“You’ve got everything to be sorry for! I told you to go home! And you didn’t!” The words tumbled out on an rage-filled waveof regret and frustration. “Now you’ve ruined everything. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want you. You’ve ruined my life!”
The knife twisted as her expression shattered. And suddenly, I saw it.
The fights with her ex-husband. His cruel accusations after her miscarriages. His lawyer painting her as a deceitful harpy for not disclosing a medical condition she couldn’t help.
Her pain. All the pain she’d been carrying since her divorce sliced through me. Sliced through all of us.
But she didn’t know we could see it. Didn’t understand that her bond bite was sharing everything.
She just pressed her lips together, gathering herself the way she did when she made the call to rush one of her birthing mothers to the hospital for an emergency C-section.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I don’t understand what’s happening here. But I know I’m not what you envisioned. And I wasn’t trying to… I just…” Her voice cracked, but she kept going. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I’ll leave now. I promise.”
I’d think about this moment a lot in the weeks to come.
Maybe things would have turned out different if she’d made that declaration and calmly walked out of my detachment station. Maybe she’d have gotten in her rental car and driven out of my life—actually gone home, like I’d ordered her to. Twice.
But she didn’t walk.
She ran.
Her runners slapped against the concrete floor as she fled—not just out of the cell but out of the station entirely.
So many signs. We had so many signs hanging on nearly every building in town, giving instructions about what to do if a tourist encountered a bear.
The number one rule on every tin post: DON’T RUN!
Written all in caps.
But Holly had come into my life—our lives—at night. She hadn’t seen any of those signs.
Instead of walking, she ran.
Which in bear country was the equivalent of striking a match in a room full of gasoline.
“Wait! Don’t ru-rrrawwwrr-n!” Björn’s warning wasn’t fast enough. His predatory instinct took over before he could finish, and his blond grizzly surged forward as fur sprouted.
Hawk’s black bear soon followed, curling over onto all fours as his body convulsed with the shift.
Before they could fully turn, though, I scrambled to the cell’s entrance and slammed the door shut, locking them back in.
“Stay here,” I snapped, my voice low and commanding. “Both of you. Don’t make this worse.”
Björn’s huge grizzly roared, frustrated, while Hawk’s bear stared at me with baleful amber eyes.
“If she leave Bear Mountain, I kill you,” Hawk growled, his ursine voice heavy with menace. “No cage strong enough to hold me if our mate gone.”
My human rallied to defy him.
But my bear?
It was stronger.
And she’d run.
My human knew better, but the beast inside me had already been triggered.
That was when I realized—I should have locked myself inside that cage, too.
