Gray Back Broken Bear (Gray Back Bears Book 4) by T. S. Joyce

as he limped toward her. “A year. It was a full year before I could convince my stupid eyes to stop checking for you. And now here you are.”
    Aviana flitted to the ground and Changed. The cool air stung against her bare skin, and she felt completely stripped down and vulnerable in front of him, but she had to tell him the truth now. She had to at least try to explain it wasn’t just him who’d been hurt.
    “Do you know anything about raven shifters?” Her voice came out frail and weak, just like her.
    He shook his head. “I didn’t even know you existed. Fuckin’ obviously.”
    “My people aren’t like yours, Easton. You are a powerful apex predator shifter while I’m a bad omen.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Do you know how many of my people are shot each year while they are shifted? Just because of the bad luck we represent. It’s against our laws, on the punishment of being shunned, that we expose ourselves to anyone.” She arched her eyebrows and looked pointedly at him. “ Anyone . And you aren’t just a human or a scavenger shifter, Easton. You’re a grizzly, a shifter my people naturally fear. Being with you as a crow was already a huge risk, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to be around you, or my life felt empty. Especially out here where I was being raised until I could control my shifts around humans. When your parents died—”
    “I don’t want to talk about them with you.”
    “When your parents died, my heart broke for you. I watched the boy I loved hurt and cry out for help, and I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t tell my parents you were out here alone. I was scared they would call their council, and they would come out here and put you down. A lone grizzly cub with no people? I couldn’t tell anyone what had happened to you. All I could do was try to help you with snares and lures and scraps of food when I could sneak it away from my cabin. I couldn’t even carry a damned blanket when you were cold in the winters. Watching you break over those years broke a part of me too.”
    “Then why did you leave? If you cared so much, why did you leave me here? You were my only friend. God dammit, Ana, there was no one. When you left…there was no one.”
    “You got caught in that trap. Do you remember?” Aviana clenched her hands and forced her mind back to that awful day. “You were hurt, screaming. Bleeding. I thought you were going to die in that trap, and even in my human form, I was too scrawny to help. You tried and tried to get out of it, and your leg looked so bad.” She wiped her eyes again. “I flew back to my house and told my dad. I begged him to help you, and he was so angry. He said I’d betrayed my family and my people by making friends with you. I promised never to see you again if he would just let you out of the trap and not tell the council about you. I led him to you.”
    “I remember him.” Easton crossed his arms over his chest and looked off into the forest with a faraway look in his eyes. “He was tall. Skinny. Fine boned like you are. He pulled the trap off and set my broken bone like he’d done it a hundred times. And then he ripped the trap out of the ground and walked off into the woods with it dangling from his hand and didn’t look back. I hadn’t seen another person in so long, I thought I’d imagined him. You sent him?”
    “I didn’t know what else to do. He packed us up that night, and we moved to Rapid City the next day.” Aviana was shivering so hard now, her teeth chattered. “Did you find my last gift?”
    “The shiny rock?”
    She smiled sadly and shook her head. “It wasn’t just a shiny rock. It was a diamond. I found it on the ground, and I’d been saving it. It was my favorite possession. My dad said it was worth a lot of money, but I didn’t care about selling it. The night before we left, I snuck out and visited your treehouse for the last time. You were curled up inside sleeping with your leg all bandaged. I gave