Heart of a Lion by Lacey Thorn
Chapter Four
Mitch paced outside the surgery room while Tony, Diane and Gideon worked on Quinn and her baby. He’d nearly lost it when Abby had run inside with an incubator. He knew what that meant. They were taking the baby Quinn was so desperate to protect. He would be too little, not fully grown, weak outside his mother’s womb. At minimum, she had at least four weeks to go. Mitch wasn’t familiar with shifter pregnancies, but he knew that would make the baby premature.
Professor Mueller was getting blood from both Tah and Daniel, the only two lion shifters currently with the pride. They were prepared to do everything they could to save Quinn and her baby. Her father was seeing to Ariel, who’d been drugged. Mitch understood it gave the other man something to focus on instead of the worry eating them both alive.
Thank God, she had the medical help the pride could provide. Diane was the pride’s doctor. Her knowledge of lions and other big cats gave her an edge on most of the rest of them. Since she’d joined the pride, she’d mated a panther shifter named Zane and given birth to a healthy baby girl. She’d also delivered the alpha’s daughter and the twin boys of another pride member. He couldn’t imagine Quinn’s son being in better hands than Diane’s.
Quinn also had Tony and Gideon. Mitch knew Tony was the best of the best. He’d witnessed Tony save more lives than he could count. Human and shifter alike, and right now, he wasn’t sure which class Quinn fell into. She’d been like a fierce lioness when he’d first seen her, earlier. She’d torn apart the man who’d threatened her child, killing him with her bare hands. She’d roared, eyes spitting fire. She’d been fierce and beautiful, and he’d wanted to claim her as his own right then and there. Fortunately, common sense had kicked in. It had been neither the time nor the place for such a statement. Plus, when it happened, and he had no doubt he and Quinn were meant to be together, it would be in a private moment shared between the two of them.
Gideon stepped out, and Mitch caught his arm before he could move away.
“What’s going on?”
The jaguar shifter who’d grown up in a lab and proved indispensable to the pride looked haggard.
“She’d holding her own. The bullet penetrated her left side, ripping through her uterus and detaching the placenta. We had to take the baby. He was in too much distress. Diane’s got him. She won’t let him die. Not without one hell of a fight. Tony and I are working on Quinn. She’s lost a lot of blood. She’s…” He paused, blowing out a weary breath.
“What?” Mitch demanded.
“Talbot fucked her up. Badly. And this… She won’t have any more kids. We had to take her uterus. The left ovary. Tony’s doing everything he can to save her, and I need to get some blood. She’s lost too much.”
“Do you need more for her? Human blood? I can donate, and so will all the guys.”
Gideon shook his head. “She needs lion’s blood. It’s got to be Tah and Daniel.”
“Why does she need shifter blood if you’ve taken the baby?” Mitch asked.
“Did you hear what I said earlier about Talbot’s actions?” Gideon asked. “He fucked her up. Quinn’s not completely human.”
“She’s a shifter?”
There was no fucking way the evil doctor had created his own shifter.
“No. She’s something in between. Tony will tell you more once we have her stabilized. Now, I need to go.”
He walked away, and Mitch’s knees went weak. Something in between? What was in between? What the hell had Talbot done to her?
Jonah stepped into the room, looking worse for wear in his ripped camo pants and blood-stained brown T-shirt.
“Threat’s been neutralized. No survivors. Sorry.”
He didn’t look sorry. Usually, Mitch wouldn’t be either, but he really wanted to get his hands on another one of the attackers and make him talk. The last ones they’d captured hadn’t survived long, even with medical care.
“How’s Quinn?” Jonah’s gaze bounced between Mitch and the OR where they worked on Quinn.
“They took the baby,” Mitch replied.
“Fuck me. That’s not good, is it?”
Mitch shook his head, pausing to watch Gideon walk back into the operating room with bags of blood and tubing. He hated being useless, and that was how he felt at the moment. He had to sit and wait for news, trusting Tony to make sure Quinn survived and Diane to do the same for the baby. He started to tell Jonah about Quinn being unable to have any more children, but it seemed wrong to share that with anyone else when she wasn’t even aware of it yet.
“She’ll be fine,” Jonah offered. “Tony won’t let anything happen to her. And Diane’s with the baby, right? She’s damn good. I’ve seen her in action. She doesn’t miss anything as far as I can tell. They couldn’t be in better hands.”
Mitch nodded. Hadn’t he just been telling himself the same thing?
“There’s more going on.”
“You don’t say,” Jonah agreed. “Heard about the lady’s roar and claws. Sounds like it wasn’t a knife she used to gut the last guy. What the hell, man? I thought she was human?”
“She is.”
No matter what Gideon said, he knew she was human. She might be something more also, but one didn’t negate the other. He knew that better than most.
“Call Derrick,” he told Jonah, referring to one of the alpha wolf shifters who’d been a close friend for years. “Tell him we need Jess.”
“You think it’s a good idea to bring them here while we’re under attack?”
“They can’t hide her forever. Besides, we both know she’s been wanting to see her father and Abby for a long time. And we need her. Quinn needs her.”
“What are you not saying?” Jonah asked.
“Talbot did something to Quinn. Changed her somehow. If anyone can figure it out, Jess can. From the way her mates talk, when she and her father are together, there’s little they can’t get to the bottom of. We need her. And they owe us.”
Jonah crossed his arms over his broad chest and rocked back on his heels. “You want to call in a marker on this.”
“I’ll call in every marker I can if it saves her.”
“Unless there’s something else you aren’t telling me, Tony’s in there saving her, right now.”
“Physically. Mentally and emotionally is a different story. She needs answers. And as good as Tony is, we both know he’ll have his own agenda. Jess will put Quinn first. She needs to be put first.”
“You’re in love with her.”
“Pretty sure her mates would have something to say about that, if it were true,” Mitch joke.
“We both know who I’m referring to.”
Mitch blew out a shaky breath as he admitted the truth to Jonah. “I’m in love with her.”
Jonah stared at him for a long moment then nodded. “I’ll make the call. I can take one of the choppers if I need to.”
“Pull in everyone you can. I want all hands on deck here. We’ll have members of four different shifter groups in one place. Six of them alphas. One the brother of an alpha. We take no chances.”
Normally, they’d only have Tah and occasionally, the coyote alpha to worry about. Now, they’d have those two plus all four wolf alphas, and Jensen Holloway, whose brother Laramie, the alpha of the Holloway den, would have all their hides if anything happened to Jensen.
“Understood,” Jonah agreed. “I’ll check back as soon as things are in place.”
Mitch went back to pacing after Jonah left. A few minutes later, Quinn’s father walked in. Mitch had met him a few times but didn’t really know him. He knew Miles Jensen had been recruited by Isaac Erikson to be the on-call doctor for the shifters in the area. In retaliation, a hunting party had killed Miles’ wife and left her body as a warning to him about his association with shifters. That was the catalyst that had allowed Isaac to sway Quinn into leaving behind all she knew to join up with a group of hunters to spy for Isaac. A task that had led to years of being Talbot’s pet project, with him doing God only knew what to her.
“She’s still in there,” Mitch mentioned, not knowing what else to say to the other man.
“They’re trying to get her stable. Her body’s not cooperating.” Miles’ voice was soft, warm, and dripping with a deep sadness that was hard to keep from responding to. The man sounded broken, but he kept speaking. “Diane’s got the baby stable for now. He’s tiny but a fighter. Hopefully, his mama will be a fighter, too.” Those weary shoulders hunched as he sat in one of the chairs. “My daughter left here hating me, and the honest truth is, I have no idea if that hate is still there or not. She hasn’t really spoken to me. But she speaks to you.”
Mitch met Miles’ gaze. The other man looked gutted.
“She trusts you. She’s going to need someone she trusts when she comes around, and she will come around. That sorry excuse for a doctor hurt my baby. Did things to her no doctor should ever do. When I think of what she must have suffered through, I wish…” He trailed off then shook his head. “I wish a lot of things, but none of them matter. I love my daughter. There’s not a thing I wouldn’t do for her, if given the opportunity. I lost her mother, and almost immediately after, I lost my daughter. It’s a hard knock for a man to take. I won’t go through that again. She’s home now. At some point, I’m going to break through her walls and show her how much she means to me. How much they mean to me. I won’t lose her again. I won’t lose my grandson, either.”
Mitch wasn’t sure what to say, so he spoke from the heart. “Quinn’s one of the strongest people I’ve ever met, and no one could ask for a fiercer mother. She won’t leave her son alone. She’ll fight to be with him just as hard as she’s fought to protect him during her pregnancy.”
“I hope you’re right,” Miles agreed, turning his gaze toward the doors Quinn was still behind. “I won’t survive losing her again.”
“We’re not losing her,” Mitch stated firmly.
He and Quinn had only recently met. They were still getting to know one another, still circling around the attraction that was always there, though neither of them mentioned it aloud. Jonah had hit the nail on the head with his earlier comment. As unlikely as it was, Mitch had fallen in love with her. He wasn’t sure when it had happened. Only that it had. At some point over the past weeks, he’d eased into deeper emotions than he’d felt in a long time. His heart had nearly stopped when the alarm sounded, and he’d not known where she was. Then there had been the distraction while a single hunter had gone after her. Not Talbot. But Quinn. Which made him wonder if she’d been the target all along.
It didn’t matter. They weren’t getting her. Heaven couldn’t have her, either. She had too many people around her who needed her to stay with them. A premature son who was going to need his mom even more now that he was out in the world. A father who needed to heal the broken bond between them. And a world-weary soldier who’d seen so much of the bad in the world that he’d given up on having anything good. He could with her. He felt it, and he knew if they lost her, the heart she’d awakened would never open up again.
An alarm screamed, and Mitch jumped up ready to face whatever attack was coming next. But it wasn’t coming from outside. It wasn’t a group of hunters. It was coming from where Tony and Gideon worked on Quinn.
“We’re losing her!”
Mitch wasn’t sure who’d said the words. It didn’t matter. In that moment, his entire world came to a grinding halt, and he did something he hadn’t done in too many years to count. He dropped to his knees and prayed to a god he’d disavowed years ago.