Burning Bright: A Spicy M/M Weretiger Heist Romance Read online

  Lucas couldn’t find his jacket, so he borrowed Ryan’s more expensive, classier-looking one. It kind of clashed with the rest of Lucas’ outfit, but he didn’t really care. Fashion was not something he had any kind of skill in during even the best of times.

  He scribbled a note, explaining to Ryan where he’d gone, and left the apartment as quietly as possible. Lucas felt glad that Ryan was managing to have a sleep-in. The trip out to see Catherine seemed to have really restored his peace of mind.

  Lucas wasn’t a moron. He could see that something very weird was going on with Ryan. Just sitting next to him in the car yesterday had felt like being in the presence of a very dangerous, alluring predator — to a much greater degree than being around Ryan usually felt like that.

  The primitive, instinctual part of Lucas’ brain was absolutely certain that something major and biological was happening to Ryan, even as all rationality and logic said that this was completely insane.

  In light of that, Lucas was especially glad that going to his mom’s had given Ryan a bit of a relief. It seemed that fear, as much as anything else going on right now, was what they had to strive to hold at bay. If they could keep each other from getting too frightened, then everything else would be a dozen times easier to deal with.

  Whatever weird freaky supernatural shit that ‘everything else’ proved to be.

  The jobs Lucas spent the day doing weren’t legitimate, per se, but they weren’t breaking any huge laws either. Grey-area stuff, like setting up VPNs for activist groups, or reconnecting empty houses to the grid invisibly, so people could live there without having to pay for electricity or gas.

  Work like that didn’t pay as much as stealing emeralds off underworld billionaires, but Lucas figured that it was still worthwhile to do it. It was never a bad idea to get in good with people who might be able to help you some day down the line, even if the most they ever wound up repaying you was a cup of coffee next time you saw them.

  Lucas was a big believer in the coffee economy. He revised his earlier considerations of what the most important things for himself and Ryan were: overcoming fear, and having potential sources of coffee they could hit up if they were ever down on their luck and in need of help. So long as they had those, the rest would take care of itself.

  Plus, there was the karmic angle to consider. Not that Lucas really believed in karma in a literal sense or anything, but he did believe that at least sometimes doing things that were altruistic made you a better person than only doing things that were self-serving. All that theft and crime meant he had a long balance sheet to make good on, and there was no time like the present to start working off the debt.

  He headed back towards the apartment shortly after nightfall, exhausted enough from his work that he caught himself limping a couple of times, and had to correct himself mid-stride. Lucas hadn’t heard from Ryan at all, which seemed like a good sign, as it meant he hadn’t had any new developments or freak-outs while Lucas had been out.

  “I’m back,” Lucas called as he stepped back inside their home and headed for the kitchen. “Have we got any soda? Cans, I mean. I know we’ve got a bottle but I think it went flat—”

  Ryan came into the kitchen after Lucas, still wearing the old t-shirt and boxers he typically slept in. He seemed a little disoriented, and at first Lucas wondered if calling out when he got home had woken Ryan up.

  Ryan’s loose, unfocused demeanor shifted in a split second, however. Without any reason that Lucas could see, Ryan suddenly stilled completely, gaze fixed on Lucas. Then Ryan shoved him back, making Lucas stumble on his bad leg for a moment and shout in surprise as he flailed to regain his balance.

  In the momentary slice of time it took him to stop himself from falling on his ass, Lucas found himself slammed against the wall of the kitchen. It felt like the whole lean length of Ryan’s body was pressed against him, posture a sinuous curve, every inch as close as could be.

  “What the fuck, Ry?”

  Ryan stroked at the side of Lucas’s neck with his thumb, the rest of his hand holding Lucas’s head in place as he nuzzled at the skin at the hinge of Lucas’s jaw and behind his ear, inhaling a deep breath in through his nose.

  “You smell so good,” he whispered in a husky purr, hips working against Lucas’s thigh. All of Ryan was moving in small, sensual ways. It seemed more like his body was running on instinct than like he was conscious of its movement.

  Lucas had seen Ryan make a deliberate move on people often enough to know what it looked like. Ryan’s seductions were more calculated than this, less urgent and wild and strange. He wasn’t a wall-slamming kind of guy.

  Also, Ryan’s seductions weren’t typically aimed at Lucas, if by ‘typically’ Lucas actually meant ‘ever’.

  “Ryan, talk to me here, what’s goin-”

  “Your smell, with my jacket over it, it’s…”

  Words seemed to fail Ryan for a moment as his hips stuttered in another needy thrust against Lucas. Ryan’s whole body was burning hot against his, and Lucas could feel how hard he was.

  “It’s like I can smell us fucking, on your skin,” he managed finally, voice hoarse. “Our scents together. I can smell that you’re mine. Anyone else who got too close would smell it too. I want you to smell like that forever.”

  “Okay, how about we-” Lucas tried to say, tentatively attempting to push Ryan back a little bit, make some distance between the pair of them.

  Ryan made a low growling sound in the back of his throat, shoving Lucas against the wall even harder, pinning him there. Ryan’s tongue licked a long, hungry line up the skin of Lucas’ throat, a growl rumbling in his chest.

  The intensity of it made Lucas weak at the knees, just for a second. It felt like he was being claimed, whether he liked it or not, and that primal, instinctual part of him wanted to bare his throat and submit to it.

  But he wasn’t the one dealing with this shit for real, not really — that was Ryan, and so it was up to Lucas to be the one who kept things under control.

  “Ryan, listen to me. We’re gonna work this out, I promise, but you gotta get a hold of yourself first. We always get ourselves out of the shit we get ourselves into, right? You don’t have to give into this.”

  Ryan was trembling against him, whole-body shudders that wracked through him so hard Lucas was worried that Ryan was about to collapse.

  “Shit, shit, I didn’t mean to… fuck…” Ryan started to say, breaking down into gulping sobs. He tried to pull away from Lucas but Lucas held onto him, clutching him hard in a hug.

  They kind of wound up half-sliding, half-falling to the floor, Lucas sitting with his back still against the wall and his bad leg stretched out, Ryan curled in on himself like a wounded animal as Lucas rubbed his back.

  Almost all of the menace had drained out of Ryan now, replaced by desperate confusion. He was still shaking, and so Lucas sat with him and waited for him to calm down, despite the fact that Lucas was shaking pretty hard himself as well after what had happened.

  “I get it, I get it. No more borrowing your clothes,” he joked weakly.

  Ryan just shuddered more. “Something is really, really wrong with me.”

  “I know man. But we’re gonna beat it, okay?”

  Lucas wished he believed his own words more than he did.

  Ryan

  It was pretty uncommon for the both of them to drink at the same time. Under all the swagger and unconventionality of their chosen profession, the truth was that Ryan and Lucas were workaholics. They always had at least some minor scam running at any given moment, and with a schedule like that they needed for at least one of them to have their wits about all the time.

  It was pretty uncommon, but ‘uncommon’ seemed a fair description of their current situation, so Ryan and Lucas had made an exception to the general rule and broken out the booze.

  “If this was even halfway decent, my tolerance for it would be so much better,” Ryan complained, hating the soft edge that his words w
ere already starting to take on as he slid his way towards actual slurring. “French champagne, good Scotch, those I’d be fine. Not this cheap rotgut shit, though.”

  “All champagne is French. You’re trying to sound cultured and you just sound the opposite,” Lucas told him, taking a theatrically large gulp from the rum bottle and passing it back.

  “What?”

  “All champagne is French. The name’s protected. If it comes from anywhere else it’s just sparkling white wine.”

  “Hmm.” Ryan shrugged. “There you go. I’ve learned two things today. One, I’m losing my mind as I slowly turn into some kind of sex-crazed weretiger, and two, you’re a know-it-all.”

  “You already knew that.”

  “Guess I only learned one thing, then.” Ryan took a long swallow of the alcohol, wincing at the burn of it in his throat.

  “I used to practically live on this when I was a kid,” Lucas said, taking the bottle back and drinking more. He wasn’t as tipsy as Ryan, but Ryan could tell he was putting in a solid effort to catch up. “Not an actual kid-kid. A teen. I was on this practically every day. About the only time I let myself sober up completely was when I wanted to play at the arcade a block away from my dad’s place.”

  “You had your priorities in order, obviously,” Ryan noted with sarcasm.

  “Damn right I did. I wasn’t going to waste quarters on a stupid thing like being drunk.”

  Ryan could remember one of the first times he’d met Lucas in-person, rather than chatting online. They’d gone to the arcade that Lucas was talking about. Even tipsy, Lucas had completely kicked his ass, having long ago learned to think fast and clever when it came to dealing with machines, so he could get his money’s worth.

  That was the true origin of Lucas’ technical wizardry. The better he was, the longer he’d be able to play, and the longer before he’d have to go home to his father’s rage. Being good had been a survival skill and Lucas, like Ryan, was one of the world’s born survivors.

  “Being a kid sure was shitty, huh?” Ryan said. Lucas nodded.

  “Yep. But look at us! We made it out. We’ll always make it out. There’s always a solution.”

  “Famous last words.”

  Drunk and sad and frightened, Ryan desperately wanted to lean over and kiss Lucas. But the tiger in him had taken away any chance he’d had of ever working up his courage to do that.

  It seemed a ridiculously tiny thing to be sad about, in the greater scheme of how wrong things were going, but Ryan couldn’t help but feel miserable about it. If it’d had to go this way, he would have at least liked it if the fumbling attempts at kisses getting gently rebuffed by Lucas had been of Ryan’s own volition, instead of a symptom of his turning into a tiger.

  Ryan’s shoulders began to shake with laughter. It was that or start crying again, and fuck crying, honestly. After a couple of seconds Lucas joined in, and they sat there, laughing and passing the bottle back and forth, trying not to think about the ways in which their world was falling apart.

  After a while, Lucas stumbled to standing position and staggered over to the computer.

  “You won’t find anything,” Ryan said, following him and sitting down on the floor next to Lucas’ chair. “You already know you won’t.”

  “But how can there be nothing online? It’s insane,” Lucas muttered as his fingers clattered over the keys, his search diving deeper and deeper into the shadows of the internet.

  Ryan gave a hollow laugh. “It’s so like you to believe in weretigers more easily than you’ll believe that you can’t find something on the internet.”

  “I just don’t see how ‘weretiger’ needs a greater level of secrecy and protection than, like, auction forums debating the relative value for money in buying individual human organs versus buying a whole cadaver. And that’s not even anywhere near the top of the grossest shit I’ve seen people talk about! Weretigers aren’t breaking the law or anything — I mean, I’m pretty sure there aren’t any laws against Kafkaesque transformations into non-human creatures, I feel like that would have come up in public record at some point.”

  In other circumstances, Lucas getting worked up and launching into a weird wordy drunken rant like that would have been incredibly endearing to Ryan, but as things were he just felt the same frustration that Lucas did. How could there be nothing? Everyone was online these days. Why weren’t there fucking Facebook groups for people in Ryan’s position to join, so he didn’t feel so terrified and alone?

  Maybe the fact that they couldn’t find anything was proof that he wasn’t a weretiger at all. Maybe he was just straight up turning into a tiger, and wasn’t going to turn back at the end. The way he was feeling sure didn’t feel reversible, after all. This whole thing might be a one-way trip.

  Ryan sat and watched Lucas’ fruitless search, too lost to know what else to do.

  Lucas

  Lucas slept the day through, feeling clammy and halfway to hungover even before the fog of drink had dissipated completely. Even though he didn’t drink the way he had when he was younger — he wasn’t sure adult metabolisms could even attempt to drink the way he had when he was younger without gaining severe liver damage in the process — he still had a pretty high tolerance, so the hangover feeling never progressed beyond a general seediness.

  Ryan’s bedroom door was shut, and after the last time Lucas had gone out and left Ryan alone it didn’t seem like the best idea in the world to do it again. But Lucas wasn’t exactly gold-star quality at making good choices; the fact he’d decided to become a career criminal kind of took that life goal off the table permanently. His decision making skills were erratic at best, and this situation was extremely fucking far from qualifying as ‘best’.

  Lucas wanted to hit something. He wanted to fight something solid and tangible, something that would hurt him in ways that he understood, instead of making him ache with confusion and fear and a mix of emotions he’d never been brave enough to identify within himself.

  Lucky for Lucas, there were always fights to be had, provided he was willing to put money down and wasn’t afraid of pain. He’d done a bunch of it back after he ran away from his dad’s, before he’d gone to live with his mom. There was easy money, though not especially big money, out there for a guy who could throw a punch and wasn’t scared of getting hurt.

  He had more formal training than his opponents, from his time in the Marines. As far as the informal training created by growing up in the heady mix that young male anger and poverty went, all of the fighters were about equally matched in that.

  Lucas had a handicap, thanks to his crappy leg, which took away any advantage that his Marine training might have provided.

  The way his lip felt sore and tender after it split against some guy’s knuckles was a relief. This was a pain he understood, an absolutely familiar sensation. He’d been getting bloody lips since before he was old enough for high school. They were one of the few continuities that stretched all the way through the different stages of his life.

  His own knuckles were a mess too, from giving other guys lips and eyes as busted as his own now were. The center knuckle of his right hand was especially minced, with cuts in the shape of actual tooth marks decorating it. He gave a small scoff of quiet laughter as he examined the damage. Now that he’d been bitten by a brawler as badly as Ryan had been bitten by a tiger, was Lucas gonna start turning into a scrappy asshole who liked street fights, next time the full moon rolled around?

  This was all so fucked up. Things like this didn’t happen.

  He stopped by the convenience store on the way home, buying a tub of Neapolitan ice cream. It wasn’t until he was halfway through paying for it that he realized how busted up his face must look, grimy and bloodied and sweaty from fighting. He tried to give the clerk a charming, non-threatening smile, but from the way the clerk recoiled a little at the sight of the expression, it seemed like Lucas’ plan to reassure the guy hadn’t quite worked.

  Ryan came into t
he kitchen as Lucas was rummaging in the drawer for a spoon to eat the ice cream with. He didn’t seem at all surprised at Lucas’ disheveled state, just raising one cool judgmental eyebrow, the same way he always had in the past, right back to when they were both teenagers.

  It was such a familiar expression, so Ryan, that Lucas stepped close and kissed that haughty, beautiful mouth before he’d even thought about doing it. Ryan made a surprised sound and tried to step back, but Lucas grabbed one of his hands and squeezed, trying to make him stay. Another sound came from Ryan, a needy grunt that shot down Lucas’ spine and straight to his dick.

  Lucas didn’t know if it was weird crazy impossible pheromones making him do this, but one thing he did know for certain was that he’d wanted Ryan forever, and he’d always been afraid of losing Ryan, and that possibility seemed more real and threatening than ever before. It was now or never, and Lucas wasn’t a ‘never’ kind of guy.

  Ryan

  Lucas’s mouth tasted of cheap booze and of his split lip, and that faint hint of blood made the strange wild thing growing inside Ryan bare its teeth and roar with fury. Its mate was hurt. It needed to protect, to defend. It needed to kill.

  “Shh, shhh,” Lucas soothed, breaking the kiss enough to speak. “I’m okay, Ry. Calm down.”

  Ryan realized he must have been growling for real. Embarrassed, he gave a huff of laughter.

  “Sorry. It… I can’t help it. You’re just… you’re important. You’re the only thing it… thing I care about. I can’t think about anything else. You’re the only thing in the world.”

  Lucas looked worried by that. The part of Ryan that was still the old Ryan, the detached part that was hanging back and observing the rest of him, wasn’t surprised. To hear such a stammering, bare, inarticulate confession like that was the strongest proof yet that something very, very wrong was going on with Ryan.