Page 47 of The Thief

I chortled. “Are you serious? I knew you were shy, but I never took you for insecure.”

“I’ve got more hair than most men.”

“Which is exactly why you shouldn’t be hiding yourself. All those times we went swimming and you sat on the bank in your clothes. You were probably sweating to death. Why would you hide yourself? You have a beautiful body.”

He gave me a handsome smile—an earnest one. My compliment was more than surface level for him.

“Please?” I asked in a way that implied it wasn’t about my curiosity so much as wanting him to be comfortable around me.

“Yes, ma’am.” Bear leaned forward to remove his shirt. When it tangled over his head, I glimpsed something on his back that shocked me. Scars. Long ones. Like someone had whipped him.

“What happened to make you cover up? I didn’t think men were insecure about body hair.”

Every woman had their ideal body type. Some were vocal when it came to expressing what they didn’t like. It had never once occurred to me that men might feel vulnerable enough to hide their insecurities, especially given how many of them walked around shirtless, regardless of their shape or size. Particularly Shifters, who were less modest about nudity since it came with the territory of shifting.

Bear draped his shirt over the arm of the sofa. “In my old pack, there were three troublemakers who tried to get me to join their little group. When I didn’t, they made me a sworn enemy. We were kids, and I figured it would blow over eventually. But the teasing and pranks went on for years. It got worse after puberty hit. I sprouted up and started looking like a man. They called me Sasquatch.” He brushed his hand down his chest. “I guess I developed a complex about it.”

“What did your parents do? Didn’t they talk to those boys’ parents?”

He shook his head. “My mother’s gone. She abandoned us when I was little. My father… well, he was ambivalent about the whole thing. On the one hand, he didn’t like seeing all the trouble I was having. On the other, he thought it would toughen me up and make a man out of me.”

“Do you still talk?”

“No.” He angled his body toward me, but his eyes avoided mine. “The teasing got worse the older we got. After my first change, the pack started calling me Bear, but that had to do with how big my wolf was. It was around that time that I got into cooking, and I was good at it. They made me the official pack chef,” he said, his chest puffing out with pride. Bear had a wistful look in his eyes, and he raked his fingers through his hair. “Those same boys got my cooking duties revoked. I don’t really want to talk about all that.” Bear heaved a sigh and finally met my eyes. “Do you speak to your family?”

He was asking a tough question, but confiding in him felt easy. Since he knew about my criminal past, maybe it only made sense to explain how it all began. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to start.

“I remember you once saying you couldn’t get away from your first home fast enough,” he continued. “Was it because of the place or your family?”

“Both. I didn’t grow up in a pack. There was a group of us living together, including my mama, my daddy, and my granddaddy. We were poor, so there were times we didn’t have things. My parents were old, and their wolves couldn’t hunt like they used to. I didn’t go through my first change until I left home, so when I was a little girl, they had me thieving for food.”

“Stealing?”

“It was either that or starve some winters. When you’re hungry, you’ll do just about anything.” I groaned when the memories rushed back. “I started off stealing eggs. Chickens were harder to catch. All that squawking and running gets people’s attention. When I got older, I’d rope a hog and bring him home. Sometimes people left food out. Pies and bread cooling on the windowsills. I’d steal those in a flash.”

“From packs?” he asked.

“Sometimes. We had a lot of country folk in the area. Humans, packs, and a sleuth of bears. My parents put me up to it. Anytime I got caught, they said I wasn’t doing it right. But I think the real reason they used me was that people ain’t gonna hurt a little kid if they catch ’em stealing. That was all I knew. My entire childhood was taking from people. And I learned not to get caught. Things got rough when I was a teen.”

Bears eyebrows gathered in concern. “How?”

“My daddy wanted me to steal more than food. People back then didn’t have much, but the packs and the sleuths did. Farming equipment, tools—things my daddy could sell. That’s when it didn’t feel like surviving anymore. I left home as soon as I had money saved up for a bus ride.”

“Where did you get the money?”

“I did odd jobs without telling my folks. If my daddy had known what I was up to, he would have taken the money for himself. I had to hide it in a jar buried outside.”

He shook his head. “That must have been hard, going off alone.”

“My family was awful about it. They tried to make me feel guilty for leaving, but I couldn’t do it anymore. By then someone in our group was bringing in fish and game. My parents didn’t need me, and I wanted something else out of life. I got as far away from that community as possible.”

“That was wrong, what they did.”

It felt good to have someone validate what I’d felt my whole life but wasn’t allowed to complain about. My turbulent relationship with my family still felt fresh, the wounds not yet healed.

“I love my mama, but I don’t even know if they’re still around anymore. It feels like it happened yesterday, but decades have gone by. Even if they’re alive, I’m not ready to forgive. When I moved to Cognito, it was impossible to make a decent living. So I fell back on what I did best—stealing. I worked in a diner by day and was moonlighting as a professional thief. I never took from people who were just getting by. I only targeted the superrich immortals who had more than they cared to share.”

Bear twisted his mouth to the side, and I wondered what he thought about a woman who had been a criminal her whole life.

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