Grigori knew that the options for a hybrid cub weren’t great. Foster care. Orphanage. Taken in by full-humans. Grigori couldn’t stand the thought. So he’d gone to his C.O. and been released from duty. Something that wouldn’t have been easy for the full-human Marines, but shifters played by different rules. Sometimes they simply had to when it came to caring for their young. So Grigori had taken on raising the quiet, neat little boy with time issues. It hadn’t been easy. Grigori was only twenty-nine at the time, and it was usually the sows who did the bulk of the raising when it came to cubs, but he wouldn’t let that stop him. The boy needed him. Because what ten-year-old folded his socks without a C.O. to tell him to? And the boy had that weird thing about time and Christ, the lists! There were so many lists. At first, Grigori worried that the kid had been mentally damaged by the accident. The first few months, he kept looking to see if the kid tortured animals or drew weird pictures that involved killing people. He was just too quiet. Too polite. Too solemn. Especially for a bear or lion cub.

He’d bring the boy in to see Marci Luntz, and she kept telling Grigori not to worry. Then, one day, the boy had walked in on Grigori watching a hockey game on TV. For the first time, the kid sat down beside him without being asked to and watched along with him. He hadn’t bothered before with TV, always more a fan of reading, something Grigori had always found boring. But the kid had watched every second of the game, almost smiling when it was over.

The next day, on a hunch, Grigori came home with a pair of hockey skates, stick, and a puck, and took the kid to one of the ponds near his house. Without saying a word, the boy put on his skates, expertly tying them up, wrapped up the handle of his stick with tape, and hit the ice. That’s when Grigori saw what the kid had been missing for the few months they’d been living together.

Then, after watching him for a good hour, Grigori realized something else.

The kid would be a superstar. For someone so young, who he guessed hadn’t been on the ice in months, Bold Novikov had the most impressive moves Grigori had ever seen, and the kid was only doing drills.

At first, Grigori was the only one who saw it. Even for a ten-year-old, Bold was smaller than any of the other cubs. Quieter, less playful. Grigori worried that pressure from the other kids would make Bold give up, especially when they started calling the kid “Speck.” Grigori should have known better. That kid didn’t give up on anything. Always smaller than the other bears he played with, Bold never let that hold him back. He never let the reaction he got from the rest of the town for being tough and mean on the ice get to him. The kid had a goal and he went for it with the methodical planning of a war-time dictator.

It was almost a shame the kid had no interest in the military—he’d be a general by the time he was thirty. Or killed by his own troops. It could really goeither way.

Dr. Karl Baxter walked out of the surgery. “Okay. We got the bullet out and sewed up what we could and put a cast on his arm. Now we wait and see.”

Grigori nodded. “Okay.”

The Yellowstone grizzly patted his shoulder. “Why don’t you get some coffee? You’ll probably need it. By the time you get back, we’ll be able to let you in to see him.”

“Okay. Thanks, Karl.”

“Of course.”

Grigori headed down the hallway toward the elevators that would take him to the cafeteria, but he paused at the doorway of the room where the wolfdog was being treated. While the nurses had refused to go back into the room with the “poppin’ and lockin’ canine,” as she’d been named by the orderlies, Betty Yu and Marci had refused to leave her side. Fascinated by every snap, crackle, and pop coming off the little girl.

“How’s she doing?”

Marci glanced up at him and then away, pushing the girl onto her side and focusing on her back. “She’s alive but still unconscious. To be honest, I have no idea if she’ll ever come out of—” She pointed at the wolfdog’s back. “Betty . . . what is this?”

The panda walked around the bed. “What’s what?”

“This? It doesn’t look like a laceration.”

“More glass?” Betty looked at Grigori. “We found glass imbedded in her flesh. Probably from the accident.”

Accident. Yeah. Right. From what he’d heard about thirty minutes ago from his cousin, the crash of that van was not a simple accident. Far from it. Especially since Yuri didn’t even think that most of the full-human victims had died from the crash. They were dead before it.

“I thought we got all of it,” Betty explained after grabbing a clamp-looking thing with long handles and placing it against the wolfdog’s flesh, “but we may have missed a piece or two.”

She tugged and pulled something from the wolfdog’s flesh. It sparkled in the harsh emergency room light, but it wasn’t glass.

Yu held it up. “What in holy hell is this?”

Yeah. Grigori would like to know that, too.

CHAPTER 16

Something was choking him. Choking him to death. He grabbed at it, trying to pull it from his throat. Strong arms grabbed his hands, pulled them away. He fought back, struggling against them, knowing they were trying to kill him.

“Bold!” He heard the voice. Recognized it. “Bold! Listen to me! It’s Dr. Luntz! Open your eyes, sweetheart! Open them and look at me!”

He did, but it wasn’t easy.

It was Dr. Luntz hovering over him, her hands on his face, brushing his cheeks with soft, cool fingers. “You’re safe, Bold. You’re safe.”