually, we deal with this stuff locally. I don’t know why the feds would get involved.”

“This didn’t even happen over state lines,” Kade mused. “Some of the wolf ranches are in Nevada, but none of the dead wolves were from there.”

Charlie looked like she was thinking of this for the first time.

Then, Kade felt a deep itch of suspicion begin, somewhere in the pit of his stomach. He resisted it for a second, then gave in.

Why send her alone?He wondered. Why send someone so inexperienced and fresh that she didn’t even think to check that she was being followed by wolves?

The thought that someone had been careless enough to kill Charlie — and even worse, put a shifter on the hook for her murder — made Kade’s blood boil, his bear pacing and itching to get out.

Don’t tell her,he thought. She’s dealt with enough.

Charlie was fiddling with the sleeve on her bathrobe, worrying at the stitches. Then she finally looked up at Kade, then Daniel.

“What makes you think she killed them?”

“I can tell she’s been here,” said Kade. “A couple of months ago, I was looking for this feral fox and I saw some grizzly scratches on a tree. They were hers.”

“We can always smell who’s marked a tree,” Daniel said.

Kade remembered those seconds with crystal clarity. He’d been human, tiptoeing around the forest, tracking the feral fox, when he’d noticed the scratches on the tree, and there had been something so oddly familiar about them that he’d completely forgotten about the fox.

He’d gone up and sniffed the scratches, and Olivia’s scent had felt almost like a punch in the face.

His little sister, still alive. Alive and back in Cascadia, something he’d never even dared to hope would happen.

For a few years, there had been reports of a feral female bear that matched her description further south, in the eastern Sierras, but those had faded after a bit. In the first few years after she left, Kade had searched hard, but nothing had turned up. Finally, Kade had accepted that his sister was either dead or close to it, and that she didn’t ever want to see him again.

So he’d joined the Army. The officers had looked at him a little strangely, but “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was still in effect then, so they didn’t ask whether he was a shifter and he didn’t tell them that he was.

Then Afghanistan, the roadside bomb that killed his team. He’d survived, shifted, and been discharged promptly once the higher-ups found out he was a shifter.

“They must have done something to her,” Kade said. He cracked the knuckles of his left hand against the wooden table top. “That isn’t how Olivia is. Was. Whatever. Even if she were feral, I know she just wanted to turn her brain off and be alone for a while, and she just forgot to come back. She was never vicious.”

He ran one hand over his short hair, feeling his heart ache for his sister.

“She’s not a murderer,” he said. “I know this looks bad, but it wasn’t her. I know it wasn’t.”

“Okay,” Charlie said. “So let’s get her back.”

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