Chapter 19

Dear Aunt Rita,

I’ve read your previous advice on being wary of bears who come with delicious edible gifts, and I have to disagree. My sweet bear friend Sally-mae has been baking me fruit pies for the past six months, and she has no designs on my body or heart whatsoever.

Why, the other week, she even offered to iron my shirt for my date with another woman. It wasn’t her fault the iron malfunctioned and she burned a hole in my shirt.

~Just a Friend

Dear Just a Friend,

Oh, you sweet summer child. Do write to me once you two are mated so I can say “I told you so” while eating my favorite peach pie.

~Aunt Rita

—From the February 2073 issue of Wild Woman magazine: “Skin Privileges, Style & Primal Sophistication”

HAVING BENT TO examine a plant beside the gate, Theo now moved back to stand nearer the car.

Nearer Yakov.

He tried not to take that personally. Of course she trusted him more than the others. After all, he’d spent hours with her without doing her harm. It was a choice made out of logic. And still his bear grinned inside him, urging him to wrap her closer.

His damn bear was drunk.

“Yasha!” Elbek raised his arm as he walked into view, a small pack on his back and his rangy body covered in mud-splattered outdoor gear.

Slender and long-legged Moon was in much the same condition, though she also had mud in the curly black of her hair.

“Bird-watching?” he said dryly.

They both grinned.

“Energetic, those marsh birds,” Moon said without any shame, before nodding at Theo. “Zdravstvuyte. I’m Moonbeam, but you can call me Moon. And yes, my name really is Moonbeam.” Sparkling dark eyes in a face as delicate as a mythical nymph’s, her skin as pale a hue as her namesake satellite. “This mud bear here is Elbek.”

Elbek, all dramatic bones in a face that was just a touch too long for conventional notions of handsome—but that worked on him to the extent that the man was one of the clan’s resident Romeos—gave a jaunty salute. His skin glowed a burnished brown under the fading light.

“Theo,” Theo responded. “Thank you for stepping in on such short notice.”

Moon waved off the thanks. “Sounds like an interesting place. You want us to stay outside?” A question directed at both of them.

“I think you should be fine camping inside if you stay right by the front doorway,” Yakov said. “Not much to disturb there. Water’s been shut off and I didn’t manage to locate where, so you’ll be mud bears overnight unless you can find running water.”

“Already did.” Elbek held up his phone, on which was a topographic map. “Map’s old, but says there’s a stream out back. We’ll go one at a time, make sure the place isn’t left unattended.”

“Spasibo.” Yakov bumped fists with first one then the other. “I’ll bring you croissants and coffee tomorrow morning from the bakery.” Because there was only one bakery in the city that mattered.

“Good deal,” Moon said. “That lock for us?”

“Yeah. Only Theo can open the current gate lock.”

“Got it. See you tomorrow.”

“We’ll be early,” Yakov promised, knowing Theo wouldn’t want it otherwise. “Hope the ghosts in that place don’t keep you up too late.”

Elbek gave him the finger. “I love ghosts. I have a ghost detector I’m working on. So joke’s on you, Pashmina’s less handsome brother, also known as Yashmina.”

Laughing at the ridiculous set of names his and Pavel’s teenage friends had found hysterical—and still did even now they were all grown—Yakov waved his hand in another good-bye before he got in his vehicle, with Theo doing the same, and they drove out.

He waited outside the gates until the others had successfully installed the lock and given him the thumbs-up in the rearview mirror. Sticking one hand out the window to indicate he’d seen, he drove away.

Theo, however, twisted in her seat to look over her shoulder. “Are you sure they’ll be all right? That place . . .”

“They’ll be fine. If they don’t like it inside, they’ll camp outside—worse comes to worst, they’ll shift into bear form. Proper bears. Not fluffy koalas.”

A sudden silence before she turned back to look out the windshield. “Bears. Right.”

He realized she’d forgotten he had another form, was probably now imagining what he and the others looked like when they shifted. Well, even if he didn’t talk her into petting him in bear form, she’d get a look at plenty of bears strutting about if she hung out in Moscow long enough. Bears had a tendency to be bears and walk into shops while wearing their credit chips on necklaces custom made for their thick beary necks.

A bear had to shop, after all.

He almost laughed aloud at the memory associated with the thought—of the time he’d dared his twin to walk into a women’s lingerie shop that had a small stand of novelty men’s boxers for women to buy for their guys. Yakov had challenged Pavel to buy a pair of boxers in the correct size for his human form while in full bear form.

Pasha had returned with boxers printed with sparkling red hearts in his mouth. In the right size.

A faint sound from the passenger seat. A stomach rumble.

Adorable in how quiet it was.

“We’ll stop for food,” he said while reminding himself never to say his earlier thought aloud—for surely this secretly angry woman would strike him dead for even daring to think she was in any way adorable. “We need to talk and strategize regardless—might as well do it over food.” Even his easily amused bear knew that place was drenched in evil. If he could blunt a little of that for Theo by offering the comfort of food?

Hell yes, he was going to do that.

And no, it had nothing to do with the fact that he was finding Theo Marshall intensely more fascinating with every second that passed. So much fury to her. So much intelligence. And so many secrets.

Bozhe, but he wanted to feed her delicious desserts and charm each and every secret out of those lips so soft and full.

A wave of heat pulsed under Theo’s skin, snapping the loop of memory and gnawing anxiety that had held her prisoner. Yakov had heard her stomach make that demanding noise. That was not something for which her research on bear changelings had prepared her. It was, quite frankly, mortifying.

Despite her discomfort, she clung to the sharp burn of her embarrassment—because otherwise, the darkness might return, the echo of screams might return, and with them, her realization that her life was a lie. “That sounds sensible,” she said.

“Do you eat ordinary food or only Psy nutrients?”

“I can eat ordinary food.” One good thing about being an unimportant member of the family without agency or power was that after a while, nobody had cared to watch her. “Though . . . I have been warned about accepting food gifts from bears.” By Aunt Rita, who was clearly an extremely wise woman.

Yakov rolled his eyes. “It’s all lies. Food is just food.” Keeping his eyes on the road, he added, “I know a good place. Far away from rowdy bears. Only minor culinary subterfuge involved.”

Oddly enough, she already knew this stranger better than she knew anyone else in her life apart from Pax. He was amusing himself with his words but not in a way that shut her out. Rather the opposite. Yakov was inviting her to play with him. He was . . . warm. Not only in the body, but in everything about him.

“I do believe I’m traveling with a rowdy bear,” she said in such a solemn tone that he shot her an assessing look, his eyes kissed by amber.

“Funny,” he muttered with a scowl, but she heard the laughter he did a bad job of hiding beneath. “I’ll have you know Mischief Bear One has grown into a most well-behaved adult.”

So much warmth and heart. Theo wanted to crawl into his lap, into him.

Her mind flashed with the memory of his piercing gentleness with the poor broken bird on the path, his big blunt-tipped hands carrying the fragile body with utmost care. Even as her chest squeezed against the surge of emotion that threatened to overwhelm her senses, her fingers curled into her palm in instinctive memory of her contact with him.

Being enclosed in his grip had made her feel safe in a way that was disturbing.

Theo had spent a lifetime relying on no one else to find balance, but right then, she knew it would be terrifyingly easy to rely on Yakov Stepyrev. Pitiful, she told herself. He’s only being polite. You’re nothing but an assigned task to him, just like you were to Colette.

Even brutally conscious of that, she couldn’t stop herself from indulging in this moment with him where she could pretend to be a normal woman with a man who drew her like a bee to a pollen-laden bloom. No one needed to know of her internal foolishness. “I read an article that stated bears take pride in being unruly, but that beer is off-limits. Never to be spilled or wasted, no matter how bad the fight. Is that true?”

His wicked grin, the single dimple she could see, it made things low in her body clutch in ways unfamiliar and disquieting. “You should ask Nina Rodchenko sometime. She owns a club in Moscow that’s a favorite with the clan. Her bouncers have broken up many a fight.”

Squeezing her thighs together against the strange ache that was turning into a low, deep pulse, she found herself leaning a touch further toward him. Another small foolishness for a stolen beat of time. “In which you were a participant?”

The grin grew wider, a deep crease forming in the cheek she could see. “I told you, I am the very picture of good behavior.” Pious tone at odds with his expression. “It’s my brother who’s the troublemaker.”

So, they both had brothers. “Do you have other siblings?”

“No, just the one. You?”

“Pax is my only full sibling. Once we turned eighteen, our parents dissolved their co-parenting agreement.” Which hadn’t applied to Theo since she was seven, regardless. “After that, my father had two more children. We weren’t raised together and I don’t know them as anything but genetic half sibs.”

As a child, she’d sometimes dreamed that her father would rescue her and bring her back to Pax; it had taken until she was a teenager to realize that her father had never held any true power in the Marshall household.

Miles Faber had been chosen as Claire Marshall’s partner in procreation because of his Gradient level, high IQ, and pleasing appearance, and had been granted co-parenting rights as part of a business deal. Any kindness he’d had in him had stood no chance against the vicious coldness of her grandfather’s reign—a reign in which her mother had always been complicit.

Part of her had always believed that her half siblings were her father’s attempt to do it all over. Replacement children for the ones to whom he had no rights and that he’d “co-parented” only in name. It was her grandfather who’d made all major decisions when it came to her and Pax. She might’ve judged Miles for his inability to fight for his two firstborn, but it’d be akin to judging a sparrow for not standing up to a falcon.

Even teenage Theo had been tougher than Miles Faber would ever be.

“Big age gap.” Yakov’s voice was a warm brush of fur over her senses, an unspoken invitation to continue the conversation.

Perhaps that was why she carried on speaking of matters she spoke about to no one else. “I do wonder how things will change now that Silence has fallen. If it will change on any major level.” Theo couldn’t see her mother ever being anything but a cold and pragmatic machine.

“Love has a way of changing a lot.” Yakov turned onto the main thoroughfare that would lead them to central Moscow.

“A parent who loves their child,” he continued, “will move mountains to keep them safe. You ever try to take a child from a bear mother? She’ll rip off your face, make a mask of it, then wear that mask to your funeral.”

Theo blinked.

“Too violent?” Yakov winced when she didn’t reply.

“No.” Theo understood violence on the most intimate level. Only her grandfather had known the entirety of what she was capable of. And he was dead, bombed into innumerable fleshy shards that had then mostly been incinerated in the ensuing fire. The authorities had run his DNA from a blown-off hand that had survived the fire, done the secondary scan on a small piece of his skull that still had brain matter attached.

Too bad he’d been at one of his other residences at the time and not the estate.

Theo knew that there was probably something wrong with her for not being horrified by the mental images of Marshall’s obliterated body, but all she’d felt at the news of her grandfather’s demise was a soul-crushing relief—and a fierce joy. The fucking bastard was dead. She’d shake the hand of his murderer if she knew their identity.

“I suppose the idea of such parental protectiveness is strange to me,” she said in response to his question, and her words were an understatement of mammoth proportions. “What are your parents like?” Her curiosity about him was a tree with ever-emerging branches, even if to him, she was nothing but an assignment.

“I’ll introduce you to my mama before you leave Moscow,” Yakov offered. “She’s tough but friendly and she once tore off the head of a man who tried to kidnap me and Pasha.”