Page 48 of Tiger Born

So much.

A sob took her lungs and tears streamed down her cheeks. She wiped them on her shoulder and kept working. It wasn’t fair that she’d finally found her person, and they couldn’t be together. It just wasn’t fair.

Dame’s attention stayed glued to her. He touched her and comforted her. Brushed her arm, gripped her hair at the nape of her neck, touched the arch of her lower back.

His heart was in his golden eyes.

Stellan was mending.

She was doing it.

She was saving him.

It was a good thing for a healer like her, but deep down she knew…

Saving his life would end hers.

Chapter Thirteen

Dame set a small crumb of crust in front of the ant that was zigzagging its way down a crack in the barn floor.

The ant stopped in front of it, tried to go around, stopped, and seemed to be talking to the crumb, deciding if he wanted to take him back to the ant pile or not.

Exhaustion was absolutely consuming Dame, but he huffed a little laugh.

He leaned back in his chair and stretched his leg out, balancing the uneaten sandwich on his thigh. Misty had made it for him, but he didn’t have an appetite.

She was inside showering, and decompressing if the little sniffles he’d heard coming from the bathroom were anything to go by.

She’d done it. Little badass had done it. She’d brought Stellan back.

Dame just didn’t know how to feel about it yet.

Dame had killed his brother with purpose. He reasoned with his animal that if Stellan killed Misty, there would be a bounty on his head anyway. The option for him was spare one life, or two. That was his logical side talking, but truthfully, that fight with Stellan had been about more.

He’d heard the terror in her voice when she’d screamed for Dame to help her, and it had broken something inside of him wide open. This cage was good at containing one Cat, but now he knew two could demolish the locks if they charged the door together. He and Mars had taken that door straight off.

He’d just finished welding the hinges back in place and installing new locks for Stellan.

He’d Changed back to his human form on the table after Misty had finished and gone to the bathroom to wash up. It had looked painful, and the tiger fought it. Dragged it out. He’d messed up some of Misty’s work and Stellan had laid there on the table trembling and staring vacantly at Dame while he re-started the healing process on what he’d damaged with that Change.

Mars and Dame hadn’t said a word. They’d loaded him up in the back of Mars’s truck and taken him back to the cage, which was where he was lying now, recovering.

He’d been asleep for hours. From here, Dame could see his stomach, and the criss cross of scars that looked healed already. He was doing this with no food. Stellan’s tiger was something else.

Dame wished he was normal. Or at least, normal for a Cat.

Fuck, he didn’t know what normal was anymore.

“I tried not to,” Stellan’s hoarse voice sounded.

Dame looked up from where he’d been watching the little ant carry the crumb toward the door. He sighed and cracked his knuckles. “Sure you did.”

“I understand what she did for me you know. I can feel it. She shouldn’t have done that. She shouldn’t have brought me back.”

“Yeah, me and Mars agree.” He glared at Stellan, who was tenderly sitting up on the cot, his arm thrown around his stomach. Dame knew that feeling. That was him a month ago. “She’s a good person. She couldn’t let you die.”

“She’s better than us,” Stellan murmured.