Chapter 16

Squatch.

I went to the country club in a roundabout way so I could be certain I wasn’t followed. The extra ten minutes to get there about killed me, but no way did I want Brooke looking in my head and seeing that I’d cut corners with safety. She trusts me with information about her coterie house, and it’s important I protect that trust.

I drove my truck through two acres of woods to wind my way up her driveway and to her house. I exited my vehicle and strode to the front door, which opened as I neared. A tall, skinny, wraith of a man motioned me in, exactly the type of butler you’d expect to invite you into a vampire’s home.

“Madame is expecting you.” He walked to the wall under the flying staircase, put his palm to it, and the walls shifted. “Someone at the base of the stairs will show you the way.”

Right, because the second sub-level of this place is a fucking maze. Brooke has another office on the third floor — one with two walls of windows and a beautiful fucking view. Why was she underground?

I made it to the bottom of the stairs, and the male snake-shifter was waiting for me. I nodded to him, but he didn’t acknowledge me at all. He merely turned and started walking.

I followed.

After a dozen seemingly random turns and several minutes of walking, he finally stopped by a door and motioned towards it. I turned the knob, stepped in, and was floored by the scent of my kitten.

She stood and ran to me, and I caught her mid-air. I looked up and met Brooke’s gaze.

She loves you and you love her. It would be so much easier to relocate her to Australia if this weren’t the case.

“Brooke says you know what I am!?” Her voice cracked, and she squeezed me, her small arms around my neck, her legs around my waist.

My gaze was still on Brooke, and I asked her, How did you know?

I needed to know why Mad Dog was making arrangements for someone else to feed me. I sat in a car near your clubhouse and read everyone’s thoughts one night. I immediately knew who the stripper named Kitty was, since I arranged for her to get the job in the first place.

I shifted Kitty so I could walk and hold her, and stepped to the love seat at an angle to Brooke’s chair. I sat with Kitty in my arms and held her.

“Is there a game plan?” I asked with my voice so Kitty could hear as well.

And it was Kitty who answered instead of Brooke. She listed a bunch of options that would take her from me, and then told me that Brooke had an idea for how to get the Amakhosi to force her father to back off and let her live her life.

“It isn’t just her father,” Brooke said. “Three ambushes are looking forward to her offspring, and hundreds of tigers are involved. He’ll have to make them all happy.”

“Three?” Kitty asked.

“Your mother’s ambush has been promised your fifth cub.”

Every muscle in my body tensed, and I had to push my wolf down. “Explain.” It came out as an order, and I forced myself to add, “Please.”

Kitty moved and readjusted until she was sitting beside me, leaned against me.

“At one point, our kind was down to seventeen tigers. We’ve built back up to nearly three hundred, but there was a chokepoint, genetically, that we haven’t recovered from. Too many cubs are born with birth defects, and yet, our elders won’t allow any of us to have babies that are impure. We must only mate with those of our own kind.”

She went silent, and Brooke picked up the explanation. “They sent a few of their teens to college to learn about genetics in the nineties, and then kidnapped one of the top geneticists in the field five years later, when they realized a simple degree in the field wouldn’t be enough. The scientist was released after more than a decade in captivity, but the tigers have blackmail material, so he still works for them.”

Kitty’s scent and expression told me she hadn’t known about the kidnapped scientist, and I wondered if Brooke had known about this before or after Kitty had come to her. Likely after.

“This scientist,” Brooke continued, “along with the tigers who hold degrees in genetics, were responsible for matching partners up for most of Kitty’s generation. She’s a direct product of gene manipulation, as is the young man she’s been matched with in Texas. Kitty has five brothers, but she’s the only offspring with the correct markers. Same with the boy in Texas. It’s believed that their children will be born without any of the markers that lead to birth defects. Their children will be able to mate with a large percentage of the available tigers of the opposite sex without worry of cleft palate, scoliosis, or any of the other maladies afflicting their kind.”

“We have several tigers who are now experts in the field. I didn’t know they’d kidnapped someone to get a head start.” Kitty’s inhale seemed shaky, but she’d re-centered before she exhaled, and it was smooth. My kitten was so fucking strong.

“I was a virgin before I escaped.”

I scented that as a lie, and I looked down at her, wondering what was up with that. She’d never lied to me before.

“Vaginally, I was a virgin. I’d been trained in oral and anal sex, so my family could be certain I’d know how to pleasure my assigned partner — so I wouldn’t bring shame to the family.”

Before my anger could fully take hold, Brooke continued with the explanation.

“Intense gene testing is done before tigers are allowed to have sex. The concept of romantic love and attraction is forbidden in the ambush. Couples are put together based on science. Most tigers are fine with this, since they don’t mate for life. Kitty, as you can imagine, wasn’t okay with it.”

“My family is...” Kitty shook her head, stood, paced. I could see the tiger. Pissed and uncomfortable. I missed her warmth, but I understood she had too much energy and needed to move.

“My family is kind of like the Kennedys — royalty in a society that prides itself on not having royalty. The fact that I ended up being the first genetically clean of our kind, and the fact I’m kind of the princess because I’m my father’s daughter, made me something of an icon. A thing and not a girl just trying to grow up and figure out who she is. Who she wants to be. I wasn’t allowed much of an education since I wouldn’t be getting a job. I’d be too busy having babies, after all.”

I could hear the frustration and anger in her voice, but I could also feel and smell it in the air. The room reeked of her resentment and bitterness.

“The boy I was matched with is younger than me. Having sex with him was going to be all kinds of wrong. He’s been allowed to fuck people in the throat and ass, but never a pussy. So, we’d both be kind of virgins, but not really.”

“It’s possible the Amakhosi will order her to go home and have babies,” Brooke said. “It’s also possible he’ll decide to stay out of it. I think there’s a slim chance he’ll take her side and tell the ambush to figure something else out.”

“Even if he steps in, I can’t see my father ever letting this go. I’m his property. I belong to him. He’s never going to just let me be who I want to be if he knows where I am.”

She sat in a chair, crossed her arms, and met my gaze. “My name is Valentina Olivia Aurelio, and I am a golden tiger, also known as an aureus tiger. In the wild, golden tigers have cinnamon in the place of the black. However, our kind are varying shades of gold, brass, and copper. My hair as a human has these colors in a specific pattern, and it’s why I can never be seen without my hair dyed. I was born in my mother’s ambush, on the shores of Lake Ontario, not far from Niagara Falls, and I was raised in my father’s ambush, near the Waccamaw River and the Atlantic Ocean, in South Carolina.

“Waccamaw River?” Brooke sounded as if she had an idea. “The Dragon Queen was raised near the Waccamaw River.”

Kitty nodded. “Yes. My father is friends with the old Swan King. I met Princess Sophia, now Queen Sophia, a few times as a child. She’s older than me. I went to a couple of balls at the Swan Castle, and she was kind to me.”

“How did that work?” I asked. “The other supernaturals knew of your family? Tigers don’t usually live in ambushes, right?”

“In the wild, a mother and her cubs is known as a streak of tigers. Like herd of horses or gaggle of geese. Lions gather in prides, but tigers are usually solitary. In rare instances, tigers form a group, and this is called an ambush of tigers. Our kind live in ambushes.”

“But no one knows what kind of tigers you are?”

“No. They don’t even know there’s a group of tigers living in the area. We limit the number of us who go out into society. My father has a home outside the ambush he can invite people to, should he need to entertain. Mostly, only the boys who are destined to go to college are allowed to venture past our walls. Father took me to the ball for political reasons. I had specific things to talk to the other children about, to try to gain information.”

She blew out a breath and sat in a chair, her arms crossed over her chest. “The cubs born with birth defects are killed as soon as the defect can be seen — at birth for those with cleft palate or severe scoliosis. For those with defects that show up later, it’s especially heartbreaking for the families. Our ambushes have always been little fortresses, in case we were discovered, but once it became necessary to make sure mothers couldn’t leave with their cubs under any circumstance, security was tightened even more. The balls were a special treat, and it’s possible I’d have never wanted so badly to escape if I’d never seen the world outside our walls.”

A possible plan formed in my head, but I didn’t dare get Kitty’s hopes up. I tried to project the facts as I knew them to Brooke. I started with Ember’s background, and the fact that there’s a therapist who specializes in supernaturals who’ve been in some kind of captivity, and who have baggage they need to work through as a result. I added in the bit about her also being a therapist who works with people in the BDSM lifestyle.

And then I showed her the coup de grâce. This therapist is in a relationship with the Amakhosi.

Brooke sat back in her chair and smiled. I decided to say what I was thinking out loud, since I knew she could hear it in my head. “That smile is just creepy on an eight-year-old’s face. I know you can’t help it, but you have to understand why it’s so unsettling.”

Her smile grew a little bigger. An eight-year-old excited about the prospect of chocolate sprinkles on her ice cream. “I’m aware, yes.” She turned to look at Kitty beside me. “Your wolf may have come up with a solution. Would you be amenable to sitting down with a therapist and going over your life history? Telling her the traumatic bits with your uncle?” She rolled her eyes. “She isn’t likely to arrive without her friend Kendra in tow, so I can only tell you that I want you to do this because we need to be certain what you feel for Sasquatch is true, before we go to battle with an entire subspecies of tiger.”

And I’ll need to wipe your memories of why we’re bringing her in, Brooke told me.

I sighed. I didn’t want my memories fucked with, but I knew she was right. You have my consent, though I ask that you restore those memories once everything is finished.

If I can do so without risk of a political firestorm, I will.

She met Kitty’s gaze, and I knew they were telepathing as well.