Redeem The Bear by T.S. Joyce

can’t stop thinking about you. About kissing you.”
    “Oh, the one where you bit my lip? Or is it the one where you pretended to be a gentle man when we slept together the first time?”
    “No. I keep thinking about the first one.”
    Her breath caught and she stopped rocking back and forth in the spinning office chair.
    His voice sounded careful when he said, “The one in the woods outside of your parents’ house. The one ten years ago, when the Long Claws attacked our people.”
    Our people . “Do you remember everything?”
    “No. Just bits and pieces. I remember I had been working up to kissing you for weeks and you beat me to it.”
    Her voice dipped to a ragged whisper. “You declared war on my people. Innocent shifters died because you were too stubborn to stop it. Riker said the Long Claws killed off most of the surviving Kodiaks, just to take their land. That you fought them. Our people fell at your hand. What happened to you to make you forsake your humanity?”
    Brooks was quiet for so long, she began to consider that he’d set the phone down and left. She licked her lips, wetting them to repeat her question. The answer mattered. “Daniel—”
    “ Don’t call me that.” His voice sounded strained, like he’d said it through gritted teeth. “I’ll call you again.” The line went dead and a dial tone blasted against her sensitive ear drum.
    Okay, he wanted to talk to her again, but when? She stared at the shift schedule on eye-scorching yellow construction paper, drawn in red permanent marker, and pinned to the office bulletin board. He couldn’t know when she worked next to call her here. Maybe he was just saying that to take the sting off of him preparing to ignore her again.
    The phone was old and didn’t have caller ID. Setting it back into the sling, she frowned at a mug of mismatched pens and gritted her teeth. She couldn’t read him. Maybe hurt, maybe just angry. Definitely conflicted on whether she was worth his time or not. Bitter, confused…cold. Still cold.
    Whatever change she’d seen in him when he stitched her up hadn’t held.
    His time with the Long Claws only made him dark again.
    ****
    “Fuck!” Brooks chucked the cell phone into the wall , and it shattered into a rain of jagged plastic pieces.
    He hadn’t been ready to call her yet. His head was too messed up , and he was right in the middle of the biggest overthrow in the history of the Long Claws. The war hadn’t ended in the meadow. It had migrated to Wyoming and his people were bleeding each other, bleeding him, for the changes he was trying to enforce.
    Changing hundreds of years of murderous tradi tion was only won in blood. Corin would hate him if she knew what was really happening here. She didn’t want him to kill? He’d killed five of his own people in the last week. Five fucking souls as dark marks against his newly sensitive soul, and he wanted to bury himself in a cave and never come out again. If he stopped though, the Long Claws would go after Bear Valley again and his new and utterly inconvenient set of morals wouldn’t allow him to live with himself if he didn’t die trying to save them.
    His people weren’t requesting a war on a neutral field where Riker and his fighters would stand a chance. They were rioting to attack Bear Valley while it thought it was at peace, like they had done to the lesser clans. Like they had done to his people, the Kodiaks.
    He didn’t have time to allow thoughts of Corin to mess with his head. He needed to be fully in this war with his people, not immersed in flashbacks from his past.
    But he’d been slipping and forgetting why he was doing this. She made him want to be good, and he was so damned tired. Her voice was all he needed to remember himself. That was what he had told himself. But now the burning desire for more of her battered the walls he’d had to erect to survive the past month.
    Corin had no idea how dangerous she was.
    Blood trickled down his stomach in