Before Koda could answer, Hawk appeared beside us, his tone as casual as if we were discussing the weather. “In your first maul’s defense, there ain’t no such thing as a bear who can think straight when their mate’s in danger.”
Koda gave him a solemn nod. “Thank y?—”
“But yeah, it was real fucking stupid,” Hawk cut in before Koda could finish. “I would’ve told him that if he’d bothered to consult with his maul before heading out.”
“It was my responsibility,” Koda insisted, his jaw tightening. “I was the one who got us into this mess, and I thought I’d be able to get us out of it. Even if it meant almost dying.”
“Wait.” My stomach twisted. “You almost died?”
A grim silence stretched between us.
Instead of answering, another reel of memory unspooled in my mind, courtesy of Hawk’s bond-bite projector.
Koda stepping down from his beautiful chestnut-brown Canadian Horse, Sentinel, onto the gravel parking lot outside a massive black industrial building—the Iron Claw MC’s clubhouse.
A mix of shifters of every shade and race walking out to confront him before he could get to the door, coming to a stop right in front of him. A wall of danger made flesh.
The group includes a huge black bear, who Koda hasn’t seen out of bear form since they were in their teens.
And the other biker who’d attacked me.
Apparently, he hadn’t walked away from his encounter with Koda’s bear unscathed. Four raw, angry scars slashed across his face, and one ear was just… gone. Only a jagged gap remained where it had been ripped clean off.
Hawk paused the memory there, his voice cutting in like the narrator of a gritty documentary. “Bears can heal just about anything, but they can’t grow shit back. And Iron Claws aren’tallowed to use shifter magic to heal wounds—unless they’ve killed whatever left the mark. But, the prez who took over after me? Batshit insane. Doesn’t like losing. Sometimes, he makes them wait to take their revenge until they’re good and rage-filled, with a permanent scar to remind them.”
My mind spun. Which one of the menacing bikers was the president of this horrible gang?
“The prez is the bear,” Koda and Hawk informed me in unison, answering my question before I could voice it.
The memory flickered back to life, Hawk running the film again without giving me time to ask the dozen other questions I had about the gang he co-founded.
The Iron Claw offering Koda a choice: survive a physical fight with three of their members—without shifting—or they’d end him.
“And finish what we started with that sweet piece of club meat you stole from us,” the one-eared biker adds, waggling his tongue.
I couldn’t tell if it was my disgust or Koda’s rolling through my stomach, but either way, I felt him lock in.
Failure isn’t an option.
The first two fights are over in minutes.
The first match is with a bulky MC whose muscles can’t make up for his lack of technique. He falls quickly. The second is with the one-eared biker, who’d clearly hoped the first guy would wear Koda out and better his chances.
Too bad for him.
Koda snaps both their necks within five minutes of engagement.
But then Koda finds out why the Iron Claw hadn’t called it “hand-to-hand combat” when the biker gang’s feral bear president lumbers forward for the third match.
My stomach dropped. “You fought a feral bear without shifting?”
“For about two minutes,” Koda admitted with a wince. “Before he got the upper hand.”
“Or claw, in this case,” Leif added from behind Koda’s shoulder with a wry shake of his head. “He was messed up pretty bad by the time we got there.”
“Typical Iron Claw bait and switch,” Hawk muttered. “Nobody’s ever survived one of those ‘challenges.’”
I didn’t want to know. But I had to ask, “What happened next?”
