Sawman Werebear (Saw Bears #4) (4 page)

Her throat slammed closed, and her body went rigid, and this time Brighton wasn’t going to help her through the seizure.

He was going to kill her.

Brighton didn’t understand. All Everly had to do was Change—give the bear her body and she wouldn’t seize anymore. She wouldn’t feel sick or waste away. He was calling to her bear, could sense her just under Everly’s surface. Hers was a quiet bear, perhaps the most submissive he’d ever encountered, but it shouldn’t hurt her like this to Turn. It shouldn’t be this hard.

Unless she didn’t know her bear existed yet.

Shit.

Clamping his canines against the pain of another Change so quick, he squeezed his eyes closed and melted back into his human skin. She wasn’t breathing. He cupped her face and searched her wide, terror-filled, silver eyes. Her bear was right there, so why wasn’t she coming out?

“Breathe,” he whispered. Pushing air particles through his ruined throat felt like swallowing glass, but he wanted her to know he was right here with her.

Her body curled in on itself, then relaxed and went limp. She gasped for air, and he cradled her head, propped her up, and rocked her gently.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he whispered over and over again. He deserved the pain of the soft words he forced out.

A sob wrenched from her throat, and she curled into a fetal position. She looked pale and shaken, and when he lifted her into his arms, she lay there limp. He nuzzled her forehead, unable to keep from touching her. Bear shifters needed touch and affection. Even bachelor groups hugged and clapped shoulders often. Touch was necessary to reassure himself that everything was right in his world. And right now, Everly was it. She was everything he focused on, everything he thought about. He had to fix her because no one could fix him, and it couldn’t be the same for another. He had to do something good for someone who needed it because no one could ever right the wrongs done to him.

Trembling like leaves in a stiff breeze, her hands were clenched in front of her stomach.

He wanted to kiss her knuckles and make her fear go away. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you.” Besides the bear someone had put in her.

Whoever had done this hadn’t even had the decency to explain what was happening to her. Women didn’t make good bears if they were too submissive. And shy, rambling Everly wasn’t a personality he would’ve ever chosen to Turn. She was at risk of her bear pushing for control and slowly taking her mind until she was nothing but a bear in a human body. The only reason that hadn’t already happened was because her bear seemed to be completely submissive. So submissive, she hadn’t even made an appearance yet. Six months of seizures, which meant Everly had been bitten a half year ago. The first Change was usually instant after the bite, and here she was, still unaware of what had been done to her after all this time.

The urge to take care of her was overpowering. He’d never felt like this before about anyone, human or shifter. He cared about the women in the Ashe Crew, Brooke, Skyler, and Danielle, and would die for them if it ever came to it, but this was different. He wanted to make Everly okay again. He wanted to know everything about her. Wanted to find what made her tick, and he wanted to be the first one to meet her bear.

And dammit, he wasn’t going to let her go crazy. He wasn’t going to just sit by while she seized until her repressed bear killed her. He’d never be okay again if that happened. Not after the trauma that had scarred him inside and out when he was sixteen at the hands of Reynolds and his team, but maybe life would be more bearable if he saved Everly. Already, he’d gone two hours without Changing, just because his need to care for Everly was greater. Everly Moore. Ever. He did remember her from Boomer’s Grill. She spoke of herself as if she was plain, but she’d been wrong. She was sick now and looked gaunt, but not even that could hide how beautiful she was. He’d watched her work at Boomer’s, talking too low to customers, who in turn asked her to speak up. She’d lowered her gaze time and time again to anyone who tried to hold eye contact with her. The Ashe Crew had been talking about new machinery for their logging business up in the mountains over lunch, but Brighton had watched Everly serve tables and wondered what kind of life had made her try to be invisible like that. He liked to be invisible sometimes, too. He hadn’t recognized her at the café because she looked so different now, but months ago, he’d asked to eat at Boomer’s Grill the next time they were in town just so he could watch her again.

The way she looked now was her bear’s fault. No, not her bear’s. The blame rested solely on the asshole who put that bear inside of her, then walked away.

He could see the house now, so he cradled her closer and picked up his pace. A tear ran down the corner of Everly’s eye, and he thumbed it away, hating himself for causing it.

“I’m not like that,” Everly murmured. She lifted her water-rimmed eyes to his. “I’m not like you. I can’t change into a bear or anything else. I’m just plain Jane. I’m just me and nothing special. Nothing scary. You have that thing tucked up inside of you, but I don’t. You were wrong.”

Brighton’s lip twitched with how much he wished it was true that she was still human. It would’ve been best for her to never have been bitten at all. For her to never have met the man who did this, and for her to continue a simpler existence. But while her body had been zapped of its energy with the seizure, the bear was still in her eyes, proof of what she was now.

Brighton climbed the porch stairs and kicked open the front door, then made his way to the bathroom with her, careful to avoid hitting her legs and head on modest-size door frames. In front of the single, large mirror over the sink, he set her on her feet. She swayed, so he steadied her, searching her eyes in the last few seconds of her naivety. After tonight, she’d be altered forever. She wouldn’t be able to see herself the same. Brighton was a legacy, born a shifter to shifter parents. This life was all he’d known. But Everly had been human, and she was learning here that monsters under the bed really did exist.

His chest ached as he turned her slowly toward the looking glass.

Her eyes locked on his in the reflection, then dropped to her own. She drew in a little inhalation of breath and covered her mouth. “Oh, my God,” she murmured, staring at herself.

“God didn’t have anything to do with what’s been done to you,” he whispered, accepting the razors slicing up his throat to force the words. He didn’t want to write notes anymore, or mouth words. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, he wanted Everly to hear the ruined rasp that was all that remained of his voice.

Her eyes lifted to his in the mirror. “Your eyes look just like mine do.” She lurched forward, as if her legs wouldn’t hold her anymore.

Brighton wrapped his arms around her collar bones and held her tight against his chest. If she didn’t have the strength to stand right now, that was okay. He could be strong enough for both of them. “I know you’re tired and weak right now, but you need to see this and accept it so you don’t convince yourself it was all a dream when you wake up and your eyes look normal again.” He swallowed hard as pain seared up the back of his throat.

Everly’s face fell, and her gaze dropped to the single bathroom sink. “I look terrifying.”

Brighton brushed his finger under her chin, lifting her face again until she looked at herself. “Not to me. To me, you look just right.”

A small, relieved smile took the corners of Everly’s mouth. “I thought you couldn’t talk.”

Pain filled his chest at what he’d lost, at how much he wished he could talk to her like Denison talked to Danielle. His voice had sounded much like his brother’s once. “It’s not really talking,” he whispered, then pointed to the scar on his throat, the one he could only cover up with a long beard. When he had to look at the damned thing in the mirror every morning with a clean-shaven face, his bear shredded him.

Time didn’t heal all things.

Everly turned in his arms and ran her fingertip down the surgically-straight raised mark. Then her gaze dropped to his torso, striped with the scars of his youth. All in the name of science. Dark curls of anger unfurled within him as he wished she could look upon a body he didn’t have to explain. He waited for the horror, the disgust on her face, but her eyes dimmed to soft blue as she drew her fingertips across each scar that curled around his ribs, one by one.

Her touch felt phenomenal against his skin, and by the time she reached the ones across his hip bone, he didn’t feel so dark inside anymore or so insecure in front of her. The humming rage of his bear was being stifled like flames under a spray of water.

Between his legs, his cock swelled as she brushed his last scar, the one that curved from his inner thigh around to his ass.

Everly inhaled a long, shaky breath as she drew her attention to his erection jutting between them. “Is that because of me?”

He nodded.

Her voice dipped even quieter than his own. “That scares me.”

She was telling the truth. If he hadn’t heard the honest notes in her voice, he would’ve known from the faint bitter smell of fear that filled the space between them.

He took a step back and whipped a fuzzy white towel from the rack by the shower, then covered himself up. Only when he was sure the smell of her fear was diminishing did he lean against the wall farthest away from her and speak. “Who made you afraid of a man’s body?”

She was quiet for a long time, eyes filled with sadness that gutted him. He thought she wouldn’t answer, but at last she said, “The man who bit me.”

Brighton slid his hands behind his back, clenching them so hard his knuckles hurt. He wanted to kill whoever had hurt Everly. She was too sweet for this world, and someone had taken advantage. Someone who was going to pay in blood by his hands someday.

“Will you tell me about him?” He had to force the words since they came out a hiss as anger constricted his throat.

“Will you tell me who did that to your body?” she countered.

He looked down at his ruined torso. One side of his profile was covered in unflawed skin, while the other was a constant reminder of what had happened nine years ago. Of course she wanted to know. Everyone who saw him without a shirt did, but he couldn’t talk about it without his bear taking his body over and over and over again until he was exhausted from the pain of the constant Changes.

He tucked his chin to his chest as he leaned his shoulder blades against the wall, then gave Everly a hard look through his lashes. He shook his head slowly.

“Because it hurts to talk about?” she asked, gripping the edge of the counter behind her hips.

Slowly, he nodded.

“For me, too.”

He got it. His scars were obvious, while hers were mostly on the inside. The inside scars, from his abundant experience, were much worse than the outside ones.

“I’m going to help you,” he promised.

“You gonna fix me, Brighton? Because right now, it feels like I can’t be fixed.”

He huffed a humorless, silent laugh and rested his head on the wall behind him. He and Everly were two peas in a fucking pod.

But out of the two of them, one was going to be okay, and he was going to make sure she got to a point where she could be happy again. Where she wouldn’t be sick or waiting on her next seizure, because the way her life was going right now, she wasn’t living. She was just waiting to die.

Everly approached slow, then traced the scar that ran from his nipple to under his arm. “At least tell me, did someone do this to you because of the bear inside of you?”

Brighton gripped her hand and pulled her touch away from his skin, then nodded.

“Will this happen to me?” she asked.

“Never,” he whispered. “The man who did this is dead.”

Her eyes snapped wide. “Did you kill him?”

Brighton lowered his chin once in affirmation. She should know who he was. That was the only way trust worked. If she knew the gritty stuff and still stuck around, maybe he could trust her back. “And if anyone hurt you like this, I’d avenge you, too.” And when he found out who the fuck Turned her against her will, that shithead was going to be in a world of trouble.

“So I’m a bear…person.”

“A bear…” His whisper faded to nothing, and he grimaced at the blinding pain in his throat. He mouthed his answer instead.
A bear shifter.

“Does it hurt to whisper?” she asked, concern pooling in the deep sky color of her eyes.

A nod and,
I can’t do it for long.

Her eyes dipped to where his scar was hidden in his beard. “Why do you hide that one?”

Because it’s the one that made me the ugliest inside.
Irritation snapped through him, and he straightened his spine.
I need to take care of you.

“What?”

You’re bleeding, and I can’t just stand here chatting while you’re hurt. My animal won’t let me anymore.
He pulled a first aid kit out from under the sink and turned her until she was facing the mirror again.

She was a brave little thing, only wincing silently as he cleaned the half-healed scrapes on her elbow. He’d ripped her dress when he’d pulled her to him when he was a bear, and four shallow scratches were already closed up and on their way to being faint scars. Shifter healing was the best part about this gig. It was the only reason he was still alive after everything that had been done to him.