1

I crack my neck while his voice continues to echo throughout this giant room. Not sure if I’m overwhelmed by irritation out of the sheer amount of irrelevance for me being here or by the anxiety I haven’t been able to curb since last night, but either way I feel like my skin is on fire and I know what that means is coming soon. I tune in long enough to deduce that we are not anywhere near done yet so I begin to figure my way out of here undetected. Step one: sit in the back. And that one is always a given for me.

I glance around discretely and focus in on Armi’s face for a few moments. His eyes never meet mine, so I know I’m in the clear. Next I find my parents. They are second row, deeply involved despite it being irrelevant to them as well. I don’t even bother to hold back my smirk as the plan to leave unfolds cleanly.

My chair in the dining hall is against the back wall, but the best part about it is that it’s right near the counters that we serve food on which coincidentally, lead to the kitchen and a way out. I slither myself halfway down my chair, check for my brother’s prying eyes once more, and once I’m satisfied no one cares either way, I slunk all the way to the floor. I crawl silently and quickly to the counter and just like that, I’m halfway there. A few more feet, I round the corner, then another and I’m out of sight, out of mind.

I bring myself up to standing position and release a little sigh before cracking my neck once again. The itch on my skin is turning into a burn so I put a rush on getting outside. As I exit the kitchen I bump into someone else, and it only takes me a second to realize they were stationary, and waiting for me.

“a-hem..”

Brown eyes stare back with a disapproving look in them.

“Manilla, fancy meeting you here!”

My little sister is hardly an idiot and is the most adept at detecting my bullshit in the family.

“Remi…”

I can hear the question in her voice and another sigh leaves my mouth before I answer.

“I don’t need to be there, and you know that. I made an appearance, and I told myself I’d sit through it but I didn’t think that shifting in the middle of it would be better than me not being there.”

“Why do you need to shift?”

I simply look at her until she realizes her stupid question and then shakes her head.

“Right, fine. If mom and dad ask you had a patient.”

“Thanks Nilla, you’re the best.”

She doesn’t respond, simply nods and turns down the hallway to the doorway where the meeting was being held. She leans in the doorway, and I realize she watched me leave from there and was in fact waiting for me. She had given me a get out of jail free card though so I wasn’t going to waste it.

I make my way out the back door and as soon as my feet hit the snow I strip off my shirt. By the time I reach the woods a few strides away my shoes are gone and so are my pants. Without hesitation I jump up and shift into my wolf. With the burning in my skin now gone as its replaced with fur I can finally relax a little. The anxiety isn’t gone with it though like I’d hoped. Delta stretches out a bit, shaking his fur as fresh snow flakes fall onto it. Then he takes off, and I know which direction we are headed without evening asking. The trees blur by, he doesn’t stop to take it in, he doesn’t care and neither do I. this entire place holds small meaning to us, less one area.

As we break into the field I see the sunlight through his eyes perfectly bouncing off the snow and creating a sheet of glowing ice. He trods further, until we reach the spot and then he flops into the snow. The silence envelops us the longer we are there and soon enough, the sun’s rays turn from golden to crimson as it lowers behind the trees.

-We are going to find her- I tell him quietly.

We share thoughts. I know what he is thinking. The same thing we have both been  thinking of non stop for nearly a year.

-She isn’t here though. She isn’t one of the young ones, we aren’t waiting for her to turn 18 like the other male wolves in the pack. We won’t find her here- he rebuts and he isn’t wrong.

-I made you a promise and I’ll keep it-

He huffs but nods in acceptance of this. When the promise was made he had his doubts, and it seems that hasn’t changed. But I want her as deeply as she does. It’s been 19 years since I’ve seen her, touched her. Yet that day lives rent free at the front of my memories replaying each night when I’m asleep in my dreams and every morning as I wake to visions of her. Her blue eyes, centered by a yellow ring that looks like a solar eclipse with her pupil in the middle. It was the closest I’ve ever gotten to seeing anything celestial and they were downright haunting me. Her long lashes that hooded those eyes as she looked down at the snow. Her pink cheeks, flushed from the cold. And her light brown hair that was short, hanging only to the bottom of her chin. I was 6 years old, and my heart stopped the moment we touched. I didn’t know what it meant, the way it felt to touch her or the way I felt seeing her and being around her. But the older I got, the more stories I heard of mates, one day I put it all together and realized she was mine. The only problem was, I hadn’t seen her since then.

She wasn’t from my pack. I was here, in this field, running from my brothers.I hid nearby and once they gave up and went home I stayed here, making snowballs and snowmen. I was so immersed in it all that I didn’t even notice her until she was right in front of me, casting a shadow over my snowman. I looked up and met eyes furrowed together as she spoke to me.

“What are you making?”

“Uh, a snowman.”

Her smile stretched across her face and I’d never seen anything more beautiful. She sat right down despite being in a dress and tights with boots on. She started patting the snow and helping me made the head. We were out there a couple hours when she suddenly got that same look on her face, eyes furrowed.

“I have to go.”

“Why?”

“My parents said to be back by sunset. Thanks for lettin’ me play with ya, bye”

With that, she stood up, waved and ran to the woods on the other side of the field. I briefly saw two people there, one of whom scooped her up and set her on his hip as soon as she reached them. They turned and disappeared into the woods, away from our territory, my heart along with them. Once I returned home, I told my parents about playing with the girl in the field, but nothing more. Once I got to the part where they walked off the territory, my parents got tense. They told me that those woods were not our territory. That to be there, those people were rogues. Then I got a twenty minute lecture on being more careful, as an Alpha’s son. Which I wasn’t, by blood. But that didn’t matter to them. Something I appreciated most of the time but not in that moment.

But the years passed, and despite coming back here as often as I could, against my parents orders, I never saw her again. Now I was 25, and my wolf was done playing the waiting game. And so was I. Once again he huffed in my mind and I mentally slapped him. This got him agitated enough to stand up and go for a run. It was time to head back to the clinic anyway.

We made it there in record time and I shifted before entering through the back door into my office. I had made this back room my office specifically for days when I needed a quick entrance or exit. I grabbed some jeans and button down from the closet and then laced up my shoes I kept under my desk. A soft knock resonated as I was sitting down to look over the charts from that day.

“Come in.” I called out.

“Hey, I thought I heard you back here. Sneak in the back?”

My nurse Clarice was a brilliant nurse, but her good qualities ended there. And my least favorite of her less than desirable traits was her inability to stop flirting with me. The smile on her face right now, showed me she was about to, so I had to put a stop to that quick.

“Yeah, I had the meeting at the packhouse and then went for a quick run.”

“Mmm I see. Well you know you don’t have to sneak in back here, I don’t mind you coming in through the front, even post shifting.”

If her smirk wasn’t giving away all the not-so-subtle meaning behind that sentence, her eyes certainly were.

“there could have been patients, and I like my privacy, you know that. Speaking of patients, do we have any tonight? I see the charts from the tests we did yesterday on Mr. Lence, did the additional tests I ordered just in case come in today?” My normal route for avoiding uncomfortable conversations with her was sticking to work. This was the pack clinic, the only place for treatment in the pack, we were busy and there was always something to talk about.

Her face deflated but she caught herself quickly and pasted on a fake smile.

“No Doctor, no patients tonight on the schedule. I’ll go check receiving to see if those tests came today.” She turned to leave but not before I saw her eyes roll a bit in annoyance. Well, stop trying babe, you aren’t gonna get anything more from me.

I turn to focus on the charts again, Mr Lence being a return patient we saw every couple weeks as he dealt with the adverse effects of a fairy curse. He had brought that one on himself, trying to seduce her. Something Mrs. Lence wasn’t a fan of. But to defend him, the fairy was a black widow and seducing him was part of the spell and curse. He never stood a chance. The aftermath of this curse though was still being worked out of his system and I was more than happy to help assist him and study it along the way.

Another knock made me run my hands over my face in irritation before calling for them to come in. I knew my voice held just as much annoyance but I was pleased when someone other than Clarice came through the door.

“Geez, what did I do to you?”

“Oh, thank the Goddess its you, please close the door.”

My brother raised an eyebrow but none the less he obliged and closed it behind him, effectively making the room soundproof.

“Clarice is at it again,” I ground out as I looked back at my charts for a second before closing them and turning to give my brother my attention.

“Ahhh, man she just can’t take a hint can she?”

“Please, I stopped dropping hints months ago, now I just give out direct notices but she still doesn’t accept them.”

“Well, she is easy on the eyes.”

“Then you sleep with her.” I tell him, annoyed for the millionth time today.

“Who says I didn’t?” he chuckles and I groan out. I was ready for bed, for this entire day to be over.

“Tell me you didn’t, Armi”

He just shrugs and shoots me a side eye that says YES despite him shaking his head no. Fucking man whore.

“Is there an eligible girl in our pack who DOESN’T have a memory of a one night stand with you?”

“I resent that, sometimes there are a few nights with the same girl. I was even with whats her name for 6 months last year. Damn, she was good in bed.”

“And yet you cannot remember her name.”

“Savannah, that’s not the point.”

“You’re right, why are you here?”

“Ah, yes.” he turns back to face me and walks over to my desk, leaning over and resting his hands on the back of the chair opposite me. “I’m here, because Mandy told me what happened today.”

Shit. So much for having my back.

“What exactly did Manilla tell you?”

“What you had to leave early because you almost shifted in the middle of the dining hall.”

“Wow the whole truth,” I said sarcastically as I stood up and ran a hand through my hair.

“I persuaded her a bit. Don’t blame her. I knew I saw you there, so I was wondering why my brother, the resident doctor and head of the pack hospital, would ditch out in the middle of the monthly meeting.”

I hated when he tried to use my title and position against me as if it meant anything in the pack related to power or responsibility.

“I sat through nearly all of it, as much as I could with the full intention of the entire thing, but I just…” I sighed deeply. “Delta needed out, and I couldn’t pull him back in.”

“I don’t believe you.”

I looked him dead in the eyes and saw the suspicion in them.

“What don’t you believe? Should I stay next time, and shift when I cannot control him and scare the living shit out of everyone and cause a scene?”

“That’s not what I mean. I believe you were going to shift. I don’t believe you just suddenly could not control Delta. You’ve been weird for months now, what’s going on Remi?”

“Nothing is going on, I’m just.. anxious.”

“Anxious is right. You are definitely that. Now, I wanna know why.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because I’m worried about you.”

I must be acting extremely odd if Armi of all people was worried about me. Armi was my older brother. By two months. Like I said, we don’t have the same biological parents. We were raised up like twins since I Was adopted so young. My whole life he was my other half, the closest to me by far of all my siblings. But we were not anything alike. He was the future Alpha of the pack. When we were 21 he took over the pack. And over all, he has been a hell of a good leader. He listens to others, unlike our father. He is advisable, and approachable and genuinely has a heart for this pack and its wolves, again, unlike our father. Our father is a good man, but the older we got and looked back at things, the more Armi and I saw that the way he ran the pack was self destructive. And he promised not to be that way.

Armi also shared in my frustration of not finding my mate yet. He was 25 now the same as me, and here we both stood unmated while all of our siblings were happily mated, some of them with pups of their own. Except I approached it from a waiting stand point, and Armi approached it in the way of filling his bed every minute he needed to until he found her. He was overwhelmed leading our pack and every spare minute was spent with a woman. So for him to notice something was off with me, meant I wasn’t hiding it nearly as well as I thought I was.

But I hadn’t ever told anyone about meeting my mate, and as tempted as I was to tell him, I just wasn’t sure yet he wouldn’t react the same way our parents had about the possibility of her being a rogue wolf.