THE LYCAN PRINCE OF WESTSIDE EDEN
I smelled it the instant I sat on my bed. My heart picked up its pace, and slowly, I got on my feet, careful not to make a sound. But suddenly, he was there, idling by the mirror, his golden eyes dangerously darker behind those glasses.
I tried to speak, but only an inaudible sound came out.
“Whose perfume do you have on you, Isabella?” His deep-set tone covers every inch of my room. I should be terrified. I was. Yet my big mouth got the better of me.
“It’s none of your business.”
“You kissed him,” he said, leaning away from the mirror.
“And you are engaged,” I retorted, raising my hands exasperatedly. “I guess this night is just full of surprises.”
In the blink of an eye, before I got my last word out, he was right in front of me, one hand on my waist, pulling me flush against him. I could taste the warmth of his breath on my tongue, and unconsciously, my eyes fluttered closed.
My father abandoned me seven years ago. So, when my mother ships me off to spend my senior year with him in Westside Eden, I expect the worst.
I don’t expect wolves. Or the nerdy man with golden eyes who looks at me like he wants to kiss me… and kill me. I don’t expect his younger brother to fall for me.
Aiden is everything I should stay away from – rude, cold, untouchable, every girl’s dream, engaged. But every time danger finds me, he’s already there, watching…
Lying to me.
And then, I discover the truth. The reason Aiden has been watching, the reason my father walked out on us all those years ago.
And the reason my new best friend wants me dead.
Baca
Chapter: Chapter 29Isabella POV "You can't just keep avoiding this conversation, sweetie."My mom's voice came through the phone tight with the specific kind of patience that meant she was two sentences away from losing it entirely. I sat cross-legged on my bed, staring at the ceiling instead of at anything real."I'm not avoiding it. I'm just... thinking.""You've been thinking for three weeks. The flight's in twelve days, Bells. I need to know if you're coming home for good or just for a visit.""I don't know yet.""That's not really an answer anymore." She sighed, and I could picture her exactly, standing in our old kitchen with one hand on her hip, the same way she always stood when a conversation was about to get real. "I know things with your dad have been better. I'm glad, genuinely. But better isn't the same as fixed, and I need you to think really carefully about whether staying there is actually good for you, or if it's just... comfortable, right now, in a way that feels good but isn't.""It'
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-09-27
Chapter: Chapter 28Isabella POV He looked like he hadn't slept in days.I spotted him at his locker before first period, shoulders hunched in a way I'd never seen from him, dark circles under his eyes so pronounced they looked almost bruised. Whatever had happened after that phone call yesterday, it had clearly cost him something."Hey." I approached carefully, the way you'd approach something wounded. "You disappeared yesterday. You never texted back.""I've been busy." His voice was flat, exhausted, none of the usual careful control behind it... just tired, all the way through."Busy doing what? Aiden, you looked terrified when you left. I've been worried.""You don't need to worry about me.""That's not really something you get to decide for me." I kept my voice gentle despite the frustration underneath it, watching him flinch slightly at the words. "What happened?""I can't talk about it.""You keep saying that.""Because it keeps being true." He finally looked at me, and whatever exhaustion had be
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-09-23
Chapter: Chapter 27Isabella POV Me: you good?Me: aiden?Me: ok i'm starting to worry, can you just say somethingI set my phone face-down on the table for the fourth time in an hour, which lasted exactly as long as it took me to flip it back over and check again."Okay, that phone has been face-down and face-up more times than I've blinked today," Sheila said, sliding into the seat across from me at lunch. "What's going on?""Aiden left school yesterday like the building was on fire. Wouldn't tell me why. Hasn't answered a single text since." I dropped my head onto the table, forehead against the cool plastic tray. "I don't even know why I'm this worried about it. He's not my responsibility.""But you are worried about it.""Obviously I am." I lifted my head just enough to glare at her. "That's the whole problem.""Have you tried Marv?""He's not answering either. Which, honestly, is scarier than Aiden not answering, because Marv answers everything within four minutes, minimum.""Okay, that is genuine
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-09-23
Chapter: Chapter 26Aiden POV Faster, Micah snarled, pacing the inside of my skull like the car wasn't already doing ninety down a road built for sixty. Something's wrong. Something's very wrong.I know.I'd known it the second my father's voice cracked on the phone... not the controlled, measured tone he'd used my entire life, but something raw and frightened underneath it, a sound I don't think I'd heard from him since I was a child.The chambers were chaos by the time I got there. Three council members crowded the hallway outside my father's room, voices overlapping, none of them making any actual sense."What happened?" I grabbed the nearest one... Elder Prisca... by the shoulder. "Tell me what happened.""He collapsed an hour ago. We couldn't reach you fast enough." Her face was pale, genuinely shaken in a way I'd never seen from her. "The healer's with him now. It's worse than any of us expected, Aiden."I pushed past her into the room.My father looked smaller than I'd ever seen him, propped up a
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-09-22
Chapter: Chapter Twenty-FiveIsabella POV I found Aiden by his car after school and didn't give him a chance to walk away this time."Who is he?" I held my phone up before he could say anything, the zoomed-in portrait filling the screen. "This man. He's in a photo with my dad from decades ago, and he's hanging on a wall in your family's building. So don't tell me it doesn't mean anything, because I already know it does."Aiden went very still, staring at the screen like it had physically struck him."Where did you get this?""That's not the point. The point is you're going to tell me who he is.""Isabella...""No." I lowered the phone but held my ground, refusing to back down the way I had every other time he'd tried to shut me out. "I'm so tired of everyone in this town knowing something about my own life that I don't. My dad won't talk. Marv won't talk. You never talk. I found a bloody scrap of jacket, I overheard a council meeting about me by name, and now I'm looking at proof that my father knew somebody con
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-09-22
Chapter: Chapter 24Isabella"Who was he?"Jacob didn't look up from his coffee. "Who was who?""Don't." I sat down across from him at the kitchen table, the same table he'd been hunched over at midnight with a box of old photographs. "The guy in the picture. Your friend. I want a real answer this time, not 'nobody' and not 'old friend, doesn't matter.'""Bells, it really doesn't matter.""It mattered enough that you spent half the night going through a box of old photos and then locked every window in the house afterward." I kept my voice steady, even though my hands weren't. "That's not nothing, Dad."He set his mug down slowly, and for a second I actually thought he might tell me... the same flicker of almost-honesty I'd seen from him before, right at the edge of breaking through."He was someone I knew a long time ago," he said finally. "Before you were born. It's ancient history. It has nothing to do with your life.""Then why did seeing James yesterday make you look like you'd seen a ghost?""I did
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-09-21
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