he was hit again—this time from above. And it wasn’t Vaughn.
Fuck! he thought as he rolled out of the way.
Except his attacker had his—her—teeth in the ruff of his neck and she wasn’t letting go. Twisting his body, he managed to nip her side enough to make her release him, but she was on him again before he could get out of the way, and she was trying to go for his throat. Protecting the vulnerable area by ducking his head, he plowed into her chest.
She growled, but didn’t back down, bringing up her clawed paw to rake him down the side.
Shit.
The marks were light, would heal within the next few hours, but the fight was done because she’d drawn first blood. Pulling away, he huffed as he caught his breath.
In front of him, the other leopard shifted in a shower of sparks to become a woman with flame red hair crouching on the forest floor. “Tut-tut,” Mercy said, waving a finger. “Overconfidence be the endeth of the man.”
When Dorian growled at her, she leaned down until they were nose to nose. “Listen to your leopard, Boy Genius. Stop thinking.” She tapped the side of his head. “The cat has had to trust you its whole life, but you’ve never had to rely on it. If you can learn to do that, you’ll be unstoppable—I would’ve never been able to get the jump on you in human form. But you can’t think like a human in leopard form or you’ll only hobble the animal.”
Lifting her head, she shifted back into her leopard form—which happened to be slightly smaller than his own. As he watched her leave, her tail curling lazily, he considered her words. Sure he’d given in to the cat, but . . . while the cat’s cunning had allowed him to sneak up on Vaughn, he’d relied mostly on his human mind, not trusting the leopard’s instincts.
For a man who had built his life around the word “control,” giving in was one hell of a hard ask.
“Stop fighting it! Dorian, please!”
His mate had said those words to him the first time he shifted. Stunned and in shock, and so in love with her it hurt, he’d done as she asked. And it had felt like . . . coming home.
Flexing his claws on the ground, he reached for the mating bond, for the love that had only become stronger with the passing days. Leopard and man, they both held on to it like a lifeline as he once more did as his Shaya had asked.
He gave in.
An explosion of scents and sounds, textures against his fur, so many noises to explore that it threatened to overwhelm. The man began to fight his way out, to take control.
“Dorian, please!”
Shaya’s voice again from that fateful day, reminding him that he was leopard and man both and this was the leopard’s playground.
The human part of Dorian fell back.
The leopard took a deep breath, separated out the important scents from the not-so-important—though it did pause to consider chasing a rabbit—and began to run after Lucas. Dorian felt his/their heart pump with exhilaration, their muscles flex, their fur rush back in the wind as the leopard, its mind sharp and cunning and furiously intelligent, caught Lucas’s double-back and switched direction so that they might be able to sneak up on their alpha.
Pride bloomed within the heart of the leopard as it thought of telling its mate of its skill, imagined her stroking those long capable fingers through his fur and saying, “Beautiful.” Later, after she’d all but put him into a coma with her petting, she’d laugh and murmur, “Lazy.”
The leopard halted, sniffed. And backed away.
Trap, it thought to the man when Dorian surfaced, and that was all that needed to be said as they switched back, skirting around the danger. Six more traps later, both leopard and man were snarling at his packmates. He’d avoided the rope tie, the tripwire, and two others, but they had managed to dump him into a slimy mud pool and successfully snapped a branch painfully in his face. His fur matted and his nose smarting from the trick—one his leopard was most annoyed that it hadn’t sensed—he almost walked right into a pit.
Pausing with one foot on the edge of the disguised hole in the forest floor, he didn’t back away but instead went right and into the forest, after Lucas’s scent. Instinct told him his alpha had created this trap while the others had been