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When she’d been a child, Nova had been carefree and careless with her visions. She had proudly told anyone who would listen about what she saw. Back then she hadn’t understood that knowing the future could have consequences.
She’d predicted her oldest sister would mate with an Alpha outside their family’s Crescent Pack and though Luna hadn’t given her foresight much credit at the time, someone else had. Maddox Clary had been a power-hungry and crazed Alpha Wolf who wanted Luna and the Crescent Pack for himself. Hearing of Nova’s vision, knowing his time was running out to claim Luna, he’d staged a coup that had ripped the DeLuca family apart and nearly destroyed them all.
Nova’s mother and father had been killed in the attack. Her brother, Leo, had been driven from their lands and forced to go to the neighboring Moirae Pack for help because the traitors had also kidnapped Luna, Maya and Nova. It was a chain of events that Nova’s visions had foreseen but had also caused.
It had taken her a while to come to terms with that and even now, knowing all the damage that would be done because of her vision, she couldn’t honestly say she would have kept it to herself if she’d known.
Fate was what it was. It was destiny. It was powerful. It had a way of always being right and fighting it did no good. In the wake of Maddox Clary’s attack, fate had gotten her way and Nova had never been able to see a path to where they all were now without it.
Lunahadmated with the Pack Alpha of the neighboring Moirae wolves. She and Michael Hudson were happy. They ruled their pack and were beloved by all. Their sons were wild and bold, the future of the pack ensured with their birth and they were the beating heart of the Hudson and DeLuca family alike.
Leo had also mated with a Moirae wolf he met during the ordeal. Darius Moreno had been the Moirae Pack Head Enforcer before he was the fated mate of the Crescent Pack Alpha. Male Alpha pairings were notoriously rare and even tumultuous but not Leo and Darius. They were as solid as rock, as warm as the sun and as open and loving as anyone could be. They were good men who made each other better and in doing so they made their pack, their family and everyone around them better in the process.
Without Luna and Leo creating the bonds to the Moirae Pack, Maya might never have found her own mate in Zander Leery. The man had been human and completely oblivious to the paranormal world until he found himself stumbling into it by what some would call complete accident but Nova knew was really fate. He completed Maya in a way that her closest sister had needed. He gave her a reason to believe in the good of the world even after all she had been through, and Nova had never seen Maya happier than she was now, with her mate at her side.
Fate certainly workedin mysterious ways, but it also worked when it slapped you in the face with the worst days of your life, threatened to destroy you, and then sent you down a path you never would have taken otherwise.
Nobody believed in fate more than Nova. She felt it as though it was a part of her. Her visions a gift from fate herself to help guide them all. And even if she couldn’t see visions of her own future, she had always trusted in the greater power to put her right where she needed to be.
It was ironic really, that she was just thinking of how fate always had a plan, when she rounded the corner of a building onto the main square at the center of Crescent Pack territory and ran smack into something hard and broad and warm.
“Shit.” A deep voice growled as she all but bounced off of him, stumbling backwards, and then two big hands were latching onto her arms to keep her from falling. “Sorry, sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
One of Nova’s earbuds had fallen out at the collision and she winced as the low voice invaded her head, overtaking the sound of Lizzo still belting it out against her other eardrum. It took her brain a moment to process that she had run into someone, not something.
Even as it did, her body reacted so viscerally that her breath caught and heat flushed through her, sparking at the point where those big hands held her arms and racing through every nerve ending in her body. She felt light-headed, weak in the knees, and a familiar sense of knowing settled in her chest before she even regained her footing enough to look up and find the man she had run into.
The man that fate had put directly in her path.
“No, I’m sorry, I…” Nova raised her head to look up and the heat that had raced through her flash froze the blood in her veins. Panic. Sheer, utter, terror and panic clawed its way up her throat and she shoved at the hands that were holding her, desperate to get away, to run, to fight, to do something. “No. No. No!”
She could hear the one word being screamed over and over but it didn’t sound like it was coming from her throat. That couldn’t be her voice. Shrill and horrified, a whine so keen that her wolf shuddered inside of her and shrank back to the farthest, darkest corner of her soul.
Maddox Clary was alive. He wasn’t dead like they all thought. Darius hadn’t killed him by ripping his head off all those years ago. He was here. Now. Standing right in front of her, gripping her arms even as she struggled to get away from him, and just like when she was a little girl and he was a grown man, so much bigger and meaner and scarier than her, he wouldn’t let her go.
“Nova?” Somewhere through her terrified screams she heard her name in her brother’s worried voice. “Nova, what the… oh, fuck.”
“Son of a bitch.” Darius was there now too though Nova’s gaze was snagged on the devilishly handsome face of the man in front of her so she couldn’t see him.
That face. She would know it anywhere. Dark skin. Full lips. Chiseled cheekbones. So handsome it hurt to look at him but it was a mask. Beneath the good looks he wasn’t a man or even a wolf. He was a monster.
“Let her go.” Darius ordered.
“I…. can’t.” The man’s honey brown eyes didn’t leave Nova’s face and his grip on her didn’t loosen even though he lowered his voice to a soft whisper, “I’m not who you think I am. I’m not him. I swear to you that I am not him and I would never hurt you. Do you hear me? Never.”
“But you’re… you’re… supposed to be dead?” she whimpered as the heat in her heart warred with the cold lead tanking up residence in her stomach.
“No.” The man shook his head again, “Maddox was my brother. He’s dead but I am not here to hurt you. I promise. I would never hurt you.”
“Nova. Honey. He’s not Maddox. He’s why we wanted to talk to you. He’s his brother.” Darius was saying somewhere behind her, his voice soothing and then, quieter, “Dammit Leo, do something. She looks like she’s going to pass out. Make him let go of her.”
“I can’t.” Leo hissed.
“Why the hell not?” Darius demanded.
“Because I can’t interrupt a mate bond.” Leo sounded horrified and Nova’s legs gave out when the truth of what she was feeling hit her ears in the voice of the man she trusted more than anyone.
A mate bond. With Maddox. No. She shivered when strong arms caught her and swept her up before she could hit the ground. Not Maddox. He looked like Maddox but Maddox was dead. He couldn’t be Maddox.
She met those honey-colored eyes again and they were so soft, so warm, that her brain finally began to believe that this wasn’t the demon from all of her nightmares. He couldn’t be. Unless this was a nightmare and she was asleep right now. She closed her eyes and willed herself to wake up but instead that deep voice sank inside of her again as the man holding her spoke.
“I’m not who you think I am.” He repeated but her heart was already sinking because that wasn’t entirely true.
Based on what she was feeling, based on what Leo had said, based on her gut instinct, he was exactly who she thought he was, even if he wasn’t Maddox Clary. He was her fated mate, her other half, the one person in the world that could make her whole.
And he had the face of the devil that had killed half her family and tortured the rest.
Fate had a fucking awful sense of humor, Nova thought, just before she fainted.
