Tiger sat on a stool on the other side of the breakfast bar, which was open to the rest of the room, and leaned his arms on the counter.
“I will tell you everything, Carly. From the beginning. Stop, and listen.”
His face was grave, mouth turned down. Carly ceased her flustered puttering, dropped the fork she’d taken up into the pasta salad, and waited for him to start.
Tiger’s position, leaning forward toward her, made his T-shirt open at the neck, but the shadows were such that Carly still couldn’t see his Collar.
Then she frowned. She reached out, hooked one finger around the ribbed neckline, and pulled it down. Her heart beat faster.
Tiger wasn’t wearing a Collar at all. His skin bore a thin red crease across his throat, but the Collar had gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Tiger saw the fear flare in Carly’s eyes as she realized she was alone with an un-Collared Shifter, nothing to control him, nothing to restrain him.
Her lips parted as she reached to him and brushed one fingertip across the abraded skin. Her touch, that one caring stroke, untightened something inside him.
“You took it off?” she asked in wonder. “Looks like that was painful.”
“Yes.” He didn’t lie. Removing the false Collar had hurt, because Liam had made it to embed into Tiger’s skin, so it would better resemble the real ones. “But not as much as it could have, because I never had a Collar on at all.”
Carly stared at him for a heartbeat then her brows drew together. “What are you talking about? It was right there.” She brushed her fingertip across the line again.
“It was a fake.” Full disclosure, that was the term he’d heard. If Carly was to trust him and help him, Tiger had to give her all the information he could. Nothing held back. “I will tell you all of the truth. When I’m done, if you want me to leave, I will. You’ll never see me again, and I’ll make sure you aren’t bothered because of anything I asked you to do today.”Carly’s eyes widened. “I think it’s a little late for that. I just parked a stolen car in my sisters’ garage.”
“They made me in a research lab in a place the humans call Area 51,” Tiger said, ignoring her and plunging straight in. “They were trying to create Shifters artificially. Shifters are born Shifter—they aren’t humans who turn into Shifters because they’re bitten or whatever, like in the movies Connor laughs at. I don’t know how they made me—they might have used Shifter DNA, or only animal and human. They never told me. I was the twenty-third Shifter they made. The others all died when I was still a cub.”
He told her about the long days he’d been left alone in his cage, then taken out only to be shot full of chemicals or given electric shocks or other things, then observed to see how he reacted. His reaction had usually been screaming agony. Tiger told her about the days they’d chain him to a treadmill and make him run for forty-eight hours without a break. They’d alternately starve him and force-feed him to see what he could take, then they’d enact an interrogation scenario, torturing him when he couldn’t answer their questions.
Carly watched him with her beautiful green eyes as Tiger revealed the horrors in his flat voice. They’d let him see his cub once, he related, before they took it away. When Tiger had asked to see his boy again, begged them, they’d told Tiger the cub had died. The grief of that had been worse than any torture they could ever manufacture.
Tiger had talked until his voice grew hoarse, he who rarely said many sentences together. “Walker said that when Eric destroyed the building in Area 51, it was investigated, and the investigators found files and notes that didn’t get burned. At first they thought I’d died either in the experiments or in the explosion, but Walker kept an eye out. When he found out there was a Shifter in Austin who came from nowhere, he started watching me. Today he told me that the Shifter Bureau wants to start the research again, officially. The Area 51 people were trying to create Shifter soldiers, off-book. Shifter Bureau now wants to see if the project is still viable, if they can make Shifters who will be controlled soldiers, using me as the prototype.”
Carly had gone very still, her gaze fixed on him in shock as he’d told the tale. Now rage flared in her eyes. “Dear God. I’m guessing they aren’t asking you to volunteer.”
Tiger shrugged. “Officially, I don’t exist. I’m not a registered, Collared Shifter. Feral Shifters, un-Collared, can legally be hunted and killed.”
She planted her fists on the counter. “This is all bullshit.”
“As a research subject, I’m perfect, because it doesn’t matter if I die.”
“It damn well does matter,” Carly snapped. “And Walker told you all this? Why, because you were nice and let him go?”
“He doesn’t like what the idea has been turned into. The Shifter Bureau sent a soldier out to wreck the car and shoot me as part of the experiment. The mission risked civilians, and Walker doesn’t like that.”
“How sweet of him. Well, consider me risked. Along with Ellison. And they had you shot in cold blood. Why didn’t they scoop you up and take you with them right then, if they wanted to watch what would happen to you?”
“They thought they could scoop me up anytime they wanted, and they didn’t want to pay for the medical care.”
“Let the Shifters foot the bill and spend the time taking care of you while the Shifter Bureau sits back and watches?”