Bearing Hearts (City Shifters: the Den Book 2)

C
opyright
© 2016 by Layla Nash

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover design by Resplendent Media.

A
xel missed real winter
. It never got cold enough since leaving the village north of the Arctic Circle where he'd hidden after everything fell apart. He only bothered with a jacket because most people paid attention if he walked around in a t-shirt as the snow fell. And today, he needed to blend in.

He pretended to read a magazine in the window of the trendy coffee shop so he could ignore the brunette in stilettos who kept flipping her hair and trying to catch his attention. Axel frowned out the window, waiting for the BadCreek enforcer to show up. Sasha walked three blocks south, tracking the guy, and called to give Axel the head's up. The only bear in Kaiser's group who liked cold almost as much as Axel was Sasha: the Russian spent most of his life in the shitty part of Siberia.

Axel hadn't known any part of Siberia could be shittier than the rest, but apparently it could. And Sasha didn't like to talk about the difference.

Axel finished his coffee as the BadCreek wolf, a tall dude with dark hair and scars on his face, sauntered down the sidewalk, his phone to his ear. They'd figured out this guy was one of the main enforcers for the rogue alpha, if not the top beta and the second-in-command, but so far no one knew his name or how to get to him. He knew all the secrets the Council would need to take down BadCreek, and Axel and Sasha couldn't afford to lose him.

Axel finished his coffee and folded up the magazine so he could launch out of the cafe when needed. The enforcer paused across the street on a snow-crusted patch of ground with a few benches, the place optimistically called a park, and turned in a slow circle to survey the surroundings. Axel held his breath and pretended to watch the few pedestrians out and about on a cold morning. Including a girl in Salvation Army chic clothes with a shock of violet hair mixed with staggered blonde and auburn stripes who scurried past the coffee shop and paused on the curb, about to cross the street. He snorted and concentrated on the beta as the man searched for someone.

Maybe they'd get lucky and he would meet with the financier or courier or whoever right there in the middle of the park. Axel and Sasha would be able to grab them both and haul them off for the Council to interrogate, and then they'd finally be able to get rid of the BadCreek pack. The private investigator they worked with thought the beta was the key to taking down the external trappings of BadCreek's illicit empire.

Axel frowned as the girl with purple hair stepped between two parked cars and edged into the street, though half her concentration remained on the man in the park and the other half focused on a phone in her hands. Completely distracted. Axel held his breath and tried to ignore her, even though his polar bear side started to get anxious. The kid might get herself killed crossing the street, but she looked old enough to look both ways. The coffee cup crushed in his hand and Axel picked up his own phone to signal Sasha, who lurked around the block and observed the park from a safe distance.

Axel eased to his feet and moved toward the door, muttering instructions to Sasha as he plotted the takedown. They just needed to see the beta exchange something with the financier. A squirrelly-looking human in a camel hair coat approached the rogue wolf, looking around nervously, and they shook hands. Axel pulled his black watch-cap lower to disguise his blonde hair and tossed the coffee cup in the trash on his way to the street. If they wrapped this up quickly, maybe there would be enough time for Axel to go bear and roam through the forest. He could find a snow drift deep enough to dive into, and then the polar bear side of him could rest. The snow and ice might numb him long enough to let him sleep, to keep the dreams away.

"I'll take the little dude," Sasha said, his Russian accent slow and laconic. Axel could just picture him smoking and pondering existential thoughts as he answered the phone.

"Of course you will," Axel said under his breath. "Wait until they make the deal."

The two men in the park continued an intense discussion, the smaller man shaking his head a lot and the beta looming larger and larger. Axel wondered if he'd end up saving the little dude's life, and debated just letting the rogue wolf kill him. The human had made some bad choices in his life, if he funded BadCreek and all of their terrible medical experiments on shifter kids. Sometimes karma was a bitch. Axel wouldn’t mind helping the universe even the score for that particular crime, but he needed to see a hint of evidence that this was the right guy.

Axel paused at the corner, waiting for the light to turn so he could cross to the park, and glanced down the block. His heart jumped to his throat. That damn girl with purple hair hopped out from between the cars, her attention on the BadCreek beta, and started across the street. Right into the middle of oncoming traffic, racing to beat the yellow light.

He flinched as one car swerved, nearly slamming into another car, but there was too much traffic. And a giant city bus, careening around the corner and barreling toward her without concern for lanes or lights or anything. She blinked and finally looked up from her phone, but froze in the street and stared at the traffic. His polar bear side nearly launched right out to save her, wanted to crush the cars that got close to her.

Axel cursed, looking back to where the two men argued, and knew the Council needed him to catch those men. He should have concentrated on the mission, told Sasha when to move in, and captured the two sons of bitches who'd killed so many shifters in the city in the last few months.

But instead he raced toward that damn girl as she frowned at the park and started forward, trying to beat the bus and the cars and ignoring a few people shouting, and the entire time all he thought was what a dumb move it was. He grabbed her and launched them both out of traffic, closer to the park, and he landed hard on his shoulder with her held against his chest. They rolled, slamming into the concrete, and finally came to a stop on the snow-crusted grass, Axel on top.

He stared down at her, stunned at how small and fragile she felt, and couldn't come up with anything to say as his heart stopped beating and the bear exhaled in relief.

Her lips parted as she looked at him, wide blue eyes blinking and unfocused. She said, "Ragnar?" in a dismayed tone, and passed out.

She might as well have shot him in the face and kicked him in the balls at the same time. Although her knee had landed pretty solidly in his junk when he grabbed her, so she'd already achieved significant shock before she said his brother's name. Axel's bear roared in dismay and rage and grief. She knew their twin. Somehow the odd girl with the heart-shaped face and crazy hair knew Ragnar.

Axel blinked as people started forming a crowd, asking if the girl was okay, and he shoved to his feet. Sasha had the squirrelly human in a friendly headlock, raising his other hand in a 'what the fuck' gesture. The BadCreek enforcer had vanished. Axel groaned. They'd spent weeks studying the guy's schedule, waiting for more information on the financier and where they met, and planning the best way to grab them both and disappear. And one girl ruined it.

Kaiser and the other guys would have a goddamn field day with this.

Axel muttered to the concerned pedestrians and leaned down to pick the girl up. She didn't look injured, just starved and a little feverish. And she felt cold from her threadbare clothes, her skin a little clammy where he could feel her wrist. His bear growled. If she knew Ragnar, then clearly Ragnar wasn't taking care of her appropriately. Axel added that to the list of things he would discuss with his brother. If he ever saw him again.

Axel carried the girl toward Sasha, shaking his head. "Which way did he go?"

The other bear shrugged, flexing his arm around the human's throat until the smaller man turned blue. "Didn't see. Your little drama created a convenient distraction. I saw you running and thought you'd be headed this way, but instead..." The Russian shrugged, then looked at the girl. "Who is she?"

"I don't know." Axel wanted to put her down but the bear insisted they hold her a little longer. She smelled like snow. And she needed to be warm, right next to his chest so he could hear her heart beating. "But we should get out of here."

"We should," Sasha said, and jostled the human again. "But maybe girl should not. If she is not part of this, it would not be kind to get her involved. Right?"

"She knew something about these two." It felt like a half-truth, though Axel could not have articulated why. "She was focused on the big dude when she started crossing the street. Maybe she knows them."

Sasha's eyebrows rose in a typically disbelieving expression. And he waited.

Axel adjusted how he held the girl, frowning as a half-full backpack tangled in her arms and his. "Just go. We'll take them both to the warehouse and sort it out there. I'm not leaving an unconscious girl in the middle of the street."

The Russian shrugged and started dragging the financier toward where they'd parked the car in an alley a few blocks away. Axel followed, trying not to feel conspicuous as he carried the purple-haired girl, and waited as Sasha bound the human's hands and feet, shoved him into the trunk, and thumped him on the head with the tire iron before slamming the lid closed. He lit another cigarette and frowned at the unconscious girl. "You sure you don't know her?"

"No, I've never seen her before." Axel scowled at the rear door. "Open it up already."

Sasha did, watching as Axel slid the girl into the back seat and handed him the backpack. The Russian studied the cigarette, tapping ash off the end. "Maybe she knows you."

"I doubt it."

The other bear didn't blink as smoke curled toward his face. "She made convenient distraction, no? Maybe it was no accident."

Axel shook his head, even though he knew what Sasha said made sense. The girl could have been a perfectly-timed disruption to allow the BadCreek enforcer to escape. She smelled like a shifter, too, though definitely not a bear. If she were a wolf, working for BadCreek, he'd just kidnapped one of their own and would no doubt bring all kinds of unholy hell down on the rest of the den. He shut the door on her and climbed into the driver's seat, cranking up the heat. She was too thin, was probably freezing in those shitty clothes, and...

A flush climbed his cheeks when Sasha ducked into the passenger seat and eyed him sideways. On the drive over in the early morning chill, he’d kept the windows down, wanting to feel snow in the air. He never used the heater. But Axel refused to turn it down, though, and started driving to the warehouse. The girl needed to be warm. That was the end of the conversation, and he didn’t give a shit what Sasha thought.

He focused on getting to the warehouse. The others could meet them there. Kaiser would know what to do about the girl.

Sasha searched the girl's backpack, and waited until they were nearly halfway to the warehouse before he asked, too casually for it to be idle curiosity, "Who is Ragnar?"

Axel gripped the steering wheel until the leather creaked in his grip. His heart cracked again, right over the empty space that Ragnar once occupied. "No one."

E
verything hurt
. I forced my eyes open and tried to look around, but a single bulb cast too much light in my face and soon, my vision swam and everything was distorted. I sat in a stiff wooden chair, even more uncomfortable given the aches in my muscles and the burning in my hip from where I hit the ground. A bubbling nausea that threatened to empty my stomach of the nothing I'd eaten in the last twenty-four hours rose to the surface. I tried to alleviate the pain in my back but I couldn't move my arms, and even my ass was numb from the cold air and sitting so still.

It looked like I was in an abandoned warehouse, with odd drips and echoing creaks originating in cobwebbed machinery, and I tried to free my legs with more urgency. Not exactly a place I wanted to die. And I really had to pee.

But my hands, bound behind me, stayed tied, and my legs remained chained to the chair. I shivered.

The events that led up to being tied to a chair in an abandoned warehouse were blurry. The last thing I remembered was Ragnar racing toward me, tackling me, and then just staring at me when I said his name. I swallowed a surge of grief and bile. He'd been dead almost three months but it still felt like yesterday. Hallucinating that he was saving my life was just the icing on the cake. Maybe Nick decided he didn't want to work with us anymore and needed to tie up some loose ends. Me being the loosest, apparently.

That didn't sound right.

I blinked as a shoe scuffled close by, and I tried to peer through the darkness. "Who's there?"

More dripping echoed through the vacant space, then the scratch of a lighter and the acrid smell of cheap cigarettes reached me. It almost hid the stink of old fish. Maybe not a warehouse. Maybe a processing plant. The thought and mishmash of smells made me gag. The fox wanted to bury her nose in something nice and clean, like fresh cotton, but it felt like I would always smell that nasty old fish.

"Who are you?" The smooth voice definitely wasn't Ragnar's. Instead, from somewhere behind me, it grumbled with a thick Russian accent.

"I'm Lucy," I said, then wanted to smack my forehead. I should have used a fake name. Except they had my backpack, most likely, which meant they probably had my driver's license and my wallet and... My notebook and notes and Smith's letters. His instructions.
Shit
. Without Smith's instructions, I wouldn't be able to make contact. And if the guy questioning me belonged to Nick's pack and found out I worked for Smith, we'd both be dead in a snap. Gruesomely dead. "Look, I think this is a mistake. That guy bumped into me but it's cool. I need to meet some friends, so if you could just —"

"Who do you work for?"

My stomach rolled and I wondered how far I could lean without toppling the chair if I needed to barf. I wore my last pair of semi-clean pants and didn’t have enough change for a Laundromat, so I swallowed as much of the nausea as I could. "I'm kind of between jobs."

"Who do you work for, Lucy?" He didn't sound angry, just disinterested. Maybe disappointed, as if he already knew I had lied. I searched the darkness for any sign of him, hoping for Ragnar instead, but my vision blurred and my head started to pound.

Cold seeped through my tennis shoes and up my legs, the freezing concrete leeching whatever warmth I'd managed to store up in my oversized jeans. I tried to wiggle my toes to get feeling back. "I don't work for anyone now, okay? I used to run errands for someone but he's gone now and I'm on my own."

My voice cracked on the last bit and I clenched my hands, even though they were still tied behind me. Damn it. I fought to breathe normally, deep and even, and hoped they couldn't read the grief on my face. I missed Ragnar. I missed him so much it sucked all the air from the world. It still felt like a raw, red wound cutting through the middle of me. It didn't seem possible, but the fox part of me missed him even more than the human side did. He was the only one who understood us, and though polar bears weren't known for their patience, he didn't mind us following him around.

"Errands?" The Russian voice moved closer, circling to my right, and I searched my peripheral vision for a hint of who spoke. Maybe I could convince him to free my feet. Or get me a bucket to barf in. "What kind of errands?"

My head tilted back so I could stare up into the darkness around the ceiling, closing my eyes against the brilliant spot of the single bulb making my head ache more. If they were going to kill me, they'd kill me regardless of what I said. I could lead him on for a while, string him along with tidbits of information, and hope I pulled my wrists free, but from the sharp pain in my hip and side, I probably wouldn’t be running any sprints for a while. I could die tired, or I could die tied to a chair. The ropes bit into my wrists as I twisted them. At least tired meant I died with dignity. Maybe.

"Just errands. Picking up packages, dropping off packages, doing research." I closed my left eye to relieve the agony in my temple. The room started to tilt around me and my stomach objected. "Look, I'm sorry if I walked into something, I just thought —"

"Who is Ragnar?"

My breath caught. A growl started from the shadows and my head snapped up so I could search for a hint of who made the noise. I waited to answer, hoping the growler would make himself visible, but as the silence stretched and nothing moved, I gave up. "He was a friend. We worked together."

Footsteps clicked on the concrete floor, echoing in the frigid air, and the Russian came into view. My heart sank and I stopped trying to pull my hands free. Well, balls. The guy was huge.
Huge
. Six feet and a million inches tall, shoulders wider than a Buick, and legs like tree trunks. The scent of cheap cigarettes wafted toward me and stung my nose, and I sneezed. The Russian's dark eyebrow arched as he stood in front of me, flicking a fancy lighter over and over. "A friend. What kind of friend?"

My head tilted. Not the question I expected, and not really any of their business. I clenched my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering in the cold, and I struggled with indignation and anger rather than fear. "Why?"

"I ask question, you answer." The accent grew stronger and he held the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger as he pointed at me. "What kind of friend this Ragnar was?"

"That is none of your business," I said with as much dignity as I could muster. "And you can go ahead and kill me, because I'm not going to —"

"Were you fucking him?" The growl came out low and calm but so close on my left that I jumped, trying to face the man with Ragnar's face as he stepped out of the shadows, and the chair toppled over.

I landed hard on my shoulder and yelped, though I managed to keep my head from smacking into the concrete. I wiggled, hoping maybe the chair broke and I could get my legs free enough to kick one of them in the balls, but the ropes still held. It might have been my imagination, but I thought the Russian rolled his eyes as he tossed the cigarette aside and picked me up, chair and all, to stand upright once more. He even tapped the end of my nose. "You are clumsy girl."

The blood rushed out of my head and I blinked to clear the black splotches from my vision. This was not good. And then the Ragnar look-alike stood in front of me, expression hard and arms folded over his chest, and waited for his answer.

Staring at him made my head hurt, but not as much as my heart. "That's not your business."

"Were you fucking him?" he repeated, implacable. Unemotional. Although a hint of something like regret made his eyes darker blue, like really deep winter.

"That is
not
your business," I said, just as slow and calm, as if the problem was him not understanding instead of being a rude prick. "And fuck you for asking. Where the hell were you raised, to ask a girl that? I don't know what I was thinking, confusing you for Ragnar. You might have his face, but you're not even half the man he was."

As I scowled at him, the Russian looked dangerously close to laughing. When the blonde Viking with Ragnar's face shot him a deadly look as well, the Russian shrugged and retreated, still flicking his lighter over and over.

The blonde strode closer, eyes narrowed. "What the hell do you know about what kind of man Ragnar is?"

"
Was
," I said, and part of me wanted him to hurt as much as I did. He must have been Ragnar's brother, the one Rag never talked about. The one he left a letter for, in case anything happened to him. "He died. Three months ago."

He staggered back, all trace of color draining from his face, and his hands clenched into hammer-like fists as his sides. He stared at me as the silence stretched and all I could hear was my heart beating in my ears. His eyes flashed gold. "How?"

"He was killed." I ignored the burn of grief in my sinuses and forced myself to offer up the same sort of cold expression Rag would have used, delivering just the facts. Just facts, no emotion. Either of those guys could kill me with their bare hands in that damn icebox of a warehouse, and no one knew where I was. They could make me disappear. I couldn't afford weakness or emotion. "We were working a job, looking for information for a client of ours, and the bastards we were hired to track caught him. Killed him."

"His body," the Viking said, and when I dared to look at him, saw contortions of grief on his face. "Where is it? What did you do with him?"

"Cremated," I said. Just facts. Just normal, mundane facts. We weren't talking about a man I'd loved. Who'd been murdered. Then incinerated because I couldn't stand the thought of putting him in the ground somewhere.

"Where are the ashes?"

"Scattered," I said, though it was a lie. A small lie. It could have been a fact. I carried the sealed urn in my backpack for the time being, so Ragnar would be with me when I finally found the bastards responsible for his death, but he didn't need to know that. He had no right to know. I hadn’t found the right place to scatter his ashes, not yet. Some place with water and blue-ice winter, with a storm building all around and wind tearing through me. Then I could say good-bye. "Over the river."

The Russian eyed me from a few feet away, the pace of his lighter-flicking slowing down, and I wondered if he'd found the urn in my bag. The blonde didn't notice, though, as he leaned closer. "Who were you to him? Were you his mate?"

His mate? I blinked, thrown off balance. Ragnar and I had never talked about it, really. "What if I was?"

He growled and lurched forward, and I flinched away in anticipation, the chair rocking back enough that I nearly tipped over again. The Russian grabbed his arm to stop him, voice low. "Axel, enough."

Axel. The brother. All the feeling left my limbs and I wanted to throw up again. Of course he was, with Ragnar’s face. He couldn’t have been anyone else. "You're Axel?"

Ragnar's brother bared his teeth in a ferocious snarl, the kind of expression a human face wasn’t supposed to be capable of. "Tell me how he died."

I put my shoulders back and prayed for more strength than I had left, not caring if the blonde decided to kill me. Smith would find out eventually, and he would even the score. No one fucked with Smith's people and got away with it. I just needed to leave enough of myself behind for him to start looking.

"We were following a couple of guys, trying to get enough pattern of life information on them so our client could... intervene. They spotted Ragnar, lured him in. Killed him. They wanted to know what he knew but he wouldn't give the mission up. Wouldn't give me up."

The blonde in front of me made a savage noise and the muscles flexed in his shoulders, even through the thick sweater, and I braced for death. He looked like the kind of man who took his killing personally, so it would probably be fists or boots or hands around my throat. He stood over me, breathing heavily, and balanced on the verge of a shift as his nails grew dark and long. A polar bear looked at me from a human face, and my fox squeaked in dismay. She wanted to hide. We needed to find a nice burrow and curl up with our tail over our face and just disappear until he wandered away.

Instead, I looked at him and braced for the end. "Just do it. It's my fault he's gone."

Another bear noise tore from his throat, and Axel loomed larger still. I took a deep breath. There was a good reason Arctic foxes only followed polar bears at a distance. They could eat us in one bite.

But nothing happened. I looked up at him once more and winced. He looked so much like Ragnar, it broke my heart again. And grief — unfathomable grief stirred in his eyes. I opened my mouth, started to tell him how sorry I was that his brother died, but he growled and turned on his heel.

He paused next to the Russian to say, "Take care of it," then stormed off. He disappeared into the dark shadows of the warehouse. Far away, a heavy door slammed shut and the sound of a car starting broke the silence.

'Take care of it' did not bode well for me. I started tugging at the ropes once more as the Russian continued watching me without any interest. I took a shaky breath. Maybe I could sway him, convince him to just let me disappear. That was one way of taking care of it. "I don't know you, but I have money. Powerful friends. If I disappear and they can't —"

"Stop." The dark stubble rasped against his palm as he rubbed his jaw. The Russian glanced around the warehouse, then looked up at the ceiling as if waiting for divine intervention. He shook his head and gave me a long-suffering look. "Start explaining. Talk fast."

Hope kindled in my chest for the first time in weeks. Convincing him to release me meant I could get in touch with Smith, get his help with tracking down the bastards who killed Ragnar and the ones who still kept Nick tangled in their web, and then I could avenge Ragnar's death. Cancel the debt I owed him for saving my life. Then I could move on, find peace somewhere else, and try to forget his smile.

My throat burned and I wanted to find that burrow, sleep for a week or more. But instead I started talking, trying to tell the long story to the impassive Russian as he lit cigarette after cigarette, and the freezing air settled into my bones until I knew I'd never be warm again. I talked until my voice went hoarse, but I still pulled at the ropes on my wrists anyway. Just in case.