Page 54 of Bears Not Included

Mason steers me forward to his car, bundles me into the passenger seat, buckles me up, and then comes around to the driver’s side.

As he takes off, my mind remains fixed on what just happened. I could have died—been killed in an alley. I should be dead.

I should be dead. I should be dead. I should be dead.

The words echo in my head repeatedly, and as I sit so still next to Mason in his car, I feel as if I’m going to crack.

~~~***~~~

Mason

I can feel myself on the verge of fucking up. Of coming inside her before the time is right.

She’s rattled, shocked, and scared, and she’s trying to hide all three of those things. It was the first time she witnessed a man being killed right in front of her eyes. Under my hand. I looked her in the eye because I wanted her to see her enemy die.

I suppose she should consider herself lucky. I didn’t go full bear on the bastard and torture the fucking shit out of him for daring to want to touch her, let alone hurt her. Now I’ll have to be content with the fucker’s corpse being incinerated by the clean-up crew I had called.

We looked into every aspect of her life. We knew who her friends were and who her enemies were. She had zero enemies, and if she did, they were considered dead already. No questions asked.

“Any other nutjobs in your life who want to kill you that we should know about, Livia?” I ask, unable to keep the rough dominance out of my voice considering I’m a very chill guy.

“I… I—” She stutters.

“Think, Livia.” I press.

“No. No, there’s no one else. Lucky Law… the man… a couple of years ago, when I started to work for Jimmy's, he attacked me, he wanted to take me, and I kicked him, and he punched me in the face…”

I shouldn’t have killed him so quickly. I should have broken his fingers one by one and made him eat them. And that’s beside what Deacon and Callen would have done to him.

He hurt her.

Fuck.

My hand clenches on the steering wheel as I imagine that piece of shit putting his hand on our bride’s face. Fuck it. I want to kill him all over again.

“Some people helped me, but he only ran when Babs came out with her rifle. He got arrested for possession of drugs a day later, that’s what Rocky, the older homeless guy, told me. He thought I was the one who turned him in. I didn’t.”

That fucker slipped through the cracks. It just hammers home the un-fucking bearable truth that we didn’t know our Ursid bride existed until she stepped onto our property. It’s hard to accept that she lived her own life and that, for the first twenty-three years of her existence, she didn’t know she belonged to us.

She had better be telling the truth about any other incidents, though. We don’t care if it was a verbal fight over a fucking parking space or some other benign thing.

As long as she remains under our protection, nothing will happen to her. Absolutely nothing. That character, whatever the fuck his name was, had been so high out of his mind that it was only when I divested him of his knife that recognition filtered through in his drugged-out gaze. If he was involved with any kind of gang, no matter how small, he would have known who I was.

It’s so obvious how she’s trying to keep her control, quivering just on the surface, as she works extra hard to show she’s okay. Strong.

And all I want to do is pull her onto my lap and bury myself so deep inside that she won’t be able to tell who starts where and who ends where. I want to fuck her so hard that I’m the only thing she sees, and we’re the only men who matter. I want to fuck her so damn deep that she’ll forget her name and everything that happened.

But if I take her now, there’s a chance I won’t be able to stop myself from coming inside her. The time to make her a true Ursid bride hasn’t come yet. As the oldest, it’s up to Deacon to decide when that happens.

A true Ursid bride means the three of us have to be true Ursid men.

Scientifically, I fall a little short there. I’m 50% blue-blood Ursid, thanks to my mother, and 50% fucking lowlife, sleazefest scum of the earth.

My control disintegrates as a soft whimper falls from her lips—as if she can no longer maintain her brave face.

But if I reach for her, I have to show her what I’m not.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

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