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When it was clear the two were simply going to fly and enjoy the night once they’d fed, he went back belowground to finish preparing for the cougar shifters Brooke had agreed to take on.

Their paperwork warned their control wasn’t great, which was to be expected. What had their mother been thinking? When her boyfriend had been killed she’d gone to cougar and stayed the cat. She’d given birth to them in animal form, cubs rather than babies.

No one is certain how the mother raised the cubs in their first months. It’s possible they stayed in animal form until they were old enough to learn to walk. Their paperwork said they appeared approximately three years old in human form when they were found by werewolves running in the forest. At that time, the boys were in human form, smelling of mountain lion, with no mother to be found.

If the infants had stayed in animal form from birth until shortly before they were found, it’s possible they were only a couple of months old even though appearing to be three years old. He knew the swans raised their babies in bird form for several months, so the first time they saw them in human form, they were toddlers.

But birds were hatched, and needed their parents tochangethem between animal and human forms until they grew strong enough to manage thechangeon their own.

Mammals were born, and weren’t supposed to shift for the first time until puberty. Nothing about these young men was like it was supposed to be.

The new acquisitions would need to be kept isolated until he could properly assess their strength and control — or lack of it. Brooke had purchased them on the auction block to keep them from being sold as sex slaves, which was what they’d been trained to be. She’d sell them as sex slaves and make a profit on the sale if they couldn’t be domesticated, but she was depending on Dev to do his best with them, so he would.

They had a room on the lowest level, rather than a cell. He wanted to start things off with them gently, if possible. If he determined they needed to go into a jail cell, those were available as well, but from what Brooke said, they were looking forward to proving themselves capable of becoming freepersons, so he’d begin with that mindset.

Chapter Three

Genie stepped out of the shower and into the bathroom of the guest suite she’d been assigned. Frost had handed her over to a snake shifter, assured her the club had a treaty with the coterie and Dev would keep her safe, and then left.

She knew the MC guys would keep her safe, and if Frost said Dev would watch over her, he would, but she was still nervous. She hadn’t known she was to be left on her own in a vampire’s lair. She took a breath and corrected herself. It was a vampire’s coterie, not a lair.

Though she wasn’t certain there was a difference. There was a whole underground house beneath the property she and Frost had hunted on, and she hadn’t known.

She had a backpack with comfortable cotton leggings and an oversized cotton shirt. She assumed a vampire in a child’s body wouldn’t want her to look sexy, but now she was worried she might be dressed too casually for an ancient being. With a sigh, she pulled out the jeans and shirt she’d brought to wear home. The shirt hugged every curve, which wasn’t the plan, but she hadn’t brought anything else to wear. Maybe she should wear the oversized shirt with the jeans, rather than the leggings? She tried both on and put the tighter shirt back on. The other seemed too sloppy, too informal, and old vampires were almost always formal and extremely well dressed.

Not that the jeans and t-shirt were formal in any way, but they were the better of the two choices.

She had natural blonde highlights in her deep brown hair. Most shifters didn’t have hair that matched their fur or feathers,but her kind of owl did. She pulled the for-hair-only scissors from her backpack and took ten minutes to cut her too-long hair shoulder length at an angle on one side, and then supershort in the back and on the other side. She fluffed it around, angled it a little more on the long side, and then blow-dried it, which made it an inch shorter than her shoulder on the long side.

A little eyeshadow and contour, a lot of eyeliner, mascara, and lipstick, and she was as ready as she’d ever be.

Everything went back into her backpack, and she settled it on the floor between the bed and the wall, so it wasn’t easily seen when someone first stepped into the room. Dev had told her to wait for him to come get her, but she opened the door into the hallway to look out, and two men were standing with their backs to her, looking down the hallway.

“I’m sure we came from this direction, so we should go the other way.”

“He turned us around so many times, I can’t say the direction, but we didn’t walk terribly far after the last turn, so I think we came from the other direction, and we should go this way.”

The men had their backs to her, but she could see arm muscles coming out from under their short-sleeved shirts, and could see the definition of sleek, carved muscles in their backs.

“He brought me in from the other direction, if that helps,” she told them.

Both men turned to look at her, and she nearly fell into their eyes, so blue she wasn’t sure they could be real. They were gorgeous and identical. Twins, andallmale. They smelled of cat. Big cat. Her inner owl wanted to slink away, but she forced herself to stand taller and meet their gaze. Most mammal shifters couldn’t tell the difference between the scent of a great horned owl and a screech owl, and had never even heard of a saw-whet owl.

“Birdy birdy, in the sky,” one of the men said.

“Why’d you do that in my eye?” the other finished.

She shook her head. “Sorry, I’ll just go back to my room.”

Genie was in the process of closing her door when one of them pushed it open, knocking her down. Terror took over and she scrambled backwards like a deformed crab, trying to escape them. She usually carried a gun when not at work but hadn’t been allowed to bring one with her to the coterie’s property.

She knew better than to show fear to a predator, but she couldn’t tamp it down. Still, she had to try. She stood and looked at them, standing her ground rather than running, though there was nothing she could do about the rancid scent of her fright. She’d learned Krav Maga, but someone had to come at her for that muscle memory to kick in. She tried to think of something to do, but withtwoof them, she wasn’t certain she could do much of anything.

“I’m Genie,” she told them. “There’s no one to properly introduce us, so we should do that ourselves.”

One of the men stopped in his tracks and said, “I’m Ezra, this is Elijah.”

“We like to eat little birds,” Elijah said, and she saw his cat in his eyes — yellow with rounded pupils, which generally meant one of the larger cats, but she’d known that from their scent. She’d spent some time around a tiger and a leopard, and she was pretty sure they weren’t either of those, but beyond that, she couldn’t be certain.