Chapter Two

TRISTAN

“I want everything on that girl. Every. Fucking. Thing. Hear me?”

I turn to my brother Freaks. Spader has slunk off to heal his broken wrist. 

Whatever my motivations, I saved him from expulsion and he knows it.

Shifters, werewolves, do not fuck with humans in Meridian. Not if we want to keep attending Crescent University. 

And nearly every single student at C. U. is a werewolf. It’s a delicate balance with the townies, and the wolf gangs help reinforce it. We’re meant to keep the strong urges of young wolves in check, so we don’t overrun the humans. 

Among the adults, it’s cordial. With the students, things can get out of hand. 

That’s where we step in.

Gangs like ours, The Underground.

And like Spader’s, Lunacy. Except I no longer think Lunacy is a stabilizing force in the relationship between werewolf and human, student and townie. 

Just the opposite.

“Boss—” Dominic.

“I don’t give a shit what you have to say about this. Any of you. The girl is mine. Get me everything.”

I don’t care what she has to say about it, either.

The wolf deep inside me growls like a rabid thing.

She was mine the second our eyes met.

Those beautiful brown eyes of hers, shining like bronze in the candlelight, seeing everything. Her clear olive skin, glowing with a sheen of sweat I could almost taste, glistening in the light. That chaotic mass of black hair, hanging half down and framing her face until she shook it out like a fucking supermodel. That obscene shirt pulling away from her shorts just enough to show a cute little navel ring, hopefully not silver, but I can take it. And her voice, raspy like a jazz singer from the 1930s recorded on a phonograph, her voice was unadulterated temptation to sin.

Most of all, her smell. She’s pure, a virgin, anyone of us could smell it, and she smells like peaches so ripe they turn to water in your mouth, combined with musky spice and girl flesh.

I wanted to put her on the nearest table and mount her with her neck in my jaws.

Billie. Billie Billie Billie. I wonder if it’s short for something, or maybe fake.

No. Nothing about that gorgeous girl is fake.

I’ll show her where she belongs. She’ll be a good student, I can tell. A feisty one, too. She’ll put up a fight, but she won’t win.

She needs our protection. We’ll make her see that.

First, get the girl. Then, tear off Spader’s hands for touching her. Maybe have her watch.

It seems like the type of thing she’d enjoy.

By tomorrow, if she’s enrolled, every one of her classes will have one of us in it.

If she’s not…we’ll work something out.

Get straight to the point.

She can become our little omega.

It’s for her protection. Spader will be coming for her. He can’t stand to be laughed at, especially by humans. We need to get to her first.

Then, we’ll have to take him out.

When I was 15 years old, a palm reader on Witch’s Night once told me my fated mate would be a “new human girl in an old place, straddling worlds” but that I’d fuck it up somehow, before making it right. That she would also be in danger, but I wouldn’t be able to protect her, she would have to stand on her own two feet and take care of it herself.

I’m beating those odds. I refuse to fuck it up to begin with.

She. Is. Mine.

Later, we’re at the Rock House, the Underground’s on-campus headquarters and dormitory. Four attached towers in a square, covered in polished stones, with a courtyard in the middle, and a rose garden. It’s outright medieval. The Underground only takes members of either highly creative or highly intellectual abilities and pursuits. Artists of all mediums, drama majors like Fleming and I, musicians like the Phantom, dancers, singers, writers, poets, a few philosophy majors, and cultural critics like Dominic. We have plenty of members, but the core six—us—have our own full suites in a specific tower. 

I’m currently supervising the shifting of Raven to the attic so we can fit Billie in the tower when it’s time, when Dominic comes up to me. “Think we got it all, big man.” He hands me a flash drive. 

“Billie?” I ask.

“Billie Marie Black. Born nineteen years ago in Wilson, Massachusetts. From the scuzzier suburbs of Boston. The ghost towns.”

“What’s she doing in Rhode Island?”

“Her mom’s sick, some kind of early dementia, a neurological condition. Dad was a cop who died in the line of duty when she was four. They lived with the grandparents until they died too, COVID, leaving just enough to cover debts and the funeral. Billie found her mom an assisted living nursing home that treats her condition and moved them here. She’s paying the co-insurance on mom’s treatment through a payment plan, and the rent on a five-fifty a month trailer. You can imagine the state of it.”

“On a paycheck from the Gaelic Wolf,” I say.

“Those tips are nothing to sneeze at. If she works enough hours—and last pay period, she worked 125–she can just make it.”

“No school, then.”

“No, that’s the remarkable part. A week ago, she had an audition for a modern dance scholarship. They film them. You wouldn’t believe how good she is.”

“She’ll kill herself like that. She’s only a human. She’s insane. FLEMING!”

My lieutenant pokes his head around the corner, a box of Raven’s art supplies in his arms. “Boss?”

“I need you to pay this woman’s hospital bills and set it up to look like a grant. Pay someone off. Dominic has the information. Take my credit card. Dom, I need you to get back in there and approve her scholarship. She’ll need an equipment fund and a housing and food stipend. I want that dependent on her living here.”

“Tris, don’t you think she’ll resent it if you cheat on her scholarship?”

“All I’m doing is getting her foot in the door. She can prove herself to her professors, or lose the scholarship. She’ll accept it once she realizes that, IF she ever finds out.”

I look around at all of them. “I want her here, and safe, by the weekend. This is priority. Billie Black is under our protection. And someone clear out the basement so she can have a practice studio.”