My Panther Mate & Our Little Cub novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Cold Hearth
Corina wakes as a neglectful mother, feeds her starving cub and pours out the tea; Darek says she never refused it before.
The first thing I felt was a small hand pulling at my sleeve.
The second thing was hunger, a sharp, hollow ache that did not belong to me.
I opened my eyes on a stone ceiling black with old smoke.
An hour ago I had been charting a drip rate on a night shift, with a cold coffee at my elbow.
Now there was a cub standing beside my bed.
He was maybe four years old, with black curls and amber eyes much too large for his face.
His wrists were as thin as the handles of spoons.
"Ila," he whispered. "Ila, please."
He was not asking for a hug.
He was asking whether I was angry that he'd woken me.
I know that flinch.
I had seen it on the pediatric ward, on children who had learned to expect a slap.
"I'm here," I said, and my voice came out wrong, higher and rougher than my own.
I sat up.
Long auburn hair spilled over my shoulder, and it was not my hair.
My hands were thin and pale, with a pale line on the left wrist where a thorn-shaped mark sat dull as an old bruise.
I understood the rest in one cold swoop.
Somebody else's body.
Somebody else's child.
"Are you hungry?" I asked him.
Tuck nodded once, quickly, and then looked at the floor.
I swung my legs out of the bed and stood, and the room tilted.
The body I'd landed in was starving too.
The den was a single stone hall cut into a cliff, with a hearth at the far end and shutters open on a gray valley.
Cold ashes sat in the hearth.
A pot on the shelf held three spoonfuls of dry grain and some salt.
On the table sat a clay cup of something steaming, dark as pond water.
It smelled bitter and faintly sweet.
I picked up the cup, and Tuck shrank back against the wall.
"Mine," he said, so small I almost missed it. "I didn't touch it. I swear."
"I know you didn't, baby."
Where had that word come from?
It had come out of me the way a reflex does.
I set the cup down and crouched until my eyes were level with his.
"Nobody is in trouble," I said. "Not you. Not me. Come and help."
He stared at me.
Then, carefully, he took two steps toward the hearth.
I found flint and a bundle of kindling, and it took me three tries to light it because my hands kept shaking.
Tuck watched every motion.
I put the grain in the pot with water and salt and stirred it until it bubbled.
There was a jar of dried berries on a high shelf, and I stood on a stool for them and dropped a handful in.
Tuck came closer by inches.
When the porridge was ready I filled the one wooden bowl and held it out.
He didn't take it.
"Go on," I said.
"You said no breakfast until I'm good," he whispered.
My stomach turned over.
That sentence was not mine.
It belonged to the woman whose body I was wearing.
"I was wrong," I said. "I was very wrong. Eat, Tuck."
He ate with both hands, scooping, burning his fingers and not stopping.
I tore the corner off the flatbread I found and dipped it for him, and he took that too.
I was still crouching beside him when the door scraped open.
The man in the doorway filled it.
He was six and a half feet of black leather and gray cloak, with a hunter's shoulders and a scar down his jaw.
His eyes were amber, the same as Tuck's, and there was no warmth in them at all.
He looked at the fire.
He looked at the bowl.
He looked at his son's face, shiny with porridge, and something crossed his own face too fast for me to read.
"Darek," I said. His name was simply there, like the word for baby.
He said nothing.
His gaze went to the table, to the cup of dark tea I had pushed aside.
It was still full.
He crossed the room in three strides and picked it up and held it out to me.
"Drink," he said.
Every nurse's instinct I owned told me not to.
I took the cup and walked to the window and poured it out over the sill.
It hit the rock below in a long dark stripe.
Behind me, Tuck stopped chewing.
When I turned, Darek was staring at me.
"You never refused it before," he said.
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