Oliver is human, or at least he was until the Glass Research Company kidnapped him and experimented on him. Now he has a bear sharing his mind, but he’s not able to shift, and he’s confused. Is he a shifter, or a human? What’s worse, he’s getting sicker every day, and no one seems to know how to help him. He can’t even bond with his mate because he doesn’t want Sebastian to hurt if something happens to him.
Sebastian wants his mate to be cured, and the only way to do that is to go to New York and kidnap one of the company’s scientists. With the help of his pride brothers, he manages to do just that, but having Oliver cured doesn’t mean all their problems are over.
Oliver will have to deal with learning how to shift and trying to convince Sebastian that he’s fine and that he can be claimed, but once he manages to do that, other problems arise. Will the two lovers finally have the time to just be together, or will the pressure push them apart?
Oliver was hiding, again. He knew everyone just wanted to help him, and he was grateful, but he couldn’t stand them anymore. Sometimes he thought he’d been better off when he hadn’t come out of his room, even if he knew they meant well. No one bothered him then, no one asked him how he was feeling over and over again, no one asked him a thousand times a day if he needed something. But he had promised Sebastian that he would at least try, and he couldn’t disappoint his mate.
Wow, his mate. Oliver still couldn’t believe he had lived in the house for six whole months without knowing his mate was only a few doors away from him. Of course, he had barely gone out of his room in all that time, so it was understandable, and maybe it was better like that.
Oliver was sick. Everyone knew it, and they treated him as if he was about to fall over dead in front of them. He was so thin he could have played the role of the skeleton in a horror movie, but he was still very much alive, although he didn’t know for how long.
In the beginning his problem had been the bear inside of him. Those scientists had used him as a guinea pig and had mixed his DNA with a bear’s in the attempt to create a shifter. It hadn’t exactly worked the way they wanted, though. The bear was present in Oliver’s body, always right there under the surface, but Oliver couldn’t shift, and he didn’t think he ever would.
He was a human, his body was not made to shift, so maybe it was a good thing that he couldn’t, but it made life in a mansion full of shifters hard. In the beginning he had tried to make friends and be sociable, but it was hard to see all of them shift easily while his bear roared at him from the inside because no matter how hard Oliver tried, he was trapped in there.
Oliver had a conflicted relationship with his bear. It wasn’t like the born shifters who lived in harmony with their animals, no. Yogi and him—yeah, he had named his bear, so what—had started on the wrong foot, but they had managed to get past it. Yogi had been angry because Oliver never let him out, as well as because of all the experiments that were done on them, but he had slowly gotten used to it. He rarely ever tried to take control anymore. He had finally understood it was no use, so the only time he made himself known was when Sebastian was near. Sebastian was the one thing that made Yogi come out these days.
It was weird how Oliver actually missed his bear. He had been a presence in the back of his head for the last year, usually a growly, roaring presence, but he had made Oliver fell less alone. Now that Oliver was getting worse, it was as if Yogi was slowly fading away. It made sense, actually, since it was what was happening to Oliver, but it made him sad.
“Oliver?”
