Carnival of Hearts: BBW Paranormal Shape Shifter Romance by Scarlett Rhone

silent, and it globbed between them all like black tar, sucking them in and keeping them apart at once.
    Kat had never rebelled against D’Orfeo before. That was no doubt why it had been successful, because he hadn’t expected her to ever turn against him. Those were the words he’d used: You turned against me . It lanced into her heart, pain and guilt a wound there now, but also a bloom of independence that she hadn’t realized she’d never felt before. Her whole life revolved around D’Orfeo and the carnival itself; her experiences were walled in by those two things, all of them. She couldn’t remember a time when her life had not been in the shadow of the big top.
    The Ringmaster had found her abandoned on a Georgia beach when she was three years old, alone, crying. The carnival had heard her shrieks as it passed by, and D’Orfeo had halted the entire caravan to investigate. He said he’d found her dressed in a little pink jumper, no parents or basket or blanket or anything else in sight, and that she’d grabbed onto his coat when he’d picked her up. That was the moment, he told her, when he had known that he wasn’t going to drop her at a church or a shelter, that he was going to keep her with him and raise her himself, as his daughter. Her life would have been completely different had he made another decision, but Kat couldn’t say that it would have been better or worse. Just very, very different. For very impressive starters, she knew the mysteries of the carnival itself, including its origins.
    Marcus had been something of an anomaly, his captivity and forced servitude unique within the history of the carnival. More than half of the carnival members were shifters, but unlike Marcus they had not been taken as a kind of prisoner of war. Rather, they had been abandoned by their respective tribes, or lost. They’d been alone, and Kat understood that shifters were creatures who needed others like themselves. Packs, dens, prides. Few of them could survive on their own. The Ringmaster had pulled them together, given them a home and work and a family, given them somewhere to belong. He had kept them safe. He’d found and saved them just like he had Kat, a myriad and colorful array of shifters and plain old weirdos. A carnival of dreams and oddities and magic. After Marcus left, D’Orfeo gave every member of the carnival the option of leaving as well. Nobody else did.
    Kat loved her father, and she loved the carnival, but Marcus had been right to challenge D’Orfeo, and Kat knew that too. Her punishment would likely have been shorter had she repented, but she refused to back down. She refused to lie. Everyone should have the right to stay or go, and she wouldn’t take back what she’d done, setting Marcus and his human woman free.
    She was human herself, after all. She had no gifts, could take no other shape. Freeing them had been as much about saving them as it had been about showing her father that she was not a child any longer, that she would make decisions independent of him, and that eventually, maybe, she would want a life beyond the carnival. And he had reacted just about how she had thought he would, the same way he had when, at sixteen, she’d taken one of the caravan trucks for a joyride through the Texas hill country. He’d done the exact same thing to her then, confining her to her trailer after the carnival went dark for the night, and that told Kat that he still saw her as a little girl that he needed to control. But she was a grown woman now. And she was going to have to show him that somehow.
    Kat thought the carnival felt more alive when it was dark. Maybe because there was no show, no flashing lights. It was simply home. The dotted, disconnected puzzle pieces of their strange little family, arranged in a circle around the big top in the same formation, no matter where they ended up. The light was still on in her father’s trailer, dim, just his reading lamp, perhaps. Moonlight glinted