“He’s calm,” Liam said. “See? Lass, if you can get him back to bed, and to stay still, we can fix him up in a trice.”

Tiger kept his arms around Carly. “I am healed.”

Carly ran her hand down the front of his torso. Tiger couldn’t stop his flinch of pain as she touched the raw wounds.

“Bullshit,” she said clearly. “You’re bleeding all over the place. Back to bed with you, mister.”

“Better step back from him,” the human leader said, his voice as hard as Liam’s. “He’s a danger to everyone in the facility and needs to be contained.”

Carly turned around, still within Tiger’s arms, to glare at the human. “What is with you? You need to leave him alone for two minutes. No wonder he’s so upset.”

She turned, sliding her arm around Tiger’s waist, and started guiding him to the bed. Tiger went without resisting. Now, if she’d get into the bed with him and snuggle up against his side, Tiger would be healed in no time. And he wouldn’t be afraid.

The other Shifters watched in awe as Tiger, calm and quiet, walked with Carly back to the bed. He’d stopped bleeding for now, but his gown was covered with blood, and blood stained the sheets.

He didn’t care. Tiger lowered himself onto the uncomfortable bed, then put his hand on Carly’s wrist and tugged her toward him.

Carly gave him a puzzled look, her gray green eyes red-rimmed with crying. Tiger tugged harder. Carly lost her balance and landed, sitting, on the bed next to him, her warm hip against his side.

She gave a little laugh. “They can’t work on you if I’m in the bed with you, silly. I’m flattered, but I’ll be in the way.”

“Need you,” Tiger said. He kept his voice soft, so only she would hear, but then, Shifters had good hearing.

“Let her go,” Liam said. “She’s done enough. Thank you, lass. I don’t know who you are, but you’re a bloody miracle worker.”

“She’s my mate,” Tiger said, his voice still not working right, but it grew firmer as he tightened his grip on her. “She stays.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Carly’s eyes widened. “What exactly are you talking about?”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Liam said quickly, over her words. “It’s a bit different in Shiftertown, laddie. I’ve explained it to you.”

Tiger closed his eyes. Liam, Sean, and Connor had told him about the mating rules—the mate-claim signaled to all other Shifters that the female was off-limits to all other males. The subsequent ceremonies performed by the clan leader, one under sunlight, one under the light of the full moon, bound the mates together under the eyes of the Father God and Mother Goddess.

But the Father God and Mother Goddess had never found Tiger in the basement of the experiment station during his nearly forty years of captivity. Why should Tiger wait for them to acknowledge his mate?

Dylan, Liam’s father and a stickler for the rules of Shifters, had admitted to Tiger one day that the rituals were artificial, put into place at a time when Shifters had fought each other nearly to extinction. To avoid Shifter males battling each other to the death over every female, they’d come up with scent-marking and the mate-claim, and the sun and moon ceremonies performed by the clan leader.

Tiger had listened, wanting to learn everything he could about who and what he was. But he knew—and Dylan knew—that the rules didn’t mean anything. A Shifter recognized his mate when he met her. He scented her, he saw her, he felt her heat, and he knew.

Carly was Tiger’s mate. No doubt about it.

With steady hands, Tiger ripped open his annoying hospital gown and tossed the shreds to the floor. The sheets around his waist bared his chest and abdomen, tanned from working shirtless on cars with Connor. Red circles of bullet holes pockmarked his chest and stomach, blood smeared around them.

The holes had already half closed. Tiger pointed at them.

“The touch of a mate,” he said to Liam. “Heals, you said. Iona said.”

“Shifters are good at healing themselves,” Liam answered, but with less conviction. “And you’re a very strong Shifter.”

A super Shifter, Iona, the woman who’d rescued him, had called him. Iona had been wonderful, and Tiger would always be fond of her. But she hadn’t been his mate.

“Stop this before you confuse me more.” Carly pulled away from Tiger and stood up. “You’re saying I closed that up?” She pointed at a wound, red and angry. “Those holes still look pretty bad to me.”

“They’re not.”

Tiger noted that everyone in the room stood a certain distance from the bed, as though an unseen barrier kept them back. They were afraid of coming too close to his mate, he thought in satisfaction. They were acknowledging her.

“I don’t believe you,” Carly said. “You look terrible, and I feel just awful for getting you hurt on top of everything else. So you let the doctors do their thing. Please?”

Tiger closed his hand around hers again. “Only if you stay.”

She gave him the perplexed look again, then she let out her breath. “Oh, why not? I’m sure I’ll be fired on top of everything else today. What the hell.”

“We’ll see you don’t lose by helping us, lass,” Liam said, in the reassuring way only he could. “Thank you.”

“Least I can do. My mama always said a person should acknowledge everything she’s responsible for, even if she didn’t mean it.” She paused. “Wish Ethan’s mama had taught him that too.”