“Those are keys to Mark’s underground den.”
Her brows arched. “He has a den? Like a bear?—”
“Think of it as a big techno-marvel man cave. He’s actually one of the most brilliant computer programmers in the world.”
She blinked, understandably surprised. Mark came off as a huge bear of a guy, short-tempered with men and hypersexualized with women.
“He’s brilliant,” Carl stressed. “But he also has too much bear DNA in him. He’s going feral and he knows it.”
Her lips pursed in a silent O of understanding. “That’s why you asked about eating and sleeping as a man. You want to know how close he is to turning completely animal.”
He nodded, misery tying up his insides. “He gave over his keys because he knows he doesn’t have long.” He jerked his chin toward his brother. “Alan’s the one with the law degree. He handles all the wills and stuff.”
“Because he’s going to die as an animal? Don’t they just live…as bears?”
No point in sugarcoating it. “The human mind can’t handle that much animal. Spend too much time as a bear and the mind goes insane. A crazy bear is a destructive killer and needs to be put down. There’s no way around that.”
“My God,” she whispered. “And Alan will have to do that?”
“No,” he said flatly. “Alan handles the legal stuff. As Max, the killing is my job.”
She gasped as she turned to him, her eyes wide with horror. “Is there any way to stop it?”
He shook his head. He’d spent every spare moment of the last decade looking for a solution, but so far he’d come up with a big, fat nothing. He wasn’t a scientist, though God knew he’d tried. He diverted as much money as he could to funding quiet research into the question, but it hadn’t yielded anything useful. The most he’d come up with was an ancient spell book that talked about bonding magic to quiet the beast. It had been used to some effect in other clans, but as far as he could tell, it just shifted the crazy to someone who was easier to kill. Which left Mark handing the keys to his life to Alan while Carl waited for the moment he’d have to do the unthinkable to his best friend.
Crazy-making all around.
Meanwhile, Becca stepped into the circle of his arm, setting her soft hand on his face. “I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do to help?”
And just like that, his bear went from growling to purring. The heat from her palm eased the tension in his jaw. His gut loosened even as his dick thickened. And when he touched the back of her hand, pressing it closer to his mouth, everything in him settled into one thought: How can I make her mine?
“You’re doing it,” he rasped. “You understand.”
He was looking at her mouth and thinking about kissing her when he heard the noise. Angry words, shouted voices—loud enough for him to hear but not clear enough to make out the words. Mark reappeared a moment later, prowling up behind them, unnaturally silent for a man his size. And when Carl turned, Mark’s eyes had a subtle glow to the golden brown, saying to those in the know that the grizzly in him was coming out to play. Goddamn it. He had to do a dominance display, forcing Mark’s grizzly to retreat. Problem was he’d shifted too recently, so he couldn’t change. He’d have to do this as a human. So he thickened his shoulders and bared his teeth.
“When I tell you to stay, you stay,” he growled. “Got it?” Then he clocked the man as hard as he could, right in his jaw. Mark’s head snapped back and his eyes flared bright. Behind him, he heard Becca gasp and Alan step in to hold her back. Good. This was too dangerous for her. Hell, it was too dangerous for Alan.
He tensed, focusing everything he had on forcing Mark to submit. Which meant even before the man recovered from the first blow, Carl stepped in and grabbed his friend’s short hair. He jerked Mark’s head to the side to bare his neck. It was hard. Mark was shorter than Carl, but layered in muscle. And then he put his free hand straight on the bared flesh, digging his nails in like he was going to rip the man’s neck apart with his bare fingers.
“Submit,” he growled.
Carl didn’t know if it was an order or a plea. Both because he sure as hell knew that one day soon, Mark wouldn’t. And that would be the end.
Mark’s neck bunched, as did his fists. His breath huffed out in two hot bursts of air. If he went grizzly, then Carl would lose. He couldn’t shift, so human against grizzly this close would be the death of him. But he was counting on Mark’s control. On Mark’s ability to beat the grizzly back one more time.
“Submit, you fucker!” he barked as he dug his fingers in with all his strength.
And then it happened. Mark’s eyes lost the hot glow behind the golden brown. His muscles went lax, and his breath eased out on a slow, almost human exhale.
“I submit,” he said in a thick, low growl.
Carl held the pose for a few beats longer. It never worked to give over quickly. But after a slow count to ten, he was able to ease off. And Mark, thank God, didn’t fight him. But he couldn’t completely relax, either. He had to follow this up with hard commands.
“Can you hear what they’re saying?” He jerked his chin at the Moss compound.
Mark grunted and turned his head to listen more closely. “Moss rhetoric. Evil government. Over my dead body. Standoff.”
So a piece of paper wasn’t enough to open the Moss gate. No big surprise there. But there was more than one way to get through the doors. “You say they’re shorthanded. Still seem true?”
