Page 70 of A Lion's Heart
She was blinking and staring at him as he stood no more than three feet away from her now.
“What did you just say?” she asked, having heard all of his words, but still remaining stuck on just a few.
He ran a hand through his hair, his lips drawn in a tight line before finally replying, “I said I was fucked up until I met you.”
She shook her head. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
“I don’t know what I said, Nisa. I don’t know what I mean. I just don’t know. I can’t remember or I don’t want to contemplate what we just saw up there dropping Cole Linden off like he was some special delivery. He’s in a coma now and none of us know why or how he got that way. Your father is going to ship Keller off to who knows where as punishment for hacking into your system. Lial attacked Gold, almost killing him with some poisoned knife and all I can think about is that if you walk away from me, how will I breathe?”
He hadn’t answered her, or rather hadn’t said what she’d so desperately wanted to hear once more, but Nisa had heard something different instead. She heard her mother telling her about her second awakening and becoming the female shifter she was meant to be. About Shya suggesting that maybe Nisa was doing exactly what she wanted here even though it wasn’t the way she’d envisioned it. To go with it and let the answers come when it was time for them to do so. She also heard Decan’s cry.
As he lay crumbled in the corner of that dank cell in the SIC his head bowed and eyes closed. He had cried, but not for himself, not for the situation he found himself in, but for them. For the Shadow Shifters.
“You could have escaped,” she said softly.
Nisa was moving before she ever realized what she was going to do.
“Each time Mackey or one of his men came into that cell you could have easily killed them and got out of there. His baton, those guns, they wouldn’t have stopped the white lion. You could have defeated them, but you didn’t,” she said.
He looked away from her momentarily and when their gazes met once more his eyes glistened in the darkness. The black and white mixture of his hair and beard more prominent, reminding her instantly of the lion’s regal mane.
“After graduating from high school I came to Oasis to visit my family. I’d heard via the messages my mother had sent to her adoptive parents that were my human guardians about the changes that had been made in those first years after the Unveiling. The plan for Oasis was just beginning to be fulfilled, bunkers were being built, tribes were coming together. My parents were excited. I was disappointed because there was a freedom above ground that Oasis just couldn’t capture. I felt claustrophobic down here, like I was going to die if I stayed.”
Nisa nodded because she could remember feeling the same way most days of her life. She’d combatted that feeling by focusing on creating something better for them—the holodeck—always looking for an answer, a solution to how they could once again join in the world that had forced them out. That was why it was imperative that she run above ground, that she get at least those small opportunities to breathe the free air.
“I joined the Marines two weeks later,” he continued. I came back to visit my family after finishing my tour. Nothing had changed. Sure, they’d built more bunkers and spread out further, but they were still trapped down here. And I hated it. I wanted them and every other shifter out and above ground living the way we were meant to live. But the Assembly Leader was adamant that the shifters stay in Oasis. That we not attempt to fight the humans. So I decided I would make my own plans. I went above ground and had just finished a meeting with Keller when I contacted a woman I’d seen before.”
“Marlee,” Nisa said the name and surprisingly did not feel any twinges of jealousy the way she had before.
“She was a prostitute. She had children and lived in a small apartment. I paid her too much money every time I saw her because I knew she needed it. I didn’t use any other woman, not because I had any serious feelings for Marlee, but because I wanted her children to also have some freedom and to live the life they were meant to live. I’d gotten my tribal tat on my last visit to Oasis. It was long past time but since I was living above ground and trying to fit in, my parents hadn’t thought it was a good idea to have the identifying tattoo. Marlee saw it. Up until that moment she’d thought I was a human, just like everyone else above ground had and because of the fear that Mackey and his goons had helped spread throughout the world, she was afraid.”
“She called the Task Force,” Nisa finished or him. “And they took you to the SIC. They took Marlee too, leaving her children to fend for themselves. Mackey wanted information from you so he didn’t kill you like he did so many others. But you didn’t kill him then.”
She’d been walking as she talked so that now she was standing in front of the man this time.
“The moment I woke up in the SIC I killed the first human that pulled a gun on me. It was instinct and training and my chest heaved as I watched his body fall to the floor, his throat torn out, blood pooling around him. I could hear the humans coming, screaming that they knew this would happen. That we were savages and all deserved to die. Mackey stopped them from killing me and that night they brought Marlee to me. He wanted to see if I could get her pregnant and what a half shifter, half human would be like. She would remain alive as long as I was there to serve a purpose.”
“You took the beatings,” she whispered and lifted a hand to move over the scars on his chest.
Pausing when she felt warmth under one particular set of scars.
“Your tat was here,” she said and looked down at the spot on his left pectoral where the strips of scarring were closer together forming a sort of patch of dead skin. “They burned it off.”
He nodded.
“I wouldn’t tell him who The Desert Cat was and when they heard that the infamous shifter might be close, Mackey decided that Marlee would be the deciding factor.”
“He killed her in front of you to force you to tell him,” she said. “But you don’t know.”
Decan shook his head. “I don’t know who it is. But the shifter showed up that night and set fire to the SIC. I escaped.”
“And began to plan to go against my father’s rules.”
The moment she said the words Decan grabbed her wrist, keeping her hand on his chest as he pulled her closer.
“I planned to free us, Nisa. We deserve to be free.”
He was right. She’d believed that all her life, but she also loved her father.
