“She’s my mate,” Tiger said, his voice still not working right, but it grew firmer as he tightened his grip on her. “She stays.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Carly’s eyes widened. “What exactly are you talking about?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Liam said quickly, over her words. “It’s a bit different in Shiftertown, laddie. I’ve explained it to you.”
Tiger closed his eyes. Liam, Sean, and Connor had told him about the mating rules—the mate-claim signaled to all other Shifters that the female was off-limits to all other males. The subsequent ceremonies performed by the clan leader, one under sunlight, one under the light of the full moon, bound the mates together under the eyes of the Father God and Mother Goddess.
But the Father God and Mother Goddess had never found Tiger in the basement of the experiment station during his nearly forty years of captivity. Why should Tiger wait for them to acknowledge his mate?
Dylan, Liam’s father and a stickler for the rules of Shifters, had admitted to Tiger one day that the rituals were artificial, put into place at a time when Shifters had fought each other nearly to extinction. To avoid Shifter males battling each other to the death over every female, they’d come up with scent-marking and the mate-claim, and the sun and moon ceremonies performed by the clan leader.
Tiger had listened, wanting to learn everything he could about who and what he was. But he knew—and Dylan knew—that the rules didn’t mean anything. A Shifter recognized his mate when he met her. He scented her, he saw her, he felt her heat, and he knew.
Carly was Tiger’s mate. No doubt about it.
With steady hands, Tiger ripped open his annoying hospital gown and tossed the shreds to the floor. The sheets around his waist bared his chest and abdomen, tanned from working shirtless on cars with Connor. Red circles of bullet holes pockmarked his chest and stomach, blood smeared around them.
The holes had already half closed. Tiger pointed at them.
“The touch of a mate,” he said to Liam. “Heals, you said. Iona said.”
“Shifters are good at healing themselves,” Liam answered, but with less conviction. “And you’re a very strong Shifter.”
A super Shifter, Iona, the woman who’d rescued him, had called him. Iona had been wonderful, and Tiger would always be fond of her. But she hadn’t been his mate.
“Stop this before you confuse me more.” Carly pulled away from Tiger and stood up. “You’re saying I closed that up?” She pointed at a wound, red and angry. “Those holes still look pretty bad to me.”
“They’re not.”
Tiger noted that everyone in the room stood a certain distance from the bed, as though an unseen barrier kept them back. They were afraid of coming too close to his mate, he thought in satisfaction. They were acknowledging her.
“I don’t believe you,” Carly said. “You look terrible, and I feel just awful for getting you hurt on top of everything else. So you let the doctors do their thing. Please?”
Tiger closed his hand around hers again. “Only if you stay.”
She gave him the perplexed look again, then she let out her breath. “Oh, why not? I’m sure I’ll be fired on top of everything else today. What the hell.”
“We’ll see you don’t lose by helping us, lass,” Liam said, in the reassuring way only he could. “Thank you.”
“Least I can do. My mama always said a person should acknowledge everything she’s responsible for, even if she didn’t mean it.” She paused. “Wish Ethan’s mama had taught him that too.”
Tiger felt her pain through her grip on his hand, and his anger surged again. He remembered the surprise and then outrage on Ethan’s face when Carly had bounded through the door to find him sexing another woman. The man had blamed Carly. But a male didn’t cheat on his mate. No matter what.
Which meant Carly had never truly been Ethan’s mate, not even in the human understanding of the bond. With Ethan’s act of betrayal, Carly was free of him. Free for Tiger to claim.
Another voice joined the throng. “Is he sedated?”
Tiger recognized the doctor who, through the first haze of Tiger’s rage and pain, had extracted what bullets remained in Tiger’s flesh. Tiger had come awake on the table and started to change in his panic, which had led to his being chained to the bed again.
Stupid clinic should have let Connor be there to calm him down. Then Tiger might not have flashed back to the sterile experiment rooms in what humans called Area 51, might not have been completely terrified.
“He’ll be all right,” Liam said, using his most charming, most Irish tones. “He just needed a bit of calming, as you can see.”
“Then I need him in the OR to finish.”
The doctor started to walk away, leaving the three nurses and another man in white scrubs looking unhappy.
“No,” Tiger said. Everything in him tensed again.
Carly’s brow puckered as she ran a soothing hand along Tiger’s wrist. “It’s okay. He just wants to sew you up.”
“He does it here. I don’t go back to that room.”
“Why not? It’s where he’ll have all the stuff he needs to put you back together, and sterilized so you won’t get an infection.”
She sounded so reasonable, so calming. And yet, she hadn’t seen the rooms they’d taken him to in the stone building in the desert, where needles and probes had pierced his flesh, where electrodes had crackled through his brain and under his skin. The experimenters wanted to see how much he could stand, so they put him through everything imaginable.
“It makes him remember bad things,” Connor said.
The cub, the youngest of them here, understood. Connor had always understood Tiger more than the others had.
Carly called after the doctor. “Wait. Why can’t you work on him in here?”
The doctor, looking harassed, turned back. “Because the light is bad, and I need my equipment.”
“Bring it in. It’s either that or have all these people fighting to get him to your operating room again.”
The doctor ran a practiced eye over Tiger. “If you guarantee he’ll sit there and let me finish, I’ll do it. I’ll give him something for the pain, but it’s still going to hurt. If not, I’m putting him under heavy sedation, very heavy, you understand? Most people die under that kind of sedation, even Shifters.”
“He’ll be good.” Carly beamed a smile at the man. “Promise. Right?” she asked Tiger.