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“Paolo, how’s it going? This is Ziomara and Molly.” I motioned behind me.
“Oh hey! I texted you to ask if you wanted to grab dinner, but you didn’t answer so I thought I’d check in. Your mom invited me to dinner,” he said.
I was going to answer when I heard Dad laughing and coming up the stairs. Behind him was Adrien, a werewolf vampire hybrid who was the son of Beta Lalo.
“Oh hey, you’re here! Adrien, this is one of our newest pack members, Ziomara, and her child, Molly. Are you sure you don’t want to stay for dinner?” he asked Adrien while eyeing Paolo around the fridge.
“Hmm, maybe I will. Whatever you’re cooking, Mrs. Roswell, smells amazing,” Adrien said happily. “But I don’t want you to feel like you have to feed me. You’re already amazing for helping me.”
“I’m going to head home. Mom just texted me that dinner is ready. Thanks for the invite, Mrs. Roswell,” Paolo said, putting his phone in his pocket. I walked him out, and at the door, he turned around. “Call you later?”
“Maybe tomorrow? I’m really tired,” I lied.
“Sure,” he said, rubbing my arms and making Tozi growl in my head. She really didn’t like him for some reason.
I walked back in, and Adrien was talking animatedly with Ziomara. He was holding Molly while she played with his long dark hair. Adrien was a natural with kids. I should know. He often babysat our group.
“Evie! I heard you’re taking your dad’s job. I’m so proud of you. You were always so smart. It was a pain in the ass trying to stay a step ahead,” he chuckled.
“You never could figure out how we could hack into the Netflix account and watch horror movies,” I laughed.
“No matter what I did, but now maybe I will. Your dad’s been teaching me how to do some of the stuff you guys do.”
“Oh, you’re interested in security tech?” I asked, suddenly excited to have more people to talk to about all the new gadgets.
“Some. We figured your dad’s been doing the pack’s security and troubleshooting for two packs for too long, so I volunteered to learn.”
“I told you all, I don’t mind. Your pack is as much family as mine,” Dad answered warmly.
“I know, and we are still depending on you both for new gadgets and software, but at least if I learn some, we don’t have to call you for the minor stuff,” he said. It made sense, and I was happy that they would have someone available who lived inside the pack.
“And?” I asked. “How are you finding it?”
“Fascinating, honestly. I’ll never be at your level, but it’s definitely interesting. It was time for Italianunicorn548 to make a comeback,” he answered with a twinkle in his eyes, and for some reason, Dad started laughing hard.
“There’s a story there,” Ziomara said, smiling at the contagious laughter of the two.
“There is, and one that’s very long. Let’s just say Adrien played parent trap for Gonzalo and Kassie,” Dad replied, making me chuckle. I could totally see him doing something like that.
The evening was very pleasant, and Dad made Adrien promise to bring his mate, Elias, next time. Elias was one of Alpha Helios’ old jaguar warriors who often babysat us with Adrien. He was a serious man who had a hidden humor to him that he usually only allowed out in front of his mate. As children, we were privy to it while we played, and they would sit and talk while they supervised us. Really, I used to consider them all family until I stopped hanging out with their kids. I used to call them uncle, just like Cory and the boys. Now they were Beta and Alpha.
I lay in bed that night just thinking about my actions over the past decade. Growing up alongside Bells and the boys and all of their cousins had been amazing. I never lacked a playmate, and the pack house was our playhouse. Despite most of the kids I played with being children of ranked members, they never made me feel like anything but a wonderful part of their group.
It wasn’t until we were in middle school that I started feeling like I was less. It wasn’t even anything to do with them. It was everyone else around us. I had already skipped a grade, putting me in the same year as Bells and Cory. James and Joe were both stuck in a year lower than us, but it didn’t seem to matter. Cory and Bells never hung out with anyone else. It wasn’t that they were snobby. They said people treated them differently, and it made them uncomfortable.
Because they were who they were, no one dared say anything to them or about them. But I wasn’t a ranked member, and in their eyes, I was fair game. The nerd that was friends with the alpha kids. They were careful. Cory was protective of everyone. Even Bells was. It’s their alpha blood. But I could hear the murmurings. The rumors. Everyone thought my grades were due to the teachers not wanting to anger the alpha family. There were always whispers of how people as cool as Cory and Bells shouldn’t hang out with me; how maybe their parents made them play with me because my dad worked so closely with Alpha Markus.
I knew now that I shouldn’t have listened to them. I was simply an easy target for them. The smaller-than-everyone-else nerd that was always the top student. But at that age, it hurt. I wondered if it was true, and I was too afraid to ask anyone because it would hurt more to find out the truth.
When I was recommended to skip grades in my sophomore year, I was given the option to take it or stay in my year with my friends. Dad left the decision up to me, telling me he didn’t want me to miss time with my friends and he would respect whatever decision I made. I was ready to say no. I was ready to say that I wanted to continue my studies with my friends. But the next day during lunch, I was in the bathroom, and I heard a group of girls talking about me. They criticized my hair. They joked about how I always had my nose stuck in a tablet, doing strange things and paying attention to no one. They were joking about how I tended to walk looking at my tablet, and Cory was always steering me away from hitting walls and people. They laughed about how I thought I could hang with someone like the twins when I was a nobody.
I ran out of the bathroom after they left and walked home. When Dad got off work, I told him I wanted to skip to senior class. Once I was in different classes from the twins, I started slowly distancing myself from Cory and Bells and the rest of them. It was a lonely first semester until Paolo started talking to me.
He was so sweet. A loner himself, and we struck a friendship. Before the Christmas break of our senior year, we were dating, and I went to senior prom with him. When I went to MIT, we tried to keep dating long-distance, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that I wasn’t really interested in him in that way. When I came back home for the summer holidays, I ended things.
I dated a bit through my undergrad years, but after I turned nineteen, I just didn’t feel anything for anyone. Tozi wanted her mate, and I wasn’t ready to give up on my dreams. We lived in constant struggle with one another. As we went to neighboring packs around the university, she looked for her mate; I hoped he wasn’t there. Eventually, we settled into an agreement. Once I finished my degrees and landed a job we could be proud of, I would focus on finding our mate.
Now that’s where we were, and I had to admit that I wanted my mate, but... I was scared. Coming back home... it stirred my longing to find a place to belong and other feelings I denied for so many years. Every time I came home, I would look at the boys and Bells from a distance, hanging out together. They always invited me at the start, but after a few years of telling them I was busy and I had to study, the invites stopped. I told myself it was just natural for friends to drift apart, but there was always that part of me that missed them.
