AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She dragged her sister away with her wolf at her side. Nova turned, her keen eyes meeting mine before she huffed. Shaking her body, she looked away and kept moving.
I had no idea why that wolf had taken an interest in me, but I’d already seen her take an arm off. I had no desire to be the canine’s next victim. Unlike Kym, I knew when I wasn’t welcome.
CHAPTER 3
Dannika
Itugged my sister through the crowd, desperately searching for a dark corner to hide in. Away from the judgmental stares and out of earshot. I just wanted to blend in with the tacky wallpaper and disappear from this cursed night.
Adora grumbled as I dragged her behind me, mumbling that this wasn’t necessary. She knew what was coming. Nova sauntered after us, doing her best to slink through the sea of partygoers.
Once we managed to find an exit and lurk in a hallway safely away from people, I stopped, whirling around on her.
“What the hell was that? What were you thinking?” I whispered harshly. With so many supernaturals, I had to be careful. Some had better hearing than others, and no one needed to overhear our conversation. “And don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Adora pulled her hair over her shoulder, picking at her nonexistent split ends, not meeting my gaze. “He was a prick.”
I sighed, knocking her hand down from playing with her hair, making sure she was paying attention to me. Her eyes widened at my boldness. “Stop it, Adora. You know you can’t do that. It’s not safe.”
She put her hands on her hips. “It just came out, okay? I didn’t think before I started speaking. I can’t help what I saw. It’s not like I can turn it off.”
Her gift was rare. Unknown to anyone outside the walls of our home. The last peacock shifter, blessed with a magic that leaders would kill for. Something they would weaponize. They called it the Eyes of God. She could see into someone’s soul. See their secrets. Their truth. Their lies.
Which was why no one knew she had the very power that had led to the slaughter of her kind. To everyone else, she was simply a latent shifter. A little vain. Beauty without brains or brawn. Useless in battle, and with no magic to speak of. They saw what we wanted and needed them to see. Because if they ever found out how brilliant and dangerous she actually was, every House would either want her for themselves or want to kill her if they couldn’t have her.
I leveled her with a look, albeit gentler this time. “Yes, you can turn it off. You have to. We’ve spent our entire lives pretending. When you let your senses take over, it gets to you, and it clouds your judgment.” I pointed to the ballroom nearby. “Like just now. Some dude just got his arm ripped off, and we’ve royally pissed off Mathis. That’s the last thing we need.”
Adora huffed in an unamused laugh, reaching up to touch the dried blood on her cheek. “He’s hated us for twenty-four years. Our mere existence pisses him off. There’s nothing that’s going to change that.”
I groaned, running my hands through my hair. “And that is precisely why we shouldn’t give him any more ammunition. Imagine what would happen to you. To Mom and Abbey. To Nova. To me.”
Adora’s hard expression turned soft, and she glanced at Nova for a moment. She took a deep breath, pressing her lips together, then nodded. “I know. I’ll work on it.”
I pulled her into a hug, wrapping my arms around her tightly, and she reciprocated. “All we have is each other, right?” She nodded against my shoulder. “I will always trust your judgment when it comes to someone’s character. Just try to minimize your reaction to it.”
Letting go, she put on her carefully crafted mask of apathy. “Yeah, yeah. Consider it done.” She smiled, looking toward the entrance down the hall. “You think we can leave yet?”
I shook my head and sighed, looping my arm through hers to walk side-by-side back to the commemoration, and Nova trailed behind us. “I wish. Mathis said we have to stay for a few hours. I’m amazed he didn’t cast us out tonight.”
“Just our luck, right? I call out some creep, Nova rips his arm off, I get slapped, then chastised in public, and I still can’t manage to get us out of this shindig,” she said, annoyance settling in as we turned into the entryway, walking through. “Talk about getting the fuzzy side of the lollipop.”
I jerked my head in her direction while laughing. “The fuzzy what?” I repeated through my chuckles. Before she could respond, I tripped over my foot, stumbling forward and into someone’s chest.
Adora pulled me up, and I found my balance, muttering my apologies, hoping to avoid angering anyone else with my presence. I was still grinning from her comment, and I tried to keep walking, but my sister held firm, a look of concern obscuring her carefree features.
I turned to see whom I’d bumped into and came face-to-face with the one person I never wanted to see. Markus, the son of our Alpha Supreme. Taller than his father, and just as imposing, he’d been graced with his mother’s beautiful ocean blue eyes, dirty blond hair, and deep laugh lines when he smiled.
I didn’t fear him, and neither did my sister. We just despised him. He was a bully. My bully, specifically. Entitled—and never held accountable for anything bad he’d ever done in his life. I wasn’t even sure he knew right from wrong. He was protected from any kind of punishment. Made to believe he deserved to follow in his father’s footsteps. As Mathis’s heir, what else could we expect?
He’d tormented me since we’d been children. I was an easy mark. Cursed, my pack would say. My House too. Everyone considered it a bad omen that the actual heir had been a shifter that couldn’t shift. By the time I’d turned eight, every kid in my pack had been able to shift as easily as they could walk. Me? Through the help of a witch, I had a giant wolf by my side. An extension of myself, but not a wolf within me.
For years, I’d been his favorite target. Adora would defend me, but she wasn’t high up on the totem pole, either. We’d learned how to take punches, and we’d learned how to process the emotional abuse. The way Markus could belittle me, the way he could get others to follow his lead and taunt me . . . mock my father’s death . . . well, sometimes a bloody nose was a lot easier to recover from.
Once we’d left school, I’d finally gotten the reprieve I’d wanted. I’d avoided functions outside our pack, and any gathering that he’d been involved in, I’d made sure to never attend. I minded my own business, making a living crafting the metal jewelry used for our House’s Fluorite stones. My sister was the better talker, and she knew how to sell the product to the other Houses in No Man’s Land. It was quiet and peaceful. I just wanted to live my life away from everyone. I didn’t think it was too much to ask. For six years, I’d done just that.
But here we were. Staring at each other.
It wasn’t his presence that was concerning. Nor was the fact that I’d physically bumped into him. The problem was how he looked at me. Adora and Nova saw it, and so did I.
