Page 87 of Bearly Out Loud

Reo moved first. The shift ripped through him mid-stride—clothes shredding, bones reshaping, and then a black bear hit the grizzly broadside with two hundred and fifty pounds of speed and fury. The impact sent both animals skidding across the marble. Reo was fast. Precise. He bought three seconds of chaos, claws raking the grizzly’s flank.

The grizzly batted him aside. Two hundred and fifty pounds of difference. Reo hit a luggage cart and kept moving,scrambling, repositioning, but the grizzly was already past him. Already charging.

Hana froze.

Not a pause. Not a flinch. Afreeze—total, body-wide, rooted in a place deeper than thought. Vance Reeves. The exploitation. The theft. The violation that had taken her music and her trust and left her standing in a hotel lobby with a bear coming for her throat and her body refusing to move.

Nari moved.

She didn’t think. There was no calculation, no bravery, no decision tree. She saw Hana locked in place and the bear closing the distance, and her body was already between them—shoving Hana sideways, throwing her own weight forward, both of them hitting the marble floor hard. She curled over Hana. Made herself the barrier. The shield.

The grizzly’s swipe caught her across the back.

Claws through her jacket. Through her shirt. Through her skin. Three parallel lines of fire that tore from her left shoulder blade to her right hip. She screamed. The sound filled the lobby—raw, uncontrolled, the loudest noise she’d ever made, louder than any performance, louder than any booth session, a sound that was not art but animal.

The loudest sound Dojin had ever heard.

Thirty-four years of control ended.

Not cracked. Not strained.Ended.The patient alpha. The generous leader. The man who made sourdough at five in the morning and named his starter and tended bees and chose gentleness as a philosophy every single day because the alternative was this—this thing that lived inside him, this furythat had no patience and no mercy and no interest in conference rooms or legal filings or civilized restraint.

His shift was not a transition. It was a demolition.

The marble floor spider-webbed under eight hundred pounds of Kodiak appearing where a man had stood. The sound was not a crack but a concussion—the air displacing, the stone fracturing, the building itself registering the arrival of a predator that was never meant for hotel lobbies. His roar shook the chandeliers. Set off car alarms in the parking lot below. Rattled the windows in their frames on four floors above.

Every bear in the city caught it. Every alpha, every lone, every den-bound shifter within a mile radius—the signal hit their chests like a fist: an alpha whose mate was bleeding.

Dojin hit the grizzly at full speed.

The impact sent both bears through the lobby and into the hotel’s ground-floor restaurant. Tables disintegrated. A wall buckled. Glass, porcelain, and silverware scattered across the floor in a wave of destruction that sounded like the building coughing up its interior. The grizzly twisted, clawed, bit—a brawler fighting the way rogues fight, with nothing to protect and nothing to lose. His teeth found Dojin’s shoulder. Tore. Blood on dark fur.

Dojin barely noticed.

His bear had one imperative. One target. One truth: the threat to his mate was still breathing. Everything else—the pain, the blood, the screaming civilians, the destruction spreading through the restaurant like a bomb’s aftermath—was noise. Background. Irrelevant.

He caught the grizzly’s throat in his jaws andthrew.The smaller bear hit a support pillar. The pillar cracked. Plaster rained from the ceiling. The grizzly got up. Charged again. Bears didn’t stay down—they absorbed damage and kept coming, kept fighting, kept going until the body gave out or the will broke.This one had been fighting without a sleuth for five years. His will was forged from grief and misplaced loyalty, and he did not care if he survived this.

Dojin cared. Dojin had a mate on the marble behind him with blood soaking through her shirt and a family watching and a sister who had already been broken once by a man connected to the same machine that sent this bear. Dojin fought toend.

He pinned the grizzly in three moves. Jaws around the rogue’s throat. The kill position—eight hundred pounds bearing down, teeth at the artery, every instinct he possessed screaming a single word in a language older than speech.

Finish it.

The grizzly went still. Submission. Total. The posture of a bear who knew he was dead and was waiting for the bite.

Dojin’s jaws tightened.

Nari was watching. He could hear her breathing—ragged, pained, alive. Hana was watching. His father was watching. The world was watching, and the alpha he had chosen to be—the man who fed his sleuth before he fed himself, who carved space for gentleness in a body built for violence—did not kill a broken bear in a hotel lobby.

He roared in the grizzly’s face. The sound carried for blocks. Windows rattled. A car alarm that had stopped started again.

He released.

Reo’s security team materialized—four operatives pinning the grizzly in shifted form, zip ties replaced by industrial-gauge restraints designed for bears. It was over.

FORTY-FIVE

DOJIN