It took some doing, but he managed to unlock the shackles around his ankles and wrists, then the collar. The urge to shift was impossible to ignore. Never in his life had he gone more than a day without handing the reins over to the bear, and now that he was free, Otto took the risk. Leaving his shackles and linen pants in a heap, he let the animal out at last.
His magic, boiling hot in his veins with the mating fever, exploded.
The joy he felt was immense, animalistic. He wanted to roar with it, but managed to keep the terrifying sound locked in his throat as he stretched out in the cramped confines of the cell.
In this form, he barely fit. An average-sized polar bear would have struggled, but shifters were almost twice the size of their animal counterparts. Even so, the freedom of the shift made the man inside nearly weep with joy.
Settling back on his haunches, he turned to look out the small window, nose twitching as he sought out his mate’s scent. A deep, possessive rumbling erupted from his chest as he picked up the thread.
Not a moment later, the bear’s keen eyes found her slim form crossing the courtyard with Harrod, her arm caught in his cruel grip.
His lips peeled back from his teeth. The man knew caution. He knew that they could not charge across the courtyard to bite the head off Harrod’s shoulders for laying a hand on his mate.
But the bear didn’t care about that. All he knew was the power of his limbs and the absolute certainty that Josephine washis.
Huffing with aggression, he watched as they stopped just before the circular house. Harrod made the mistake of taking one threatening step toward his mate as she ripped her arm out of his grasp.
Otto, mindless in his rage, threw himself against the stone wall. The barn shuddered under the force of his nineteen-hundred pound weight. Unfortunately, the wall was of fine orcish stonework. Each stone was carefully hewn to fit flush with its partners, making all but the thinnest amount of mortar necessary. Held together primarily by tension and its own weight, not even a blow from a fully grown male polar bear shifter in the grips of the mating fever would knock it down.
Not without considerable effort, at least.
Whipped into a frenzy of desperation, the bear tried again. His paws, big as barrel lids, beat and clawed the stone as he fought to get to his mate.Need her,the bear thought.Protect her!
The only thing that stopped him from breaking the window, fear of discovery long discarded, was the arrival of a carriage. There was a ripple of magic as the wards around the homestead bent to allow it through the old gate.
His hot, furious breaths fogged the window as he watched the sleek black carriage pull to a stop in front of the house. Both horses, great beasts nearly as tall as him, stomped their hooves and glanced restlessly at the barn as the occupants climbed out.
Much to both man and bear’s frustration, the carriage blocked his view of his mate and the front of the house. By the time it moved, his mate was gone.
It took an enormous amount of willpower to keep himself from panicking. It took even more to force his shape back into the man.
Instincts told him that something was wrong, and that being caught out of his chains — even in the nearly unkillable form of the bear — was a bad idea. Certainlyhecould survive just about anything, but Josephine was delicate. Gods knew what might happen if she got caught in a fight.
Donning his trousers once more, Otto cursed as he attempted to reshackle himself. It wouldn’t do tolockthe cuffs or collar, of course, but he had to make it look like they were on in case anyone came sniffing around his cell. The illusion was easily accomplished with his ankles and collar, as they rested against the tops of his feet and the base of his throat, but his wrist cuffs proved trickier.
After some doing and plenty of muttered Danish curses, Otto reluctantly used Josephine’s ribbon to tie the cuffs together. Should he need to change with a moment’s notice, the ribbons would tear and the other restraints would pop off, freeing him.
That done, all he could do was wait.
What felt like hours later, his sensitive ears picked up the sounds of multiple people approaching the barn. An unfamiliar man held up most of the conversation, speaking to Josephine with a fake sort of deference that made Otto’s teeth grind.
And then they were in front of his cell. Otto’s stomach dropped.
Infecting others. Taking Josephine away. Breeding her. Infecting him.
Emotion whipped through him in great bursts: Rage. Bloodlust. Fear. Disgust.
He believed Josephine when she warned him about the infection, but the weight of the knowledge didn’t truly hit him until that moment. It wasn’t just her, who might have been fed misinformation by her abusive father over time, nor the doctor, who thought that he would lose his animal once bitten.
It wasallof them. They’d tested it. By the sounds of it, they’d tested itdozens and dozensof times.
Otto’s ears rang. His breath moved in and out of him in heavy, panicked gusts. The bear paced in the back of his mind, afraid and confused and frantic with worry for their mate, as the information sank in.
It wanted Josephine’s bite with a deep, instinctive urgency, a yearning made all the more acute by forty years of deprivation and violence, but it didn’t want it like this. It wanted her willing. It wanted her love.
Of course, the bear also didn’t want to die.
How would it protect her if it no longer lived? It wanted to run with her, to know the joy of curling around her at night. It wanted to bury its nose in her hair and listen to her breathe as she slept, safe and content in their den. It wanted to teach their cubs how to swim and watch them play in the snow. The idea that he could not have her bite and also live to know those pleasures was utterly inconceivable.
