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Arousal seeped from my core at his dominance and open vulnerability.
Fuck, he was hot.
I watched as the stubbornness and frustration faded from Granny’s face. They were replaced with shame, guilt, and sadness. Her gray eyes, which were so much like mine, held an infinite depth I couldn’t comprehend. It felt as if I had seen them somewhere before. It was right there in the back of my mind, drowned in a distant memory I couldn’t unlock.
“Let me preface this by saying that everything I did was for the greater good. I was young and stupid. There was war everywhere. Shifter’s blood was being spilled, and if we didn’t do something, if we didn’t try to find a way to coexist, we were going to die out.”
“What are you talking about?” Hunter questioned. “We’ve been living in harmony with humans for centuries.”
Granny raised her eyes to his, tears sitting on the surface of her lashes, yet she didn’t shed one. “I’m not talking abouthumans. They were never truly behind the hunts. I’m talking about the war with our own kind. The one that almost decimated our entire species.”
“We need you to tell us everything, Granny.”
“I thought she couldn’t do that unless she was telling it to somebody who shared her blood and lineage,” Hunter said.
“Do you want to tell her?” Wolf lifted a brow at her. “Or should I?”
I looked between the two of them, confused. My heart beat in my chest as I struggled to understand their silent conversation.
“Tell me what?” When neither of them answered, I asked it again, but louder. “Tell. Me. What?”
Granny’s gaze shifted to mine, and I was once again struck by an odd feeling in the back of my brain. What was it trying to tell me?
She visibly swallowed, her eyes filled with sorrow and guilt as she looked at me, but to my wolf, felt almost shallow. Insincere.
“My name is Elizabeth Freyalda Constantine.” She whispered her confession to me. Lizzie. The man at the café had called her Lizzie. “And you, my sweet Freya, are my daughter.”
Wolf coughed, surprised. Whatever he had suspected, that wasn’t it.
“Your daughter?” Hunter stared at her, bewildered. “That’s impossible. She’s only twenty-one. You’re at least a hundred years old.”
“I am thousands of years old,” she divulged.
As if that made it any better.
“If you’re thousands of years old, I can’t be your daughter. That’s physically impossible. Plus, I know my parents.”
Anxiety whirled inside me. My hands grew clammy as my heart raced and my chest began to rise and fall in a rapid rhythm. It couldn’t be true. If she was my mother, that meantthat my entire life had been a lie. Everything I had ever known, the very foundation of who I was… would be a lie.
“I’m going to tell you a tale, and it’s not a pretty one,” she started. “Once upon a time, there was a budding civilization. One of the first of the ancient lands. My father ruled over his kingdom with love and peace. He believed that harmony didn’t come from ruling with an iron fist but with respect and understanding. My mother died giving birth to me, and this weakened my father and weakened our kingdom.
“On my twenty-first moon day, invaders came from the north. Men who brought with them machines and weapons like we had never seen the likes of before. They laid siege to our kingdom for many weeks, and eventually, our people began to starve. My brother, who was next in line to inherit my father’s position, took it upon himself to find his own solution. We’d always been a land of magic, and it had existed long before any of us, weaving its way through the world. In his travels, my brother brought back a voodoo shaman. A man of the mystic arts.
“My brother begged him to help us. To give us the power and strength to defeat our enemies and save our kingdom. At first, the shaman refused, stating that magic came at a price that most people refused to pay. But the shaman began to weaken in his resolve when he saw the dire situation we were in. So my brother asked him again to give us the strength and the power to defeat our enemies and save our people, who were withering away in the streets.
“He relented. But he warned us that the curse would not just affect us and those who chose to stand beside us, but everyone in the city. If it saved our people, we didn’t care. So on the night of the full moon, we made an oath to destroy our enemies, and we gave our blood to the Moon Goddess. At first, nothing happened, and then, as the clouds parted and the rays of moonlight shone down on the city, disaster struck.”
“You were the first shifters,” Wolf breathed in amazement. “There’s never been any lore about where shifters came from. Nothing concrete, anyway.”
“The shaman was right when he said it was a curse. We were rabid. We couldn’t control the beasts within us. We slaughtered our enemies, and then we kept going, my brother leading the pack.”
“What happened to your father?” Hunter questioned.
Granny took a deep breath, holding it inside her chest before slowly releasing it. Pain was etched in every part of her features, her muscles tight, her hands clenched, and her eyes gaining a faraway look as she remembered a tragic past that had long been forgotten by the world.
“I learned later that my father had wanted to surrender to the invaders. They had promised to spare the people of the city, to spare us, if he turned over the crown. I thought that my father just couldn’t face the path we were going down. He’d been distant since my mother died, but I learned that my brother had slit his throat in his sleep when he found out what my father had planned.”
“He was going to surrender.”
