Page 4

seriously, the worst spring ever

. . .

gideon

V intage eighties’ hair rock. Blasting. Woke me up before my alarm.

Cracked an eye open to find Callum’s bed on the other side of our room. Empty, with rumpled sheets.

Figured. Cal had dropped his Coast Guard discipline the second nobody was yelling at him to make his bunk.

But… Motley Crüe. Bed empty three hours before either business opened.

Didn’t need to see my identical twin to know. He was pissed.

Sure enough, I found him in the doorway of the third bedroom, where the mayor had set up a gym. Banging out pull-ups like a damn machine in nothing but a pair of gym shorts. Dripping sweat with wild eyes. And a massive hard-on.

That old familiar itch rose in my bones. Match him. Mirror him. Stay the same so you don’t fall apart.

But there was only one pull-up bar.

And my dick hadn’t worked since I moved back to Bear Mountain—right after black ops Joint Task Bear Force chewed me up and spit me out with heavily redacted discharge papers featuring words like corrupted , body count , and too unstable to trust .

So I went for the stereo.

Nice thing about the mayoral cave den, it dated back to the last century and came with vintage everything. Real sound system. None of that Bluetooth Wi-Fi crap wired into the Bear Mountain Proper cabins where we grew up.

Cal damn near went feral over it when we moved in. Blew hundreds on CDs full of music from before we were born. So, yeah. I knew cutting Vince Neil off mid-scream would piss him right the hell off.

I guessed right.

He dropped to the ground. Glared at me like I’d kicked Tommy Lee in the balls. “Turn it back on.”

I waited.

“I said, turn it back on.” He bared his teeth. Took a step toward me.

I just peeled off my T-shirt. At least now we matched on top.

Still, I couldn’t mirror him if he was seriously pissed. Too close to the natural state I’d been hiding underneath the shell of being one of the “Red Outsider Twins”—the ones nobody in Bear Mountain could tell apart.

“You wanna tell me why you’re interfering with my workout?” Cal demanded, getting right in my face.

“You wanna tell me what set you off?”

“None of your business.”

I stared him down. Didn’t blink.

Eventually, he caved. “Cody’s closing the restaurant early so he and his new best friend Hawk can make a big surprise dinner for their mauls.”

“Okay,” I said, brow furrowing. Not sure why he was riled up and sporting a hard-on over not having to work tonight.

“It’s not even either of their birthdays!

” Cal snapped, heading back to the bar and knocking out a few more rolling reps.

“Cody says they just wanna do something nice for their mates. Guess winning the maul bride lottery wasn’t enough for them.

Now they gotta rub their happily-ever-after in our faces, too. ”

He paused to huff out an angry breath. “I mean, what are the odds of not one but two eligible tourists strolling into our town during off-season?”

Tourist was what we called both the literal tourists and the humans who’d gotten turned into bears during their time in Bear Mountain. Not gonna lie, it could get confusing.

“One of those tourists was the older sister,” I pointed out anyway. “She wouldn’t have come if she wasn’t looking for Noelle.”

“And how long did it take Holly Winters to walk into that bar after Hawk strolled in to meet those Iron Claw MCs?” he gritted out.

Aw hell. Not this again.

I didn’t answer.

“Fifty-five minutes!” Cal exploded. “That’s how long that maul-less ex-con sat there before a tourist wandered in and changed his whole life. And what do you do? You hire him as our prima donna winter cook. Like, Hey, this guy hasn’t been lucky enough—let’s pay him to only cook what he wants to! ”

I didn’t regret hiring Hawk. That ex-con could cook .

And the one thing every winter diner could agree on? My twin brother could not. Not even close.

Great bartender, sure. But the cooking genes must’ve all gone to our baby brother, Cody.

And, yeah, Hawk only made one or two items per meal. But the numbers didn’t lie—he’d quadrupled our customer traffic during a season that was normally dead. He paid for his own paycheck and then some.

Still, Cal had been simmering since Hawk rolled into town, mauled up with two Mounties, and got their new mate pregnant within a week or two after her arrival.

“That’s some prodigal son bullshit,” Cal muttered.

“Holly didn’t even give any of the other already-made mauls a chance.

Just looked at the ex-con and the two cops who hated each other and said, ‘Yep, those are the guys for me.’ She was mauled up within three hours of getting here.

We’ve been mateless for three years. Three years. It doesn’t even make sense.”

What didn’t make sense was this conversation. Holly smelled like chocolate. Even if we could have made her scent work with our cloves and cardamon, our first maul’s Labrador tea scent would have made a maul mateship a no go. Tea and chocolate wasn’t really a thing.

Speaking of our first maul.

I rubbed a hand over the back of my head and glanced toward Rys’s bedroom. Door wide open. He was still in Victoria, doing his thing as our MLA. Too bad. Rys was good at talking Cal—or anyone—off a ledge.

Me, not so much. I preferred the things I could do for Cal silently. Matching his rhythm in the gym. Keeping us identical so no one could tell us apart. Pretending I didn’t ever hear him beat off to that naughty teacher porn he liked.

“And you know why it’s not a surprise breakfast ?” Cal said, still banging out pull-ups.

“Because they have jobs?” I guessed.

“Because they’re too busy fucking ! Everyone over the age of eighteen is fucking —except us.”

So this wasn’t just about Hawk. My twin was also strung out over Spring Fever.

Blame it on animal instincts or too many months holed up in cave dens, but the second we emerged from hibernation, bear shifters lost their damn minds.

So much sex, in fact, that Rys— our first maul, mayor, and MLA—had to formally designate the woods behind the village as the only outdoor area where bears in the throes of Spring Fever could go at it.

Most maul proposals, one-on-one hookups, estrus matings, and baby deliveries happened during that short stretch between the end of hibernation and the start of the summer tourist rush.

But we were already in a maul, so we weren’t allowed even the one-on-one hookups with other shifters. Not unless we wanted to piss off some female bear’s three dads by one-night-standing her without any intention of ever exchanging bond bites cos she wasn’t a scent-match.

No, if you were already maul-bound, tourists were your only option.

Didn’t matter much to me. But judging by Cal’s attempt to break the world pull-up record, summer wasn’t coming fast enough.

“This something you want to talk to Rys about?” I asked.

“Already tried. He’s not even returning my calls.” Cal hit the floor and started pounding out sit-ups.

Thank the Great Bear. I gave in to the matching twin instinct and anchored his feet on the other side of the squat rack.

Under Ayaska law, siblings weren’t allowed to trade the bond bites that let maul-mates talk telepathically. But we didn’t need that. We fell into a rhythm easy as breath—synchronized core-crunching, two shadow-box punches at the top.

“You know, I’m starting to wonder if Rys even cares about finding a mate for our maul at all.”

He was just now starting to wonder?

Then again, Cal wasn’t rotting from the inside, like I was. Pretty much anyone not using a watercraft to smuggle drugs across Canada’s western border was A-OK in his book.

Me, not so much.

I’d been side-eyeing the mayor’s motives since the day he invited us into his maul out of the blue.

And by “out of the blue,” I mean right before his last election—after his opponent accused him of being unfit to lead because he didn’t even have a maul.

That wasn’t true. Since moving into the Mayoral Den, I’d watched our first maul work his ass off, advocating for our people and fighting to keep our special exemptions from human law intact, no matter who was in charge of British Columbia’s Legislative Assembly.

But he’d taken the whispers seriously enough to offer us his wrists. And since outsider bears couldn’t form a maul without at least one Ayaska male, we jumped at the chance.

Cal jumped because he wanted a mate and a family, and I jumped because Cal wanted a mate and a family.

I gave up being my own bear years ago. There was only the matching now.

And as long as we stayed the same, I didn’t have to think too hard about the version of me I’d left behind in JTBF’s solitary confinement.

But that maul proposal had been two springs ago.

And even my eternally optimistic brother was starting to figure out that Rys cared more about holding on to outsider voters down in the log cabins—and keeping the traditionalist Ayaska elders from opting for a full quad candidate—than actually finding a mate for our maul.

I doubted he’d do anything else until the next election in two years—maybe not even then, unless the polls told him he had to.

Fine by me. Even if most of my conversations with our first maul involved black-ops-adjacent side quests that we never told Cal about.

I was too broken to make a good mate anyway. Spring Fever hadn’t so much as twitched my dead dick.

But I could see Cal coming apart.

I wondered what that felt like. To want something. To feel something. To have your own desires, instead of disappearing behind the identity you shared with your twin. To not be a psycho hidden inside a body that looked exactly like someone else’s.

“Summer’s almost here,” I said. “Tourist season. Plenty of fish.”

“Sick of hook-ups.” Cal punched the air before going back down for who knew how many more sit-ups. “I’m ready for something real.”

I knew he was.

And I couldn’t shake the feeling that if someone who scent-matched with all of us didn’t show up this summer, our maul wasn’t going to survive another spring.