Taze (Rise of the Pride #11) - Theresa Hissong Page 0,57

I did it to remind myself that I could do it, or if I did it to appease Taze.”

Dr. Lyons paused to think. Calla knew she was going to come back with a question to make Calla think long and hard about her decision.

“You have to break it down sometimes, Calla,” she began. “You’re second guessing your decision this morning, but I think you know, deep down, why you decided to train.”

She thought about it for a minute or two. There was a lot of emotion when she pulled that bag from her closet. She’d laughed at herself for being scared of a gym bag, but that bag held a lot of memories for her; both good and bad.

“That training facility and the time I spent there holds a lot of growth for me over the past six years,” she replied. “It’s where I learned to get my confidence back, but it’s also a place I associate with my brother and Taze’s dislike for each other. There was a lot of fighting between us back then, too.”

“What about now?” Dr. Lyons continued to ask questions, and it had Calla spilling so much more than she had intended.

“The two of them say they’ve reached a truce, but I honestly don’t believe them,” she scoffed, rolling her eyes. “If something happened to me in Taze’s presence, Mal would kill him. Same goes the other way.”

“They’re both protective of you,” the doc noted.

“They are,” Calla agreed, thinking about the way they acted. “But each of them acts different.”

“Different how?”

“Malaki uses his anger at the world as an excuse to protect me,” she sighed. “He has his own issues that he refuses to get help for. So, I think he uses our captivity to shelter me from the world.”

“Okay,” the doc nodded. “And Taze?”

“He’s my mate, and I know you know how we find our mates,” she blushed. “I’ve told you a lot about how our animals show us they know before we touch.”

“The mating scents?”

“Yes,” Calla answered. “Taze is protective of me because of our panthers. However, Taze is more supportive of me defending myself. He accepts my strengths, but he’s there if for some reason I can’t protect myself.”

“I understand a lot of the old ways of the shifters through my friendship with Harold,” Dr. Lyons said, crossing her legs as she set down her notepad and leaned back in the chair. “Your kind had lived a certain way for thousands of years. The males played the role of protectors for a very long time. The women of the pride let them because that’s all they’d known. When your pride mate, Evie, snuck around and asked one of the males to teach her to fight, it changed things. Other women in the pride realized they could contribute to the safety of their families, and that set off a chain of events.”

“Even Taze hated us training in the beginning,” Calla admitted. “He was such an asshole.”

“What made him change his mind?”

“Word is, the alpha threatened his Guardianship if he didn’t cooperate,” she confessed.

“What happened to make you two train together?”

“I really don’t know.” Calla stopped to think. “He was twenty and was new to the Guardian program. I was seventeen. He saw me fighting one day, and the next thing I knew, he was stopping me to correct a move. After that, he was there every time I trained. We clicked, and after that, we were inseparable.”

“How did Malaki take that?”

“Not very well,” Calla admitted, thinking back to her brother’s outburst. She remembered crying alone in her room at Talon’s, keeping her face buried in a pillow to keep the sound from reaching the alpha’s ears.

“Why do you think Malaki was so upset?”

“I don’t know,” Calla said as she shook her head. “He always said it was his job to protect me, but I’ve always felt there was something more to it.”

“Do you think maybe he was angry because he wasn’t the one training you?”

“We trained together for a very short time during those years,” she said in defense, but frowned when she remembered the time he’d stopped coming to work with her, leaving Taze to jump back in to help her.

“What is it, Calla?”

“He couldn’t hit me on those mats,” she sighed. “It was just too much for him.”

“Malaki was having a hard time because of the things he saw and couldn’t protect you from,” Dr. Lyons explained. “Calla, your brother feels responsible for your kidnapping, rape, and beatings. He’d most likely