“Aw hell, don’t tell me another one of you black bears kicked the bucket,” I answered without bothering to ask who it was. “Was it Mak this time?”
“No, uncle, I’m right here,” Mak answered.
He was still in his twenties, but he sounded as weary as a guy my age.
Some kernel of concern tried to scratch at my chest—prickly and unwelcome. But I shoved that emotion all the way down where it belonged. In the basement box where I kept the timeline where I became his father instead of my older brother.
“Then you’ve got five seconds to explain why you’re calling me,” I growled. “And if it’s about that Joining Ceremony, I already emailed in my ‘no way’ to that lovey-dovey shit. If you wanna maul up, just do it. Don’t make the rest of us fly out and give you presents for some junk your tribe’s been doing since the goddamn Ice Age.”
“This isn’t about the Joining Ceremony,” another voice said. Koda, Mak’s older brother. It was easy to guess because he sounded exactly like his uptight birth father, Vik, had at the same age.
“When we’re all mauled, I’m going to teach Zion how to cuss and you how to loosen up. Mara and Koda need at least one dad who knows how to have some goddamned fun.”
The promise I’d made Vik before I knew just how far my brother would go to fuck us over floated across my mind. Back whenMara and Koda were still little, and I thought I’d get to help raise the womb twins. Maybe add a cub of my own to their maul family that still needed a third husband.
But I shoved that down in the other timeline box, too.
Koda, who was now a grown man, not the little boy I’d once thought I’d co-parent, continued. “We’re hoping you’ll do your nephews a favor.”
Mak’s voice came next—my brother’s son, and technically my only nephew by blood. “Yeah, we need you to check in on the mother of our mates.”
I’d trashed that Joining Ceremony invite as soon as I was done reading it, but I’d gotten through enough of it to know that Koda and Mak had gnarled up their family tree branches but good. The brothers had not only mauled up with the shaman’s oldest and youngest sons, but they’d somehow found two Outsider sisters willing to each take on a maul of three male bears.
Even I was having trouble keeping up on all the math with that one.
“Why the hell would I do that?” I ground out, winding the line up so I could cast it a little farther out.
“Her name’s Bell Winters. She lives in Minnesota.” Koda started filling me in on the details of their case, like my question had been the same as a yes. “Before Christmas, she took back the piece of trash she used to call a husband and went no-contact with her daughters.”
I raised an eyebrow. “So, you want me—the guy who lost your mother to his own brother—to go talk this Bell chick out of making a shitty choice?”
“Our mates are starting to think this isn’t just a bad choice,” Koda answered. His voice became slightly less level. “She hasn’t RSVP’d for the Joining Ceremony—even with grandkids on the way. And she didn’t get in contact with them, even after they sent her flowers for her birthday, which was on Mother’s Day. They’re scared….”
Koda’s voice dropped. “Uncle, they think something’s really wrong. Like, she’s-in-danger wrong.”
“Or worse,” Mak added, tone grim. “If it’s bad, we can’t let either of them just walk into that, even with one of us by their side.”
I opened my mouth, but Koda answered my obvious follow-up question before I had a chance to ask it. “Our bears won’t let us leave them alone while they’re pregnant to do it ourselves.”
Oh.
All my dreams of having a maul of my own had ended when their mother chose my brother over me, so I wouldn’t know anything about that firsthand. But I’d heard about how protective bear shifters could be of their mates, even with two other males in their maul.
“Trust me, uncle.” Koda’s level-headed Mountie voice interrupted my grouchy silence. “We wouldn’t be calling you—asking you to drive all the way to Minneapolis—if we weren’t desperate.”
I frowned.
Looked at the fishing pole I was pretty sure would catch a nibble if I just stopped yakking and got off the phone.
Scowled.
Reminded myself that I didn’t owe these two full-grown shifters on the other side of the line a goddamned thing. This wasn’t a fire. This woman had chosen a man over her own daughters. That bad decision didn’t have anything to do with me.
I gripped my fishing pole tight with my polar bear rumbling in my chest. Then I snarled out my answer.
6/
bell winters
