Ronin swallowed the sound down, eyes on the front door. The bruises on her face that wouldn’t heal fast enough and the easy tears in her eyes said differently. She might not be fragile, but she hadn’t realized her strength yet. And he would be damned if he was so selfish that he would ask her to find that strength by putting her through war.
He just needed to get her out of here. No…it was more than that. Ronin frowned. He needed to keep her safe.
The front door creaked open, and Emerald stepped out onto the front porch. She didn’t see him right away, so he stilled. He liked watching her when she didn’t know. He’d done it as a cub, and had done it again last night while she was sleeping. What a fucking creeper he’d turned out to be.
She frowned in the direction of the fight, but when a squirrel rustled a tree branch, Emerald’s attention darted to it. He could see her profile from here. High cheek bones and dark eyebrows. Raven-colored hair that tumbled down her shoulders like black waves. She’d washed all of her make-up away, but she was still a stunner. She wasn’t one of those skinny girls the Pride was probably looking to put on the throne beside him. Nah, that wasn’t his type. His type was Emerald. She had full, soft-lookin’ tits and an ass he could grab when he was fucking her. Just the mental image of him railing her on her back, her spine arched under him, his name on her lips, how tight and wet she would feel, made his dick hard and too thick to kneel in this position comfortably. When he stood slowly, she arched her gaze to him. Her full lips turned up in a sweet smile. Had anyone smiled like that before when they’d seen him? He couldn’t remember a single time.
“Hi,” he murmured.
She inhaled deeply and then grinned even bigger as she said, “Hi, yourself.”
Something was different about her, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He held up a giant paper grocery bag, the meal he’d thrown together for them. “Do you want to do a hike and have lunch with me?”
Her cheeks turned a pretty shade of pink as she nodded. God, those gorgeous green eyes. It was hard to look away from them. As she approached, her thick-soled boots made crunching sounds through the snow.
He said, “You don’t look down as much anymore.”
“Well, not here. No one’s putting me in my place here.” Her jacket was open, so Ronin set the bag of food down in the snow and pulled her closer by the open flaps of her coat. As he zipped her up, he said, “No one will put you in your place here.”
“Why not?” she asked cheekily.
Pretty girl. He didn’t like hurting girls, but she should keep her distance today. He would have to walk a fine line between letting his lion get protective but not bonding them. He didn’t want to make it harder for her to leave.
Keep her safe. And he would, even if it meant from himself.
He gestured to the fight as they swung a wide berth around it. “You wouldn’t even guess how many of those fights I’ve been in. My destiny is a bloody one, Em. You should know that before I tell you things that will take the smile from your face.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, her attention on the two bloody lions that were locked up in battle.
Terrence was on the outskirts, not paying attention to the fight. Instead, he was tracking Ronin and Emerald with narrowed, suspicious eyes. He was going to have to bring Terrence back in line sooner rather than later. That lion had been pushing Ronin lately. But it would have to wait until tomorrow, if he survived. Right now, he had three precious hours with Em. Ripping his gaze away from Terrence, he said, “I mean, I don’t necessarily want to hurt you. We just aren’t on the same path of destruction. I want to keep it that way.” He zipped her jacket up to her neck and took a step away, picked up the sack, and started walking toward the woods. “No one will put you in your place because you don’t belong here.”
He heard it—a little whoosh of breath like she’d been hurt by his words. Too fragile, and it made him feel things. Soft things that were bad for an Alpha on a mission. He needed to keep his focus.
Behind him, Emerald cleared her throat. “You have a lot of tattoos.”
An out—that was what she offered him. An out from the painful, awkward moment that hung in the air between them. Right at the edge of the trees, he stopped and waited for her to catch up. “I got my first one the year after I joined the Furers.”
“The tiger Crew?”
He nodded. “I was a hell-raiser there. Mad at the world, missing Grim—”
“I remember you two were really close,” she said, picking her way carefully through the brush beside him. The trail here was years overgrown and barely visible anymore.
“Yeah. He was a brother to me. I spent so much time with him and Rose, they were like a family to me when I lived here. And then suddenly being ripped away and placed in a Crew of strangers? They took me in, but Tigers stick with tigers. It wasn’t their idea to bring in a lion cub with the Tarian Pride’s death-mark on his neck. I think Damon bribed them. Or threatened them.”
Ronin chuckled at the memory of the entire Crew going quiet every time someone mentioned the Blue Dragon. “And I wasn’t super-enjoyable to be around. I fought everyone all the time, for any reason at all. I was just pissed down to my soul. I got passed around from family to family, until finally the Alpha, Zeke, came to visit me. He was a bachelor tiger, a total monster, got to be Alpha by brawling his way to the top and stepping on every bit of political tradition in the process. Old, scarred-up, gnarly beast of a man. I remember he found me sitting on a woodpile, not doing the chores my foster family at the time had asked me to do, and he was this tall, barrel-chested man. I was thin as a whip at the time, hadn’t started getting my size on me yet. He had this great big old beard and dominance out the ass, and it was hard to even breathe around him.” Ronin moved a branch aside for Emerald to pass. “He asked me, ‘Boy, do you even know what you’re fighting for?’ And I couldn’t answer intelligently at the time because I didn’t know why I was so angry, so I said, ‘Hey, Zeke, why don’t you fuck off,’ and before the last word was out of my mouth, he had my shirt in his fist and had dragged me within an inch of his face. I could feel his snarl, he was that close.”
“Oh, my gosh,” Em murmured. “What happened then?”
“Well, I about pissed myself because I thought it was finally happening, I was gonna die, but he pulled his lips back over some razor-sharp teeth and said, ‘You’re my cub now.’” Ronin couldn’t help his smile. “You know how degrading it is to hear you’re some stranger’s cub at age seventeen? I thought I was grown! I thought I didn’t need anyone in the world, and then Zeke comes in and basically says, ‘Look, baby, you’re mine to bottle feed now until you learn to handle your shit.’ I think my pride circled the toilet that day. And it’s not like I could say, ‘Polite decline,’ to the Alpha. He was Zeke. He was fuckin’ terrifying, twice my size, and dominant as hell. I was shaking in my boots while trying to act tough.”
“What did you say?”
There was a smile in her voice, so Ronin looked over at her to see the curve to her lips. So pretty.
“Well, what else could I say? I looked him square in the eyes and said…” He drew it out as he helped her over a fallen log in the trail. “Yes, sir.”
Em snorted and then laughed so loud it echoed through the wild Tarian woods. “You weren’t so tough back then.”
“Oh, fuck no. I thought I was tough as old leather that first year, but it took one close encounter with Zeke, and I was docile as a kitten. He told me from then on, I wouldn’t be fighting his Crew. No more challenging the shifter kids at school or fighting the less dominant adults. He said if I had an itch to fight, he was going to teach me how to really fight.”
“How?”
“By fighting him.”
“While he was Changed?” Em asked, her voice jacked up an octave.
“Yep. And you should see his tiger. He’s a monster through and through. He’s still Alpha of the Furers. Longest lasting Alpha in Tiger Crew history.”
“Wow,” Em said on a frozen breath. “And he was the one who took you in.”
“Yeah. I know I didn’t find my place until I was seventeen, but it feels like between Rose and him, I had it all right. Maybe not a lot of people would think that way, but for me…well…I’m grateful for what I had.”
“Was he good to you?”
“Very. Very hard on me, but very good. He didn’t do anything that wasn’t teaching me a lesson. He turned me into a man.”
“I would like to meet him someday,” she said softly, her eyes on the ground again as she walked.
Staring at her profile, trying to read her expression, that’s when it hit him. It had been bothering him that he couldn’t figure out what was different about her. Ronin pulled her to an abrupt stop and hooked a finger under her chin, lifted her face. The bruising had faded, barely even there, the swelling gone, and the split in her lip was just an angry red line that would be nothing more than a faint scar in a day or two.
“Your healing.”