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JULIET
My mother…
My dead mother isaliveand of at least relatively sound mind and body and she never tried to find me.
To save me.
And now I’m going to be eaten by a wolf like Little Red Riding Hood before I have a chance to tell her just how shitty it was to grow up a motherless daughter in the Zion pack.
I skid to a stop on the pine needles covering the forest floor, my lungs burning from my sprint and a part of me ready to take the easy way out. The giant red wolf snarling in front of me looks like he could gobble me up in one bite.
I could do it. I could ask him to open wide and jump inside.
Or I could lay down and lift my sweater, baring my soft, vulnerable belly the way I did that one time in the arena. It would be over in seconds, and this time the monster tearing me apart would finish the job.
He wouldn’t leave me alive to suffer the pain of knowing my mother abandoned me to be raised by a psychopath to make her own life easier.
That has to be what happened.
My father decided he was ready for a new wife, but he wanted to keep the kid, the heir, and pretending my mother was dead was the easiest way out. He’d already been married three times before my mother, but none of those women had given him a child. The pack had assumed he was barren and that the Alpha throne would pass to his younger brother’s children when he died.
Then along came Mom, a beauty from an absurdly fertile pack in France with two Ivy League degrees and an impeccable pedigree.
Not that my father cared that my mother was a genius, I’m sure. Hammer liked to brag thatIwas brilliant, but only because I was an extension of him, sprung from his loins and therefore something he could take credit for. I’m sure my mother’s pretty face and allegedly fertile womb were his primary motivations. Even before I learned my mother was still alive, I was laboring under no delusions that Dad loved Mom or grieved her loss all that much.
Sure, he said he did, but he was married again six months later to Crystal, the woman he tried to knock up for a few years before he divorced again and married Ford’s mom. Adriana came with a bonus prize—the son Hammer had always wanted. Even when he was a tween, it was obvious Ford would grow up to be a handsome, powerful, dominant wolf, just like his dear old stepdad.
Ford…
He’s behind me.
If I lay down to die, he’ll try to save me, and possibly end up dead for his troubles. One wolf, he could probably take, but this red menace isn’t alone.
As I back slowly away, a tall, willowy shadow with dark red hair emerges from the trees on the other side of the clearing.
It’s a woman, a girl, probably not much older than eighteen or nineteen, and ballerina slim. But that doesn’t mean anything. Her wolf could be a beast with paws the size of my head. Human size doesn’t always equal wolf size. Adriana’s wolf was nearly as big as my dad’s, even though as a woman she stood barely five foot three and prided herself on being a size two.
If this woman and the red wolf gang up against Ford, he might not come out on top, and I can’t do that to him. He deserves to go to Lost Moon and make his revenge dreams come true, even though I sure as hell won’t be going with him.
“Get behind me.” A strong hand grabs my upper arm, dragging me backward.
It’s Ford, my hero, my stepbrother, my rival.
My…friend?
I don’t know what exactly we are to each other anymore, only that I’m glad he’s here. After the initial flash of temptation, the easy way out holds no appeal.
I don’t want to disappear. I want to survive and punish all the people on my shit list, including my mother, whose name is now at the top, right next to Hammer’s. She basically sold me into slavery, too, knowing full well I would never be safe in Hammer’s pack. Even two minutes with her was enough to see the intelligence in her eyes. She understood exactly what she was doing when she turned her back on the innocent baby she’d brought into the world and walked away, leaving me in the dragon’s den.
“Relax,” the willowy girl says, lifting her hands into the air as she sways forward.
She moves like a ballerina, too, and is probably older than I first assumed. As she steps into the sunlight, I see slight wrinkles around her eyes and a hollowness to her cheeks that’s more than a side effect of her thin frame. She lost her baby fat long ago and has a cool, easy confidence very few achieve in their teens.
She smiles as she comes to stand beside the red wolf, tangling her fingers in the fur at his scruff. “Alexander is protective of me, that’s all. It’s a twin thing.”
The red wolf snarls again, but this time up at the ballerina.
