Page 4 of Choose the Bears

Nope, that wouldn’t happen. I’d drop the two of them off and then make a run for it. Whatever I couldn’t fit into the car tonight would just be left. It was time to go, and all I needed to do was this one last thing before I was free.

“Fine,” I said. “Where are we going?”

Chapter 2

Kyle

“Time to go,” I told my sleuth mate, Asher.

The prick was staring at his computer screen like it’d personally offended him. It wasn’t a hardware issue, our other sleuth mate, Lucas, would’ve been in here, fixing anything technical.

No, it was the contents of Asher’s email.

The human public thought we ran a security company. Our shopfront was discreet, bland looking, office building, but what we did was not. Bankrolled by the deep pockets of the bear community, ours was a business that protected a very specific clientele: women and children trying to get free of their abusers. Run as a not for profit, it made for a nice tax break for our investors, but for Asher…? It was personal. He was studying a new case that had been funnelled our way through some back channels from the police, which is what had him staring at the computer screen as if it had committed whatever act of cruelty he was reading.

“Ash—” I started to say, reaching out and grabbing his shoulder, but he shook me off.

“This—”

“I know, Asher.” Every damn day we dealt with horror on a scale that beggared belief. Every day men went home and hurt their kids, their wives, and their girlfriends like it was completely normal to brutalise those that you loved, when all we wanted was to find the other half of our heart. Hold her close and protect her from the horrors of the world, not be the source of them. “I know, mate, but we need?—”

His head jerked up, and those icy-blue eyes met mine, making clear how this would go. We were supposed to be heading out bush to take fur, let the bears inside us out. What we did, what we saw each day, was hard on our beasts. I had to fight to keep my bear down each time a bruised child or a battered woman walked in our door with haunted eyes. My big Kodiak wanted to roar his disgust, right before he rampaged through the streets, smashing every man we knew that abused others until they were bloody smears on the ground.

But I couldn’t allow that.

We kept silent, quiet, hidden in Australian, American, European, and Asian cities across the world, hiding what we were. So, if we had a chance of maintaining control, we needed to get the fuck out of this office for the weekend.

“Ursula!” I shouted, not afraid to call for back up when needed.

“Hey.” Asher’s foster sister walked in the door, nonchalantly unwrapping the tape from her hands. “Is Fuckface being a martyr again?”

“No—” Asher snapped.

“Yes,” I countered.

“Ashy…” She reached over and ruffled his dark hair, his elbow jerking up to knock her away, but he pulled his punches at the last minute. A small moment passed when their eyes locked together, speaking of the bond between them. She sucked in abreath, then let it out slowly, the same way we all did when dealing with our glorious leader. “You need to go and take fur with Kyle and Lucas.”

“A new case has come in,” Asher said, stabbing a finger at the screen. “Physical and emotional abuse?—”

“And I’ll take care of it.” She glanced back at the door. “The team that you painstakingly put together will triage it and bring them in, starting the process. You know what Elodie said last time.”

Elodie was our in-house shrink, mostly dealing with the complex needs of our clients, but we were regularly dragged in to sit on her comfy couch. Burnout in people who worked abuse cases was high, she’d informed us, and so she made it her business to ensure we all took breaks.

Like I was trying to get Asher to do right now.

“I’ve got the car ready…” Lucas walked in, squinting behind his glasses when he noted the tense atmosphere in the room. He raked his shaggy blond hair back from his face and then scanned the lot of us.

“We’re coming.” I jerked Asher’s chair back, ready to drop down and fireman carry my sleuth mate out the door if that’s what it took, but he nodded and forced himself to his feet.

“Update me,” he told Ursula.

“Absolutely not gonna do that.”

This was why I brought her in. She was smart, capable, but most of all, she could hand Asher his arse if she needed to. The bond they shared went beyond blood, beyond even the connection between our animals. His eyes met hers, and for a moment, they just stared.

She saw him, the polar bear that my foster brother transformed into, and she didn’t look away for a second. The beast, the man, they knew they’d met their match, so he shook his head and then turned to us.

“Let’s get on the road.”

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