use all that anger, to feed it to my bear to ensure a successful mission, and we went in.
“I was all kinds of fired up, but at that point in my life, the only thing I'd killed were steaks. I found out very quickly that I don't have an issue defending my family or myself, but straight up killing for the sake of killing wasn't me.
“My cousins realized it too and took out the hunters while I went to work freeing a total of ten shifters bound and caged in silver. We were too late to help two of them: a tiger and her cub.”
Uriah blew out a shaky breath, his eyes no longer seeing Ivy, his body and his voice still firmly there with her, but his mind was far away. Off in some dark forest, witnessing unspeakable horrors.
“They'd been shot first, and I thanked every star in the sky for it, because the hunters did what they do best and skinned both. Field dressed them right there in the dirt. The kid couldn't have been more than ten. Staring at their mangled corpses, I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, some sick fuck had skinned my family and had their pelts decorating his house.”
With tears in her eyes, her belly twisted in knots over what that must have been like for Uriah, Ivy lifted her hands and combed her fingers through his thick hair.
“Did you ever find them?”
His throat worked loudly as he gave a tight nod, blinking to bring himself back to her.
“My cousins kept one of the hunters alive for a little while, questioned him until he gave up all his clients’ names. It took another two months, working with different groups and different territories to find out it was a dentist from Alleghany.”
Uriah pulled his hand down over his face with a humorless laugh. “A fuckin' dentist, so emasculated by his ball busting wife, he turned to hunting to make himself feel like a man. Had all three pelts, didn't even try to hide them.
“He put my father's pelt on the floor of his study, draped my uncle's over the fuckin' couch, and used my mother's coat as a damn comforter on his bed.
“A shifter’s animal side doesn't operate with the same moral code as the man’s, and when I walked in to that human's trophy room, I'm ashamed to tell you, I let my animal side take over to spare my human heart the pain.”
His hoarse confession and the way Uriah carefully studied her expression, seeking any hint of disapproval or recrimination, broke her already bruised and battered heart. She couldn't imagine what it must have been like for him to walk into that house and find, what were essentially, corpses of his family, thrown around and displayed as decorations.
“I hope you pulled every tooth out of that sick bastard's head and broke every bone in his body before he died.”
In answer to the icy coldness of her voice, Uriah's cheeks warmed, and his lips kicked up at the corners in a weak smile. “The cousins wanted to skin him alive before we took him out, but I wanted him to wake up every day in pain, terrified I'd come back and finish him off. Last time I checked in, the guy was in a wheelchair still wearing a diaper and drinking his meals through a tube.”
Uriah gently tugged her forward to stand between his splayed knees, circling her waist with his big hands, stroking his palms up and down her hips while he looked at her with a solemn expression of understanding in his amber eyes.
“It took time for me to move past my rage and grief to figure out why my old man hadn't wanted me to come on that job with him. It took me even longer to come to terms with the fact that he loved me so much he wasn't willing to risk losing me or forcing me to become something I'm not.”
Ashamed for having assumed he couldn't possibly understand how she felt, Ivy apologized, wishing she could take back her bitchy words. “Uriah, I'm so sorry.”
“It's okay, honey,” he murmured, brushing a kiss across her trembling lips, her cheeks, her eyelids, making her feel his love in every tender caress. “You have every right to feel whatever you feel for as long as you need to feel it. But no matter what, you can't forget your mother loved you. You were the most precious thing in her