Page 41 of Catch a Tiger

Warm hands wrapped around her arms and pulled her up. She took a deep breath and blinked the water out of her eyes to see the alpha studying her face for answers. He smelled worried, but his expression gave nothing away.

“Sorry.” Vix pushed the hair back and out of her face. “It’s hard for me to remember things if I can’t see them or they’re…not around.”

Then she saw the alpha was in the bath with her and the water was off.

She glanced down to see he was still wearing his pants, but this was a lot closer than before.

Taking a step toward him, she bared her throat as she reached out. Vix held her breath when his grip on her arms eased and he let her slide into their hold. It felt as natural as breathing, and she rested her head on his chest to calm her stupid heart.

“Memory magic is dangerous,” she whispered against his chest. “It fucks with time, and sometimes it becomes squiggly lines or one large square all mixed together. I forget what’s real, but I’m not allowed to possess those memories, so they get sucked out into the ocean of evergreen to wash up on shore later without warning…”

The alpha sighed and placed his hand on the back of her head, holding her against his chest, and it felt oddly familiar even if she didn’t know why.

“My witchling is like that sometimes too,” he told her. “She can see the past, present, and future all at the same time.”

His?

She pulled back and studied those calculating jade-green eyes. “Yours?”

“Yes.” There was a challenge to his tone, as if daring her to argue with him.

It was best not to worry about that right now. She’d be able to get all the answers she wanted eventually, but it was impossible to ignore just how badly she needed to know more.

Vix let him pull her back over to the bottles, trying to let go of the irritation she felt at such a blatant claim whenhewas the one who’d come to findher. “Do you love her?”

He smiled slightly and started working more of that stuff into her hair. “Of course I love her.”

A low growl escaped her before she could stop it and Vix wanted to die of embarrassment.

“Even if she wasn’t the abandoned cub I found and helped raise, she’s not interested in men,” the alpha explained.

Vix couldn’t scent or hear a lie, and he sounded too fucking amused to be tricking her about this.

There was really no way to explain her possessive outburst without making things worse, so she decided to stay silent as he worked.

Vix kept her body pliable, even when he brought her over to a different part of the bath so he could sit on the edge and she could sit below him on a makeshift seat underwater.

Her lip curled when the tugging started, but she’d asked for this. At least his comb seemed to be imbued with magic, which would keep the process from being too awful.

“You haven’t asked me for my name,” the alpha said, his voice suddenly deeper, and there was a hint of his tiger in it that surprised her considering the topic. “Don’t you want to know what it is? Or do you not care?”

“Names have value,” she murmured, moving her head when he gently pushed it in a certain direction. “They give us power. If you have someone’s name, you own them.”

His hands froze and there was a strange edge to his scent now that she couldn’t interpret. There was no hint of anythinglike fear or anger, but…reverence maybe? Strange. Most people thought she was crazy when she talked like this.

“I don’t take names that aren’t given to me,” Vix explained, swishing her hands through the water to distract her from the heady way his scent was darkening—calling to her. “They’re a gift when given freely. I only take the ones that deserve to be stolen.”

“You talk like the fae.” She went still at the dangerous tone in his voice, wondering why this would bother him so much.

“I don’t know any fae,” she admitted, flicking the water when his scent started to thaw just a little. “I only know what you can read in a book. Gabriel wasn’t fae.”

The tugging paused. “Gabriel?”

“Mhm. That’s who took me. He’s an angel, not fae.”

The water didn’t feel too hot anymore, and the rising steam lifted the swirling scents of that pretty oil he’d put in. It smelled exotic to her – the opposite of everything she knew.

“He told me names have value and if you have someone’s true name, you own them. It’s why he took my name and gave me his. It means ‘Gabriel’s warrior.’”

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