“No,” she whispered. “Stay on this Earth. With me. I want to keep him.”
Vyr lifted his chin and stared down his nose at her. “I can see how much you mean your words.” He tapped his temple twice. “Usually I hate this power. Hate. It. But just now you became important to me. Stop HavoK from what he’s doing to my woods. Bring him home and make him sleep easy. He doesn’t do that anymore. Prove you can tame HavoK, and I’ll welcome you into my crew.”
“You love him,” she rushed out before he could leave. “As a friend. You act cold to everyone, but Torren was always yours to keep safe, wasn’t he?”
“Hmm,” he rumbled, tightening his arms over his chest. “There are very few dragons left, and none like me. It doesn’t matter what HavoK looks like. To me, Torren is my brother. He’s a dragon in a gorilla’s body.” Vyr’s eyes blazed a lighter silver as he locked his gaze with hers. “I won’t be around forever.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I won’t, Candace. I don’t talk about this with the crew, but with you, you should know what your role will be when I’m gone.”
“What role?”
“Save. Torren. Because when I go, HavoK will turn into the devil himself.”
Chills rippled up her legs. She opened her mouth to say more, but Vyr turned abruptly and disappeared into the dark hallway.
Crap. Vyr was alpha here. A reluctant one, but alpha nonetheless, and if he was leaving, this crew was going to be thrown into turmoil. It would topple the hierarchy and shred the crew, the dominant males especially, from inside their minds outward. Broken bonds were bad for beasts like Torren, Nox, and Vyr.
With a huffed breath, she rushed to grab her jacket and slipped her feet into her snow boots. She was only wearing one of Torren’s XL shirts to sleep in, but she didn’t want to bother with shoving herself into jeans right now. Not when Vyr had told her HavoK was doing something bad in the woods.
Torren, Torren, Torren, please be all right.
That dream with her dad and mom had messed with her head, and all she wanted was to cuddle up against Torren’s chest and feel okay again.
Her unlaced boots made a crunching sound each step she took through the snow. The temperature was dropping. Thanks to the tiger in her middle, the cold only bothered her a little bit. She wrapped her arms around her stomach to conserve warmth as she followed the gorilla prints into the woods. The first streaks of gray illuminated the cloudy horizon, and snowflakes were falling slowly in big clusters. It reminded her of ashes raining down after the eruption of a volcano.
She heard HavoK long before she saw him. Or rather heard his destruction. In the distance, she could see trees shaking violently as he blasted his fists against them, and she heard the beating of his fists against his chest. Carefully, she stepped over logs and brush until she came to the edge of a small clearing. HavoK was destroying a tree. And when he got tired, he sauntered away and beat his chest, little specks of red flinging onto the white snow before he charged the tree again.
“Stop,” she murmured.
He didn’t react.
“I said stop!” she demanded, approaching slowly.
HavoK roared and pushed off the tree, paced away, chest puffed out, eyes on her, posturing. His eyes were greener than moss after a spring rain, and with every step, his knuckles bled onto the snow.
Before, she could only imagine what these Changes were like for him, but now she saw. She saw the damage. Saw the anger. Saw an animal with too much control.
“Torren,” she murmured.
HavoK peeled his glossy black lips over his long canines. “He’s not home,” HavoK said in that growly voice.
“Why not?”
HavoK spun and picked up a fallen log, then chucked it against another tree with a deafening crack. “Because dreams.”
“Bad ones?”
“Always bad.” HavoK slapped the side of his head three times and went back to pacing.
She made her way closer. “I had a bad one, too. What was yours about?”
“You. You. You. Tiger getting thrown through the wall. Tiger under that silverback and his fist, and what if I hadn’t been fast enough to stop him? I dreamed I wasn’t. When I woke up, you were sleeping and I was… I checked if you were breathing. Your Torren wasn’t there. Just me.”
“My Torren,” she repeated softly, closing the gap between them. “And you’re my HavoK.”
His lip snarled up but fell instantly. His eyes softened, and he stopped the pacing when she reached out for his arm. He allowed her to pull his massive hand from the ground. She searched his eyes for a few moments more before she examined the mess he’d made of his knuckles. “Why?”
“Because I must.”
“Why?”
“Because my body needs to stay strong. Because it needs to stay used to pain.”
“Why?”
The massive silverback huffed a frozen breath and sat in the snow, straightened his spine, but didn’t pull his hand out of hers. “So I can keep you and Vyr and Nox and Nevada safe.”
“Not like this. This doesn’t just hurt you, HavoK. It hurts Torren. You rip away from him, shove him aside, and the more you do that, the shorter your life will be.”
“Don’t care. Easier this way.”
“For who?”
“Me.”
“And what about me? What about your mate? What about your family group? What about your crew?”
HavoK gave his attention to the woods and looked bored. “Only care about you.”
“And Vyr.”
HavoK slid her a narrow-eyed glance but didn’t argue.
“And also Nox and Nevada,” she said, because she knew it to be true.
“They’re strange. I don’t understand them.”
Candace giggled. “I don’t think anyone understands them, and I think they like it that way.” Suddenly, before she could change her mind, she told him, “You’re Changing too much. Hey,” she murmured, lowering her voice. “Look at me.”
HavoK grimaced, but allowed her to cup his face.
“It’s too much, and you’re hurting Torren. And the more you hurt him, the more you hurt me.”
His breath steamed from him like engine smoke. He looked enormous, strong, and capable. His coal black fur and the dark gray saddle of color on his back contrasted against the white snow. He was a striking creature. He was deadly power meets beauty.
“Family group,” HavoK said low.
Candace smiled. “That’s me. But you have to work to keep everything together. What would our family group do without you? Who would keep me safe? Who would keep Vyr safe from the world, and the world safe from Vyr?”
“Who would beat the shit out of Nox?”
Candace snorted. “That, too. We need you. I need you, but you have to do better than this. You don’t keep yourself in check, and you push for more and more power, and what does that do for you?”
“Feels good.”
“Up until the point you lose everything.”
HavoK scratched his lip and let off a low, unhappy-sounding rumble. “I don’t like rules. I like to make them or break them.”
“Then we’ll call it compromise. Three.”
“Three times a day?” HavoK barked.
“That’s way more than any other shifter I’ve ever met, so quit your belly-achin’.”