Page 69 of Bearly Out Loud

“Entirely aware that her son is a bear. Yes. Thank you. I’ve connected those dots.” She dragged her hands through her hair. Her heart was hammering—she could hear it, which was disconcerting for a woman who prided herself on controlling the sounds her body made. “Reo. Reo’s a bear. Hana’s a bear. Your whole?—”

“Sleuth. The term is sleuth.”

“A SLEUTH. Of course, it is. A group of bears is a sleuth. I knew that. I watch nature documentaries. I’m a well-roundedperson.” Her voice was climbing in volume. The parking structure’s acoustics were doing unreasonable things with it—her words bouncing off concrete, echoing back, layering on themselves. She filled the space like she filled every space: completely. “Your entire security team. The operatives at my parents’ brownstone. Bears. All of them.”

“All of them.”

She stopped. Stared at him. He was still kneeling—patient, still, bleeding and naked and waiting for her to finish processing. He understood that Nari Wixx handled shock at full volume and any attempt to interrupt the process would add fuel.

He knows me. He’s kneeling on concrete with a bullet wound and broken glass in his knees and he’s waiting because he knows I need to talk through it before I can feel it.

The thought cracked the performance. Her voice dropped.

“You’re hurt.”

“It’s a graze.”

“You were SHOT.”

“The bullet barely?—”

“Dojin Keiser, you shifted into an eight-hundred-pound bear, threw a man through a car door, got shot, and your response is ‘it’s a graze.’” She crossed the distance between them. Knelt in front of him on the concrete, glass be damned, and grabbed his face with both hands. His jaw was rough with stubble. His skin was hot—running several degrees above normal, which she now understood was because he’d been a damn BEAR sixty seconds ago. “Let me see.”

She turned his head. The wound was on his left shoulder—a furrow, shallow, bleeding steadily but not gushing. She’d seen worse in action movies. She’d never seen it on skin she’d kissed.

Skin I’ve kissed. This shoulder. This exact shoulder. My mouth was on this shoulder in a hallway three weeks ago andnow there’s a bullet wound on it and I’m going to need a minute.

She didn’t take a minute. She pulled her jacket off. Her jacket. She pressed it against his shoulder. Hard.

He winced. Once. The only sign of pain he’d given all night.

“Hold that.”

He held it. His hand covered hers on the jacket—warm, enormous, his fingers wrapping around her knuckles. She looked down at their hands. Looked up at his face. The amber was fading slowly back to brown, and he was looking at her with an expression so open and undefended that it knocked the sarcasm clean out of her lungs.

“You shifted for me.”

“Yes.”

“You turned into a bear. In a parking garage. Because a man reached for my arm.”

“He was reaching for you.” Basic. Simple. As if the sentence explained everything, because for him, it did.

She exhaled. Long, shaky, a breath that carried the remnants of adrenaline and fear and the new, enormous understanding that the man kneeling in front of her was not entirely a man and had never been entirely a man and had been hiding this from her for weeks while feeding her honey from his rooftop and holding her hand on an East Village sidewalk.

“Also—” She pressed the jacket harder. Kept her voice level. Failed. “Watching you shift was unreasonably attractive, and I need to never think about it again immediately.”

His eyebrows rose. “Attractive.”

“Don’t.”

“You said?—”

“I said what I said and I’m going to pretend I didn’t. The human-to-bear transition is a deeply alarming visual experience and I am not going to examine why my body responded toit with interest instead of terror. That’s a conversation for my therapist.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. She caught it. Pointed at his face with her free hand.

“Don’t you dare smile. You’re naked and bleeding.”