Her mom, with smeared lipstick and laughing breathlessly, shoved clothes into a suitcase while the man, married to the West Corner, whispered in her ear with a lecherous gaze.Kaeli was sixteen.She hadn’t even had her first kiss yet.But she’d instinctively known what was going on between them.
“You’ll understand one day,” her mom had whispered with wild, selfish eyes.
But Kaeli had never understood her mom walking away from her before she was an adult and tearing apart the very fabric of her life.She’d sworn that day that she’d never walk away from people who needed her and loved her, but the problem was that all these years later, she’d never found those people.
Someone had taken her in until she was old enough to live on her own.
But she’d never had love again.Family.Loyalty.
She’d been a dog begging for scraps, and happy with crumbs.
The car arrived, and she checked the app details against the car and the driver.Then she set her bag on the seat next to her as she settled in the plush seat and shut the door.
“Bus station?”the woman asked as she pulled away from the curb.
“Yeah.”
“Where are you headed, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Cleveland.”
“Oh?The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is there, well worth the time.How long will you be gone?”
Kaeli’s magic hummed restlessly under her skin as the car passed the town limits, the bus station a bright red dot on the GPS screen, blinking like a warning light.“For good.”
“Ah, well.Ohio is pretty great.Mind if I put on some music?”
“Go ahead.”
As music filled the car, Kaeli looked out the window and watched the scenery blur by.She was half on the edge of a mental breakdown, half ready to storm back into the Corner’s home and show her a thing or two about taking care of people.
But she didn’t cry or ask the driver to turn around.
Instead, she opened her phone and looked up the Cleveland coven.
She knew she didn’t have to go there; she could go anywhere she wanted.
Something spoke to her, though, in a quiet, reverent voice that Cleveland was the right choice for her.
As she stared down at her hands that had not too long ago attempted to wield magic and had failed, she wondered if there was any place for her anywhere.
Maybe she was destined to roam, a witch who couldn’t cast the simplest of spells, a woman without a place to call home.
Rubbing at the ache in her chest, she realized the ache had been there since she was abandoned at sixteen and had only scarred over and never truly healed.
She was so used to being discarded that she hadn’t even seen the call to the Corner’s house as anything sinister.But they’d planned it all along.She wasn’t welcome there any longer, and whatever lay ahead…she just hoped that fate would be kind to her.
As she thought about fate and how shitty the hands that were dealt could be, something sparked, glowing and soft, inside her, and she closed her eyes and held onto it.
Hope.
ChapterTwo
Solan Keane liked mornings in Thorn Hollow.Mostly because they were quiet.Although the nights on patrol with the security team were quiet as well, there was something reverent about the quietness of the morning as the sun rose and began the day.He’d always been a morning person, not a night owl.
He walked the treeline behind a row of houses in the pack’s territory, watching for anything out of the ordinary.Their pack had come under attack recently by an anti-shifter group called Humans Against Shifters.H.A.S.was run by a shifter-hating zealot named Brent Foley, who’d attacked the tiger shifters in Northern Ohio a few months earlier before turning his attention to the people who lived in Thorn Hollow.
Solan had been part of the security team for years.He’d literally grown up being trained as a pack protector by the former alpha, Lit, who’d stepped down to address family issues and handed the reins over to Adam.
