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Chapter One
Every single cell in Maya DeLuca’s body tingled with apprehension. Her wolf was pacing beneath her skin, itching to be set free despite the fact that the full moon was well over a week away. She didn’t know why, but all day she’d felt like she was holding her breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She couldn’t shake the feeling that something was coming, something big, and it was making her edgy.
Earlier in the day she’d almost convinced herself that she was just nervous about the family dinner her older siblings had called. She always got a little anxious when they were all in the same room. With her older brother Leo as the Pack Alpha of the Crescent wolves and her older sister Luna installed as the Queen of the Moirae Pack, they were powerful shifters. Add in that both their mates were Alphas and that her younger sister, Nova, also had the power of a Seer and the air was practically charged with magic when they were all together. It had always made her own wolf uncomfortable being in the middle of so many dominant personalities so it made sense.
But she’d left the dinner and the Moirae Pack lodge behind to walk home twenty minutes ago and still the restless, anxious energy vibrated in her bones.
Maybe she needed to shift and let her wolf run. Maybe then she could figure out what it was that had prickled her instincts and was fraying her nerves. Maybe her wolf just needed to be set free.
Maya had learned over the years that her wolf couldn’t always wait for a full moon to stretch her legs. Sometimes she needed the freedom to run just to know that she could. Sometimes she needed the feel of her home territory under her paws to put her at ease, but Maya had let her do just that a couple of days ago and normally going home would ease her wolf for at least a few weeks.
Logically she knew that keeping her wolf away from Crescent territory wasn’t exactly healthy for either of them and was likely the cause of her wolf’s near constant anxiety but she’d been making the situation work for years now.
After the attack that had left their parents deceased, all of the DeLuca children’s lives irrecoverably changed . Luna, Maya, and Nova had been kidnapped by the power-hungry wolf who had staged the coup. Their brother had had been chased out of the territory by Maddox Clary and his traitorous friends. With no other solution at hand, Leo had gone to the neighboring pack for help rescuing his sisters.
That one act, that one decision, had been fate at work, only nobody had known it.
Leo certainly hadn’t known that entering Moirae territory would lead him to his fated mate, Darius Moreno, the Moirae Pack Head Enforcer. And nobody could have predicted that Michael Hudson, the Moirae Pack Alpha, would forge a mate bond with Luna in the process of saving them all.
Well, nobody except for Nova, whose visions for the future had set all of it in motion to begin with and who, since she was only a child at the time, was the only DeLuca that seemed relatively unscathed by the whole ordeal.
Maya on the other hand, had been traumatized so badly that she still found it difficult nearly six years later to be back among her pack. Each time she returned to Crescent territory she relived the pain of seeing her parents brutally murdered. Every moment she was there, the darkness of those days where she’d been held captive and repeatedly tortured crept further out of her subconscious and tried to overtake her. She was still a Crescent wolf and, as a DeLuca, a princess of the pack her family had ruled for generations, but it hurt too much to spend time there so she stayed away as much as she could.
She had done her best to split her time between her two older siblings and their packs until she came of age but as soon as she’d turned eighteen she’d told them both that she was moving out and getting her own place. The constant back and forth had left her wolf confused about where they belonged and her family ties to both packs didn’t help matters any. Having her own space separate from each territory had helped to settle her but even years later her wolf demanded she return to Crescent territory on full moons. She’d found it helped soothe her animal side if she went back regularly but if her wolf had started to need the reassurance of home more often, then she wasn’t sure what she would do.
For a long time now she had considered the possibility of leaving the Crescent Pack entirely. She had ties to the Moirae Pack now that Luna was Queen. Her wolf could find a home amongst them, she was sure of it. But whenever she thought about cutting ties to her pack and starting over she couldn’t help but think of her father and mother, of the way it would have broke their hearts to see her abandon all that they’d worked for and created. She always ended up imagining the hurt and betrayal on Leo’s face and decided to leave the decision for another time rather than upset the carefully balanced house of cards that her family had managed for years.
She knew she would have to make a decision someday but she didn’t like the idea of anyone forcing her into it, especially not her own wolf.
“Well, well, what do we have here?”
Maya had been so lost in her thoughts that she’d forgotten to pay attention to her surroundings and the voice caught her off guard. She glanced up and immediately frowned. There were two men in her path and considering they were standing outside of Hyde’s Pub, she could only assume they were drunk and looking for trouble. Her wolf gave a low growl, more than happy to serve them up with a double helping, but Maya took a deep breath and tried to remain calm.
“What’s a beautiful girl like you doing walking alone in the middle of the night?” The second man sneered at her as the first looked her up and down lasciviously.
“I’m going home.” She spoke evenly, “If you’ll excuse me.”
They didn’t move and some part of Maya had known that they wouldn’t. Her jaw clenched. She didn’t recognize them and the fact that they didn’t recognize her told her all that she needed to know about them.
They weren’t locals. Everyone in Noir, Louisiana knew who Maya DeLuca was. Either they knew her as a princess of the Crescent Pack or as the younger sister of the Moirae Pack Queen. If these two didn’t know her on sight then they weren’t from around here.
More than that, though, she could sense magic on them, yet she didn’t scent another wolf. They weren’t wolf shifters but they weren’t human either. She couldn’t be entirely sure what species they were and she didn’t like that anymore than she liked the way they were looking at her.
They were young, probably barely legal, and had either been tossed out of Hyde’s or come out for some air in an futile attempt to sober up. They couldn’t hold their alcohol and they were just drunk enough, and dumb enough, to think they had the upper hand because there were two of them and only one of her.
They were wrong.
Maya knew what they saw when they looked at her. Just a girl, young and alone, weak and helpless. What they didn’t see, what they couldn’t see, was that Maya’s days of being powerless were long since past.
She knew what it was like to be too young and too weak to defend herself. When she’d been taken hostage she had fought with every bit of strength she had but it hadn’t been enough. She hadn’t been strong enough to save herself or her sisters from the monsters that tormented and tortured them. She’d had to rely on someone else to save her and she had vowed to never need a man to keep her safe ever again.
She was strong now. She’d spent years training with Pack Enforcers. She could take care of herself. She might be a princess but she didn’t need any knight in shining armor to come and rescue her.
Whatever these men were,whatever they wanted, she could handle whatever they tried to throw at her.
A smile twitched at the corner of her lips as she shifted into a defensive position. Maybe a fight was exactly what she needed to calm the uneasiness that had plagued her all day. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d give her emotions wings by using her fists and she’d never minded a little pain so long as she had the chance to dish it right back. Instead of backing away from the leering men, she stepped closer to them.
“I don’t think you’re going anywhere.” The taller of the two stretched up to his full height so that he loomed over her.
