Page 9 of The Witch’s Daughter

“I was wondering when you girls would get here.” Lennox paused in the reception room with a tray of breakfast and vase of roses balanced in his arms. “Easy day today. Room 12 checked out. Room 15 needs trash removed. And Room 5 doesn’t want any service. I’m taking the morning off to treat my mate.”

Lennox, the old shifter and inn-keeper, didn’t stick around long. We never saw much of him without his mate and he took every chance he got to disappear with her. It made him an easy boss.

“You heard the wolf.” Meg clapped her hands. “Let’s get started.”

Three Sisters Cleaning at your service.

I climbed up the small staircase behind Meg. The name—and business—had been her idea when we were sixteen. Somehow it’d stuck, and this became our lives.

I didn’t blame Meg for needing to do something. She was an alpha born wolf through and through. Her beast got restless if she had to sit still for long. I was the beta wolf in the traditional triplet Cerberus birth. Historically, I was supposed to be the peacekeeper. But I didn’t know about all that.

“Another day, another prison sentence,” Alec grumbled as she trudged behind me. As a rare sigma female wolf, she… Honestly, there was no describing what Alec did. She had more secrets than any of us, and she was closest to our Sigma father.

But we were a family of entrepreneurs. Mom owned the café. Aunt Coral ran the library along with helping Alpha Kera manage the entire pack. If we hadn’t formed our own business, the three of them would’ve had jobs ready for us.

Cleaning rooms wasn’t that bad.

“If we attack 12 together, we can get you to City Hall before everyone arrives this afternoon,” Meg said, like she was doing me a favor.

I nodded, still not letting on how much my insides were twisting about this. That stupid summons was the least of my worries.

“Why are humans so gross?” Alec sneered as we stood in the open doorway of Room 12.

“Shh.” Meg and I shushed her at the same time, looking over our shoulders.

“Lennox’s mate might hear you,” Meg said.

“Plus, our mom is human,” I pointed out, pinching my nose.

“Mom’s a witch.” Alec rolled her eyes. “And you know what I mean. The purist humans. I call laundry.”

Meg was already pushing the vacuum in and opening the window to air the room out, which left me with bathroom duty… again.

“It’s not that they stink.” I breathed through my mouth as I dug out our natural cleaning supplies from the cart. “They just use so much to cover up their natural scent.”

The smells of perfumes and weird soaps and whatever other chemicals they’d sprayed still lingered in the air. Thankfully, they hadn’t stayed for long, so it wasn’t as much to clean.

Humans never stayed very long anyway.

Most of them stuck to their city and its high walls, believing the land out here was toxic. Even when they’d seen the truth, many were reluctant to give up the way of life they’d always known.

A few travelers came once or twice a year—mainly those who tried to spend credits and were met with cold indifference until they coughed up some tangible trade. Of those, only a few ever ventured beyond Cerberus Pack. It was Alpha Kera’s treaty after the war that forced them to keep the option open for the humans to be able to leave the city as they pleased.

“It’s not natural,” Alec grumbled.

She wasn’t the purist humans’ biggest fan, like many other wolf shifters. We had more reason than most to despise them, especially with how they treated our mom and Aunt Coral.

But no one could hate something as much as Alec could.

Except for maybe me and cleaning toilets.

I despised this job as much as she did, but the difference was that I didn’t want to make anyone upset. I wasn’t good at much anymore, yet I still pulled my own weight.

Sighing, I ran the brush around the inside of the toilet bowl. At the ripe old age of twenty-four, I’d resigned myself to this life with my sisters. Even though Mom hadn’t mated until twenty-seven, the three of us were basically unmated old maids. Most shifters met their fated matches around puberty.

Not us.

If Gram had still been alive… If my magic hadn’t gone on the fritz… If Alpha Kera didn’t insist that the three of us were the ‘Fated Destiny’ of the Cerberus pack…