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CHAPTER ONE

“SO, I DON’T even get it. How does someone steal your scent match?” said Casey Billmeyer, gesturing with her fork before she speared another lettuce leaf drenched in balsamic vinaigrette. “I thought scent matches were forever, some kind of fated thing?”

Casey was my friend, so you would have thought I’d have talked to her about this before, but I didn’t have friends in quite the same way as I did before all this happened. Being betrayed by your best friend, it changed the way you trusted. I tried to trust people now. I even wanted to. But I simply didn’t. “Well, they’re only forever if the alpha bonds you.”

Casey nodded slowly, stuffing another piece of salad into her mouth and chewing. We were sitting at one end of a long table in a room with floor-to-ceiling windows at one end. Through the windows, we could see the city spread out in front of us, sunlight gleaming against the buildings. Casey swallowed her mouthful of salad. “That’s the biting thing, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said, “the biting thing. Which he did to her, not me. So, that made them mates, not him and me, and it didn’t matter if we had a scent match, because he was hers. Forever.”

“Shit thing to do to your best friend,” said Casey.

I shrugged. Even now, it was sometimes hard to admit how devastated I had been by this. It had been fifteen years ago now, so you would have thought I was over it.

No, I was over it.

But when I thought about it, even now, the pain of it was really intense, and I often felt that if I admitted out loud how much it hurt, I would not be able to stop it from breaking through me again, like an avalanche of emotion that would bury me and everyone else in stinging, icy grief.

“But he’s not innocent here either,” said Casey. “You seem to be blaming her for all of it. He’s the one whose teeth did the actual biting, am I wrong?”

I pushed lettuce around in the salad I was eating. It was a chicken bacon ranch salad, my favorite, but this conversation was not exactly whetting my appetite. “You’re not wrong. But she was in heat, and she knew what she was doing. She knew that if she went up there and he scented her heat, it would make him crazy.”

“This wolf stuff is over the top,” said Casey.

“I know,” I said.

“But that’s why you came to the city, right?” she said.

“Right,” I said. Being here in the city, it controlled my shifts. Being around concrete and metal all day, it put a block between whatever it was in my body that made me turn into a wolf on a full moon and the rest of me. It also felt… uncomfortable. Wrong in a way that made me feel a little lightheaded and on the verge of a headache. Every day. But it was worth it, to be free of the wolf part of me. And I was used to the discomfort now. It had been over a decade at this point.

“So, if being in heat made him crazy, and you were his scent match, then why hadn’t he bitten you while you were in heat?” said Casey.

“We were young,” I said. “We were always kept separate during my heats. My father would—”

“Wait, this is a thing your father was in on?”

“It’s natural, Casey.” I rolled my eyes. “Out there, everyone’s used to it. My father would force my shift, usually, and send me out to run it off in the woods. It was easier to channel the heat into something else, into a hunt or something, if I was in wolf form.”

Casey’s eyes got very big, and she began stabbing more pieces of lettuce.

“Okay, that can happen or whatever,” I muttered.

“What can?” she said.

“The wolf-on-wolf thing in shifted form. Yes. But I was a kid. I was off limits, even in heat. My dad would not send me out in a place where there were a bunch of other wolves, but if someone scented me, they would steer clear.”

“I thought, when someone was in heat, it made a guy crazy,” said Casey.

“Well, sure,” I said. “But…”

“But they can control themselves?” she said pointedly.

I sighed heavily.

“So, what you’re saying is that your scent-match alpha childhood-sweetheart dude, the one you were so attached to, he should have kept himself in control and he didn’t. He bit your best friend instead.”

But I didn’t say anything.

Casey ate salad, chewing triumphantly, as if she’d made some kind of point.