Declan - Heart of a Tiger (Royal Taiga Streak #1) - J.R. Loveless Page 0,39

or pack. Declan tensed. “What is it?”

“Sean’s body has been through quite a number of traumas over the course of his life. Aside from the slight limp he has in his gait from the improperly set bone in his leg, there have been other broken bones in his ribs and the same shoulder area. Without having a full scan from head to toe, I can’t truly know the extent of the damage to the rest of his body, but I’m going to make an educated guess and say they’d reveal having gone through the same level of stress.”

“What are you telling me, Cam?”

Cameron took a deep breath and looked Declan in the eye, face serious. “He may never be able to shift, even if you do get the collar off, Declan. I don’t know if his body will be able to handle the change.”

A cold chill spread over Declan. “But you don’t know that for sure.”

“No. Again, I can’t tell without doing a full body scan, tests, an MRI even. It could cause him unbearable agony to change or it could heal the damage. In fact, I’m not even sure removing the collar is a good idea right now until we know for sure.”

Declan swore, his hands wrapping around the metal handles of the chair he sat in so tightly they bent outward. He wanted to spare Sean any further pain, but it seemed at every turn he failed to do so. How could he tell this to Sean? Even now he could feel Sean’s distress over the situation from mere moments ago and the children Sean had cared for over the years. Declan wanted to break something, to tear it apart with his bare hands, to rend the flesh from someone and rage at the heavens to explain why someone with such a gentle soul would have to endure so fucking much.

“Do you have the equipment here?”

Cameron shook his head. “No. You’d have to take him into the city. I don’t have the MRI machine here for tests like that.”

“Schedule it. As soon as possible.” Declan stood.

“Declan?”

He looked at Cameron.

“Sean may appear fragile, but he’s stronger than you may believe him to be. He spent years being abused and survived when others didn’t. That says a lot about his inner and outer strength.”

“I know it, Cam. He’s stronger than me because I know I would never have lived through so much and come out the other end as sweet and kind as he is,” Declan replied, his expression somber.

Cameron smiled, though there was no humor in it. “Victor told me about the graves, Declan. To prepare us for exhuming the bodies. We need to identify them and start notifying the parents. It’s awful Gina is dead, but at least now Becky knows what happened to her daughter. It’s the not knowing that’s the worst, I think. The constant wondering where they are, are they alive or dead, is someone hurting them? Those questions will haunt those parents until they know the truth.”

“I understand, Cam. I already planned on talking to Sean to try and see if he at least could remember their names, anything about the children, to help locate their clans. But this… this just made it all the harder. I saw her, Cam. I saw Sean as he buried her. I saw the things the son of a bitch did to her before death gave her release from the nightmare. To know this happened on the edge of my lands and I didn’t even know it!” Declan snarled, fangs dropping and claws breaking free from his fingers. “I have already begun reworking the patrols, to push them out toward the borders. There is no chance of this ever being a possibility here ever again.”

The sympathy on Cameron’s face caused Declan to scowl even harder. He blamed himself for being lax in his duties as alpha. This never would have happened if he had done more, pushed his people for more, felt a need for better security at the edges of his lands. There hadn’t been any strife amongst any of the clans in over fifty years. His father had pulled the patrols in closer to the compound a little over thirty years ago. He’d done it to protect the streak and their members better rather than being so widespread after a random rogue shifter attack one night in the compound left two female lionesses wounded and a male wolf dead. Declan had never seen any reason to