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"And then a giant Russian tiger broke into my office, growled at my ring, threw me over his shoulder, and sniffed my—" she breaks off, and twists the blanket, "—and suddenly the door wasn't just open. It was off the hinges. The whole wall was gone."

I laugh, a real laugh, rare enough that my own brothers would not recognize it, and it shakes both of us where we're joined.

"Good," I say simply. "Walls are for houses."

She dozes for a while as the knot finally releases us, and I hold her, watching the fire burn down, and think about solitude.

Tigers are solitary creatures. We live alone. We hunt alone. We are content alone. And I was. Content. I had my brothers, my Bratva, my territory. Human men pine over cold hearths; a tiger simply prowls his ridge until hunger drives him down.

But I wanted cubs.

I wanted a little girl with her mother's cougar eyes climbing the bookshelves. I wanted sons with fangs and attitudes. I wanted the compound full of cubs again, the way it was when I was young, and my father ruled. When the woods were loud with us. I had started to do the math. Forty-six, no mate found in twenty years of searching, the odds shrinking every year, and I had quietly, privately started to stop looking.

Then a journal landed on my desk with a grainy photograph of a doctor with wide eyes and pretty pink lips, and my tiger lifts his head after decades of silence and gives me one clean command: That one. Ours. Go.

She stirs on my chest, blinking up at me, and her hand slides down my stomach, curious, possessive, and my cock stirs back to life with a vicious, twitching kick.

"Again?" she says, half laughing, half groaning. "How do you have anything left?"

"Heat," I remind her. "Rut. We will be at this for days, little one. Your body will demand it, and mine will provide it. That is shifter biology. You are a doctor; you know how this works." I catch her hand and press it to my mouth.

Her fingers wrap around me, and the brown of her eyes sharpens to flint, and the last of her shyness burns off like fog in the morning sun.

"Ivan." Her voice has changed, lower, steadier. Her heat is cresting again. "We didn't use anything."

"No," I say. "We didn't."

"Did you—" she swallows. "Did you do it on purpose?"

I cup her stomach with my hand. Flat and soft and warm under my palm, and the thought of it swelling round with my cub makes my fangs ache and my cock throb against her hip.

"Of course," I tell her honestly, because rule number three. "I scented your heat and I fucking lost it. But if you are asking whether, even in my right mind, I wanted to fuck you and breed you?" I lean down and put my forehead to hers. "Of course, mate. Yes. And I will breed you again. And again. And again. Until your belly is full and this compound is loud and you are never, ever lonely again."

Her breath catches. Her eyes shine.

She stares at me for a moment, her expression unreadable.

"You know," she says slowly, "most men ask a woman if she wants children before announcing they're going to fill her house with them."

My tiger goes still.

"Do you?" I ask.

Her hand settles over mine on her stomach. "I've always wanted a family, Ivan. I just didn't think I'd ever find the man I wanted one with."

"And now?"

She smiles, small and wicked. "Now I'm wondering whether this house has enough bedrooms for all those cubs you're promising me."

My tiger practically preens.

And then she rolls onto her back, a cat showing her belly. An invitation I can't deny. I follow her, taking her mouth and sinking my cock down into her in one long, perfect slide, and all the words leave my head.

I set the pace over her, hard and claiming, my forearms braced beside her head, her legs locked high around my waist. I watch her face change with each deep drive, watch her learn what her body was made to do with mine. My hands span her hips and drag her down to meet me. My thumbs stroke her stomach. She is so beautiful in the firelight that my chest hurts with it, physically hurts, a second heartbeat beating out of sync with my own, hers and mine, mine and hers, until the two rhythms find each other and pound together.

Later, when her cries turn hoarse, and her nails leave my back raw, I flip her without pulling out, put her on her knees on the rug, fist her hair and drive into her from behind, deep enough that her whole body rocks with it. She pushes back into me, greedy, begging with her hips, and I give her everything, my hand sliding around to work her clit while I pound into her until she is sobbing my name into the rug.

"Look at you," I growl. "Look at my mate. Taking what is hers."