Page 86 of Brandon’s Mate

He could hear her crying inside his head. She didn’t know how to do that.

Maybe she was a wolf like Brody. Can you be a wolf? He pictured that in his mind, and inside him he heard a tiny howl.

Change, he told her. He hadn’t known then that shifters didn’t change until they were at least a year old, except maybe dragons. He just knew she couldn’t come out as a baby, but maybe she could as a little wolf pup. Maybe she’d be smaller.

She wouldn’t listen to him, so he said it louder. He tried to do like Flynn did when he was being the alpha and making people stop fighting. CHANGE! he yelled in his head. AND STOP FIGHTING, DAMMIT!

The baby stopped moving.

Then there was a ripple and a heave in Jasmin’s stomach. “She’s turning!” Trish pushed on Jasmin’s belly, trying to help the baby turn the right way to be born.

But when it came out it wasn’t a baby. It was a little wolf, all messy and bloody. She opened her eyes and they were bright blue, and she turned her head and looked up to where Brandon was staring in the window, mesmerized.

Their eyes met, and then the tiny wolf rippled and shimmered and turned into a human baby, and started to cry.

Brandon never told anybody what happened that day. He knew he wasn’t supposed to watch Jasmin pop a baby out of her belly, and he didn’t want to get in trouble again because he’d been in trouble already three times that week and Flynn had threatened to not make him panthercakes for breakfast ever again.

Flynn probably didn’t mean it, but he had to be pretty mad to even say it.

Later, when Brody brought Kitty out and showed her to the crew, he let Brandon hold her on his lap.

She looked up at him with those big blue eyes like he’d seen on the wolf, and he knew that he was always supposed to protect her and keep her safe.

Brandon skidded the truck around a curve. He’d tried to protect Kitty by leaving her. He was a troublemaker and a hellraiser, and he figured she was better off without him.

He hadn’t understood that she not only belonged to him, she was maybe the only thing that could bring joy into his life.

And he belonged to her.

Flynn had told him that his panther needed a crew to take care of, and he’d told Flynn to fuck off. It was only now that he was finally seeing what Flynn was talking about.

If you were a strong enough alpha, you needed a crew to keep you steady. Even if they drove you nuts. Even if sometimes you’d rather move to Tahiti than deal with their shit.

He had a crew now. He’d always had them. They needed him, and he needed them.

But most of all, he needed her. Kitty Jameson, who loved him and supported him and didn’t take his bullshit at all, and who’d stand by him no matter what.

He couldn’t lose her.

And he was going to lay waste to the people who had hurt her. Not a single one of them would survive.

Gunning the motor, he sped through the night.

Chapter 38

Her dream vision was real. Kitty was trapped in a burning building, just like before.

And just like before, Monster Wolf was her only way out.

Kitty felt the red wave of rage and terror bearing down on her like a flash flood in the desert. Sudden, implacable, a force of nature.

Out, out out out! Fire!

Walk-in refrigerators weren’t fireproof, and they depended on ventilation from outside for the air supply. If she didn’t get out of here, she would die.

Her, and the cat-girl. She looked down at the body on the floor, and forced herself to focus. Not “the cat-girl.” A person. Callie.

It won’t survive, Monster Wolf said. It’s using up our air. Put it down.