The kick to the gut sent Livy into the wall. Then the bear crouched in front of her again. He helped Livy sit up by wrapping his hand around her throat, and pulling her up while squeezing.

“You,” he said now in accented English, “should have left this alone, little badger. You should have taken your father and buried him and forgotten all about it. But you did not. So you leave us no choice.”

He threw her into the other wall and stood. Livy, coughing and trying to breathe, saw the bear and two others pull guns. With care, the bears screwed silencers onto their weapons, and pointed. Livy only had time to pull herself into a tight ball and grit her teeth, and endure the pain as the bullets tore into her back, hip, and ass.

Lock, busy staring at a bunch of really sturdy women and girls doing amazing backflips across mats and launching themselves off pommel horses, heard a noise he hadn’t heard since he’d been a Marine in a shifter-only unit that used to hunt the hunters of their kind.

Turning, he walked out of the training room, tossing his ice cream cone into a nearby trash can. Bo came up behind him. He still had his ice cream.

“I didn’t see Livy in there. So, where are we going now?”

Lock didn’t answer; he just followed his ears. He reached the end of the hall and pushed the door open. He stepped into the stairwell and saw Livy’s crumpled body in a corner, blood pouring from multiple gunshot wounds. Three grizzlies stood over her with guns drawn. A black bear at the bottom of one set of stairs and another black bear at the top of the other were just watching.

Novikov’s ice cream cone hit the ground, and the hybrid’s mane dropped to his shoulders as his body began to shake with rage. Lock knew it was rage because his own grizzly hump had grown three times in the last two seconds, his claws easing out of his hands, his fangs out of his gums.

The black bear at the bottom of the stairs looked back, his eyes growing wide at the sight of them.

“Jasha!” he yelled out, his hand reaching for the gun he had under his jacket.

Novikov was down the stairs and had the black bear’s hand in his. Then he crushed both gun and hand.

The black bear roared in pain as the other bears spun around, their weapons now pointed at Novikov and Lock.

One of them yelled out something in a language Lock didn’t know, and all the bears suddenly focused on the hybrid.

And none of them took a shot.

Instead, the bears began to back away from them. They still had their guns trained on both males, but they didn’t fire once, and one had his free hand up, speaking to Novikov. What he was saying, though, Lock had no idea.

But when they smiled and nodded at Novikov, Lock suddenly understood that these bears were hockey fans. Fans who didn’t want to hurt Bo “The Marauder” Novikov.

Disgusted, hewondered if these idiots really thought that either Lock or Novikov would ever consider letting them get away with shooting some helpless woman to death in a stairwell.

At least that was what he was thinking until that helpless dead woman slowly and silently pulled herself up into a crouch and unleashed her obscenely long claws.

Taking her time, Livy moved until she was right beneath one of the other bears. She waited a beat, two . . . and rammed those claws between the bear’s legs. His agonized roar of pain rang out as Livy twisted her claw, dragged it out a bit, readjusted, then rammed it back in again.

The uninjured black bear aimed his gun at Livy, but she caught hold of it with her other hand and stood. She yanked at the gun, but he didn’t give it up, so she went up on her toes and slashed the shorter bear across the face. He screamed, one of his eyes landing a few feet away.

Livy took the black bear’s gun from his now-weakened grip, and Lock grabbed Novikov from behind. He yanked his teammate up the stairs and dropped them both to the ground as shots hit the wall and door where they’d just stood.

In a few seconds, it was all over, and together, he and Novikov stood and walked to the top of the stairs, looking down at all those dead bears and Livy. Who was not dead.

Without her head moving, her gaze lifted to Lock’s. He saw the rage in her black eyes. Something he’d never seen from her before. He’d seen her annoyed, but never truly angry. But as blood wept from her many wounds and her body shook, Lock wasn’t exactly surprised when Livy unleashed a roar of her own.

Lock pulled out his cell phone. When the call was answered, he said, “Dee-Ann . . . we have a major problem.”

After arranging his parents’ flight to the States, and their hotel room at the Kingston Arms, Vic and Shen went to the Sports Center. Vic had already lost an hour of his life arguing with Livy’s uncles, and the last thing he wanted was for her to hear the latest from them.

So it was with the intent of telling her what was going on that he walked into her office, freezing halfway into the room when he saw giant pictures of his naked self on her desk.

“Oh my God.”

Shen came in behind him, his cell phone ring of zoo pandas eating bamboo really annoying Vic at the moment.

Looking for the phone in his jacket, Shen laughed and pointed at the big prints. “Is that you?” He laughed harder. “I can’t wait until your mother sees that. This is Shen,” he said into the phone.

A few seconds later, Shen walked out of the room and Vic stood there, staring.

“She can’t seriously be planning to show these to anyone . . . can she?”

Vic stepped back to rest his ass against Livy’s desk, but as he did he saw her camera there.