Page 37

"Let go."

"You're throwing away everything we've worked for."

"Steven. You're hurting me."

I pull back, but he tightens his grip and jerks me toward him.

The roar splits the trees.

It rolls through the snow and through my ribs and through the bond at the base of my skull, and Steven's hand is torn from my arm as a mass of orange, black, and white slams him off the path and into the drift. Ivan's tiger lands over him with one paw planted beside Steven's head and the other raking down across his shoulder, claws shearing coat and shirt and skin in four red lines that spill down his side while his bag bursts open across the snow in a spray of steel and gauze.

Steven screams. The bodyguards surge forward with their hands on their weapons, but none of them draw, because the animal pinning their guest is their vor, and his jaws hang open inches from Steven's throat while saliva strings between fangs long enough to puncture a windpipe.

Ivan. Ivan, Ivan, the name beats through me while I move, because thinking is a luxury and my body has already chosen, and I drive myself between the tiger's lowered head and Steven's exposed neck with my palms up and Ivan's breath washing across my face in rank, furious gusts.

"Look at me." My hands sink into the thick ruff on either side of his jaw, the fur coarse and hot, the growl vibrating up through my wrists and rattling my teeth. "Not him. Me."

His golden-orange eyes lock onto mine, and the paw beside Steven's head flexes, claws gouging furrows in the frozen earth while Steven whimpers underneath him and tries not to breathe too loudly, blood turning the snow beneath him dark.

"I am all right, Ivan. Look at me. I am here, and I need you to stop. You are not killing my oldest friend."

The growl drops lower, and his eyes practically glow. I slide one hand down the side of his neck and press my forehead against the broad plane of his skull, putting my own throat within the reach of his teeth because there is no other argument a tiger in this state.

"Breathe with me," I murmur, slowing my own breath for both of us. "In. Out. I am here. I am unhurt. I am yours, and I am standing right here asking you to let him up."

Steven makes a keening whimper behind me, and Ivan's ears flatten. I tighten my grip. "Do not move," I hiss at Steven without turning around. "Do not speak. Don't give him a reason."

One second stretches while snow lands on Ivan's back and melts, while Steven bleeds, while the bodyguards hold their terrible stillness, and then Ivan pulls his paw back with a wet scrape of claws through fabric and steps off him, one deliberate pace, then another, until his shoulder brushes my hip and stays there, a wall of muscle between Steven and me.

Two of the bodyguards haul Steven upright, and he sags between them, gray-faced, while they half-carry him toward the stairs. His boots drag twin lines through the snow, and he twists his head and finds me still standing with my hands buried in a tiger's neck.

"Cienna—"

"Go, Steven," I say while Ivan's growl answers it against my leg. "Get on the helicopter and leave, before I run out of ways to keep you alive here."

At the helicopter, Steven turns to face me. The rotor blades are starting to spin up, the door closes, and then he's gone.

I turn to face Ivan. The tiger keeps circling me in the snow, his huge paws slapping down hard enough to throw white spray against my coat while his breath huffs out in hot clouds and his tail lashes the air behind him, and every pass brings him close enough that his shoulder nearly brushes my hip before he swings wide again and comes around for another, and another, and another, until the trampled ring around me starts to look like the only honest conversation we are capable of having right now.

My hands shake, and the shaking runs all the way up into my elbows while my teeth knock together no matter how hard I clamp my jaw, and Steven is gone and the sound of the helicopter no longer beats against the trees, and still my body has not caught up to that fact, still braced for the next door, the next voice out of my old life putting its hands on me and pulling.

I drag in a breath, and I hold it until I can let it out slowly, the way I count patients down from panic in a trauma bay. Because I am still a doctor who chooses where she stands.

"Change."

The tiger huffs and slaps the snow, claws tearing four clean lines through the crust, and the refusal rolls through the bond. "Ivan. Change. Now."

The shift takes him in a rolling break of bone and muscle, fur pulling back into skin while his spine straightens and his shoulders broaden into the man, and then he stands naked in the snow with his chest heaving and his hair damp against his forehead and not one flicker of shame in the way he takes up space, because the cold never touches him the way it touches me and we both know it, and knowing it does not make my coat any warmer.

"You knew the rules, Cienna. I gave them to you plain. That man does not get to touch what's mine."

The breath leaves me in a sigh that hurts on the way out, my shoulders dropping under my coat while the shaking eases into a fine tremor I can hide by curling my fingers into fists, because he is not wrong and that is the part that scrapes.

"He grabbed me when I tried to leave. I told him to let go. I thought I knew him, but..."

Ivan's head comes up, snow melting against his bare shoulders. "But what? Did he try something?"

"Steven asked me about publishing our work, about awards and journals and whether a Brusilov mate gets to stand on a stage. He told me I won't be able to do any of that as your mate."