The Bear's True Mate

By Elizabeth Monvey

Henry McBane had a wife. And a true mate. And they weren’t the same person. He once made a terrible mistake and it cost him everything. When he found his wife dead from a group of shifter hunters, he gets work as an enforcer for the Shifter Council in order to bring the hunting club down.

Ajay Orbin has been a prisoner for months, trapped with others as living science projects and held at the whim of a horrible scientist. When he’s finally rescued, he can’t believe it’s by the man he once loved with his whole heart.

Can he find it in himself to forgive Henry? And what happens when he finds himself...pregnant?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Evernight Publishing
• Release date: Sep 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781772335149

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Published by Evernight Publishing ® at Smashwords

www.evernightpublishing.com

Copyright© 2015 Elizabeth Monvey

ISBN: 978-1-77233-514-9

Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

Editor: Kerry Genova

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

DEDICATION

Thank so much to Evernight for their continued support. And to Jacey Holbrand for being a great friend!

THE BEAR’S TRUE MATE

Divergent Species, 1

Elizabeth Monvey

Copyright © 2015

Prologue

Ajay heard the faint click of a light switch and opened his eyes. Far off he saw a glow spilling from underneath a door at the end of the laboratory. The door he had come to fear because of what came forth … a woman in a white coat that swished around her legs as she walked, smelling like antiseptic and blood.

He raised his head and waited for the door to open. Waited for that woman, the one who had inflicted all the pain and degradation he had endured for the past few weeks. Ajay turned his head and saw other shifters had heard the hum of the overhead fluorescents. His cage, along with two others, was separated from the other shifters. A pink flag hung from the top of their three cages. A cougar named Logan and a wolf named Darwin. Normally, the three of them wouldn’t have gotten along in the wild. They would’ve heeded the territory scents strewn about and moved along, but the cages had become their new homes, iron bars the only separation allowed. They’d become friends, for lack of a better word because they couldn’t rely on anyone else. The other shifters kept to themselves, not transforming back into their human bodies. Ajay, Logan, and Darwin had thought it better to try to reason with the insane woman if they could talk to her.

They looked at each other. Trepidation blanketed the air, the taste so foul and bitter that it gagged him. Scared him. He had tried busting through his cell by transforming and letting his bear out. He had tried fighting when they’d taken him to the back to conduct their experiments, but the drugs they’d injected him with had weakened him to point of being practically useless. In the end, he’d been punished beyond his ability to cope. He’d forced his bear to retreat and let the woman do what she wanted. She had poked, prodded, and torn him asunder, and all Ajay could do was endure. He waited because he knew at some point there would come a time when his claws could slash open her throat. Ajay vowed to himself when that day came, he’d drink her blood and rip out her heart to consume his enemy.

Which one of us is she going to take? Logan asked in a small voice. Out of the three of them, Ajay feared for Logan’s psyche the most. He was a small cougar, and the first thing they had done to him was rip out his claws. The woman had laughed and mocked that he was now a domesticated kitty. It was beyond inhumane.

A small lifetime had passed since they’d been in the cages, but Ajay was patient. Bears hibernated for seven months out of the year so he could damn well bide his time. But if he was the one she was coming for, he was determined to win. He would get out of here and he knew Darwin and Logan felt the same. They’d made a pact that if one escaped they would bring an army of shifters back to fuck up everyone wearing white coats. Ajay glanced at the turntables of syringes sitting innocently on the table in the middle of the room. Those would be hard to fight, but he knew it was his survival, as well as his friends, he was fighting for.

The door slowly opened. The light sweeping in illuminated the pathway into the holding room. Ajay squinted. There were eight cages in all, and from what he could tell, each one held a different shifter. How this place, these people, had discovered their secret identities he didn’t know, but he would make sure they wouldn’t live long enough to tell anyone else.

He stayed still, as did Darwin and Logan, but the five others rose and began to pace since they had stayed in their animal form. The lynx hissed, the hair bristling on his back. The woman walked by Ajay’s cage, smirked, and headed toward the lynx. She stopped a few feet from the cage and viewed the feeble attempt of the animal as it tried to defend itself in an impossible situation. Slowly, the woman took a few steps closer and the lynx reached through the bars to try to attack.

She bent down, placing herself eye level. What’s the matter, pussy? Didn’t you like your dinner? If you turn into a human, you can eat better food than cat slop.

She straightened and turned to the neat circle of syringes. The lynx moved back and forth in his cage, clearly agitated, as she selected one and placed it on the table in front of her.

Why don’t you leave him alone? Ajay demanded.

The woman ignored him for a moment, and then she turned her head and smiled at him. Ajay’s stomach turned at her cold, poisonous look.

"You should keep your mouth shut. Otherwise, I might speed up your injections next."

Ajay grabbed the bars. What are you doing to us?

Experiments, my dear. Thought you had figured that one out. She looked back at the lynx. You know, cat, you’ve been here a week and you still don’t have a name. If you’d change and tell me your name that would be helpful. I can’t keep calling you pussy now, can I?

The lynx only growled again and shrank back, not acknowledging the plea. The woman sighed before she slid her hand in her lab coat to extract a sterile needle and a vial of