Another surge. Another battle to hold his form. And he won.
She fired again without warning. And again. Each shot was a war, but Reed held firm. After ten shots, Siren lowered the weapon.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Like I’m going to throw up.”
“You’re doing good. Let’s keep going.”
She changed the shot pattern to two shots in quick succession. She called it a double tap, the way professionals fire when they mean to kill.
The rapid sound hit differently. It triggered something deeper in his nervous system. A memory from the ambush. The bullets coming from everywhere.
His bear roared inside him. His hands started to shift, claws pushing through his fingertips.
“Reed.” Siren’s voice cut through the noise in his head. “Stay with me.”
He pulled back, forcing his claws to retract. “Good,” she said. “You’re close.”
Then she raised the Glock and emptied the magazine. One shot after another in rapid succession. The sounds overlapping, echoing off the barn, filling the air with chaos.
Reed’s vision blurred and his bear took over.
The shift happened before he could stop it. His bones cracked and his muscles tore. One moment he was a man, the next he was a grizzly bear. The bear’s instincts screamed that there was a threat.
But the threat was Siren. His mate. Even in the uncontrolled haze, he knew he couldn’t hurt her.
She just stood there staring at him, her sharp blue eyes pinning him in place.
“Come back, Reed,” she commanded.
The bear fought him. He wanted to rage. But Reed pushed it down and pulled the human back out. When he was fully human again, he found himself on his hands and knees in the grass. Naked and shaking. His clothes shredded around him.
Siren draped a blanket over his shoulders and sat beside him in the grass. She gave him a bottle of water to drink while he recovered.
“You’re treating the bear like an enemy,” she said. “Like it’s something to suppress.”
“It is.”
“No. That’s not how the shift works. I’ve been in some highly traumatic situations during my service and time with Dom. I’venever suppressed my wolf.” She picked up a stalk of grass and twirled it between her fingers. “Your inner animal isn’t separate from you. It is you. You can’t win a war against yourself.”
“What am I supposed to do? I’m trying to keep it contained.”
She dropped the grass and looked at him with her bright blue eyes. “When you hear the gunfire, your bear wants to protect you. That’s natural. It’s trying to help you.”
“It’s trying to fuck up my life.”
“It’s trying to keep you alive the only way it knows how.” She paused. “The problem isn’t the bear’s response. The problem is that you’re resisting it so hard that you create a power struggle. When you’re fighting yourself, you can’t think. You can’t choose. The bear wins because you’re too busy pushing it down to work with it effectively.”
Reed considered that. It went against everything he’d believed about his issue since that first day at the park when he was thirteen. He believed his bear was dangerous when it was provoked.
“If I don’t fight it, what should I do instead?”
“You need to accept who you are. When the bear rises, don’t push it down. Let it be there. Acknowledge it. You should think. ‘Yes, I feel danger. Yes, my bear wants to protect me.’ And then redirect it. ‘No, I don’t need to shift. I can handle this in human form.’ Or, if you do choose to shift, it will be on your own terms, and you can maintain control of your actions.”
“I’m not sure how to do that,” he said.
“You have to remember that you and your inner bear are partners. Not enemies. The bear has wisdom. It knows thingsthe human mind doesn’t. But you get to decide when and how you use that wisdom.” She pressed her finger to his chest.
