Chapter 2

Aria

“Hey. Breathe.”

Ethan turned to me and crouched down, blocking out the view of my awful family behind him. His eyes were calm and cool, a dusty blue like the cloudless sky. Just looking into those eyes made my pulse begin to slow.

“Breathe,” he repeated, taking my hands in his. “In through the nose, out through the mouth. Good. Like that… See? All better.”

I looked down at my hands to find that the claws had disappeared. My fingertips still trembled, but that pressure that had been building all day—it had ebbed away like the tide.

“How… How did you…”

“I’ll explain later.” Ethan gently helped me to my feet. “But for now, we have to discuss the matter of your father’s estate.”

My father’s estate. I knew what that meant: my father was dead. Gone. I hadn’t seen him since I was five years old, and had hated him for leaving me with my cruel mother and her new family ever since then, but knowing now that I would truly never get to see him again made my heart ache in ways I wasn’t ready for.

“So. Richard Collins is dead,” my mother cut in with a sneer. “How much are we getting?”

“We?” Ethan scoffed and placed his hand on my shoulder. “Aria is his only inheritor. She is getting everything he left behind. You get nothing.”

I blinked, completely in shock. My father… The man who had abandoned me as a child… Was leaving me everything?

Surely there couldn’t be much to inherit, though. I didn’t know much about my father, but I knew the type of man who would leave his only child behind like that wasn’t typically well off financially.

“What did he leave me?” I asked, more out of curiosity than anything. A car? A few grand? Hopefully enough to allow me to leave this house behind and start fresh—

“Ten million dollars.”

My mother just about fainted at the staggering number. I would have collapsed, too, had it not been for Ethan’s steadying hand on my shoulder.

“Ten… Ten million dollars?” I whispered.

Ethan nodded. “There’s more, but we can discuss that in private. Preferably without the sharks circling us.”

I followed his now-stony gaze and found that, indeed, my entire family’s eyes had gone as wide as saucers and they were closing in on me like rabid wolves. I could practically see the dollar signs in their pupils and the saliva foaming at their mouths.

“Ten million dollars!” my mother exclaimed, rushing forward. “Aria, we’re rich! Can you believe it? We’re rich!”

“She’s rich,” Ethan cut her off. “She. Not ‘we’.”

My mother’s eyes narrowed. “And who are you to decide whether it’s ‘we’ or not?”

“Yeah,” Sophie chimed in, “my parents raised Aria when they didn’t have to. Aria, you owe us for all of our selflessness.”

I almost laughed out loud at that. They honestly expected me to give them the money my father—my father—had left behind. As if I owed them a single thing after the way I’d been treated in this household for years.

“I’m not giving you a penny,” I said bluntly.

My stepfather’s face turned red. “But we’re your family.”

“Hardly.”

“Why, you little—” My mother raised her hand to slap me, but Ethan was faster. He caught her wrist like it was nothing. Try as my mother might to resist him, yanking at her arm and trying to pry his fingers away, he didn’t flinch. Her sharp nails didn’t even pierce his skin.

“The heir has spoken,” Ethan said calmly. “Now… Sleep. All of you. And when you wake, you won’t remember any of this.”

Ethan snapped his fingers, and in an instant, every single person in the room—my mother, my stepfather, Sophie and her friends—collapsed to the floor. Completely asleep.

Only Ethan and I remained standing. My stomach dropped. “What did you just do?”

“Nothing drastic,” Ethan said, smoothing down his shirt and stepping over my stepfather. “They’ll wake up soon, though, so we should probably leave.”

“Wait!” I followed Ethan to the door. “Who are you? And where are we going?”

Ethan hesitated in the doorway, the sun haloing his golden hair from behind. “Like I said, I’m Ethan, the executor of your father’s estate,” he said with a sigh, almost as if I were inconveniencing him with my questions. “And I’m a werewolf, just like you.”

“A… werewolf.”

“Yes. Now are you coming or not?”

For a moment I just stood there, my feet rooted to the floor. Behind me, the others were starting to groan and stir—but in front of me Ethan was calmly walking down the driveway with his hands in his pockets toward a nondescript black SUV.

I could have stayed. Could have been the good little girl who turned around and helped her family like I had always done.

But this man… This strange man who calmed me down and said he was a werewolf and that he knew my father…

I looked down at my hands, those hands that had just sprouted claws from them, and didn’t want to let him walk away before I had answers.

With one last look over my shoulder at the house that had become my prison, I turned and ran after Ethan.

“That’s a good girl,” Ethan chuckled as I ran over to the passenger side and climbed in. He jumped into the driver’s side and peeled out of the driveway just as my father’s confused form staggered into the open front door.

…

“You said you knew my father?” I finally asked once some of the shock had worn off. Ethan was driving me far away from the suburbs where I had grown up, the manicured lawns and perfectly gridlike streets making way for rolling hills and dense forests.

We had been driving for a long time—two, perhaps three hours. No one had bothered to call me, even though I could have been dead by now if Ethan had bad intentions.

“Yes. We were friends,” Ethan explained as the car wound through the forest roads. “He was the Alpha of my pack—Nightclaw pack.”

“Nightclaw pack.” I looked at my hands again, wanting desperately to believe that this was all a fairytale and yet unable to do it. Claws had extended from my fingertips earlier today. Claws. If this was a dream, then it was awfully vivid.

Ethan nodded. “Your father found his fated mate when you were a child, so returned to the pack. He wasn’t sure if you would be able to shift or not, and humans aren’t allowed in the pack lands, so he had to leave you behind.”

My throat constricted. “You realize this all sounds like nonsense, right?”

“Of course it does. But you’ll see soon enough that I’m being very serious.” Ethan shot me a meaningful look.

“How did he die?” I blurted out.

Ethan sighed. “Unfortunately, he and his fated mate died three years ago in a rogue attack. He left everything in the pack to you should you shift in adulthood—if you didn’t shift, you’d only get the money. But lucky for me…”

His eyes glimmered and his lips curved into a faint smile. “I just so happened to walk in on your first shift.”

I shook my head and rubbed my hands over my face, struggling to make sense of all this. “Fated mate. Rogues. Shifts. None of this makes any sense to me. What’s a fated mate?”

Ethan looked almost amused as he explained, “It’s when a wolf is soul-bound to another. Some believe it’s a simple biological drive creating a hormonal thread between two individuals. Others believe it’s a gift from the Moon Goddess—our deity.”

I furrowed my brow, thinking deeply about all of this. My mind momentarily flickered back to the texts Sophie had shown me from Daniel. He’d referred to Sophie as his “fated one”.

I explained all of this to Ethan, and he listened intently the entire time. When I was finished, he said calmly, “It’s likely that Daniel is also a werewolf. And your sister is his fated mate.”

“So you’re saying there are more werewolves out there.”

Ethan snorted. “Of course there are. Some hide amongst humans, although most live in the pack lands.”

“So, if werewolves can live amongst humans, does that mean that I can return to my normal life?” I asked. “Once I get my father’s inheritance, of course.”

Ethan’s hands tightened around the steering wheel. The air outside the car grew a touch colder as we crossed over a mossy stone bridge and into a forest of towering pines and mist.

“Now that you have shifted, if you remain in the human world, you’ll slowly go insane,” he said. “You must return to your roots and learn to control your wolf first.”

I frowned, shifting slightly to look out the window at the passing forest. Packs. Werewolves. Mates. Shifting.

All of it felt incredibly impossible.

I still had no clue what any of this meant or if I wasn’t just dreaming, but if this was all real… Fated mates sounded like a lot more trouble than they were worth. My father had abandoned me and my mother for his. Daniel had cheated on me because of his.

If this was all true, then I hoped never to find my fated mate while I was here.