3

David leaned in. “It baffles me how you can be so foolish, Billie Jesper. You’re old enough to know better. Don’t disobey me again.”

The cutting edge to his words made me hunch my shoulders. That was always how his anger manifested, vacillating between care and scorn. I tried to be well-behaved, but every misstep was treated like the worst mistake I could ever make as if David assumed the slightest leniency would get me killed. I’d gotten brave enough to go outside after Colt gave me the binoculars, but I knew then I had only tricked myself into thinking I could get away with it.

He turned from me, running his hand through his greying hair and beard before grabbing the binoculars off the table. “You’re not getting these back,” said David. “You’re grounded. I don't want you down here when the others come back from the hunt.”

The vision of Gavin gaining on Colt flashed in my mind.

I wanted to confess my worries about the aggression I’d seen from Gavin, but that would only exacerbate David’s simmering anger toward me. It would only prove how too-soft I was to participate in hunts in the first place. Surely, it would only remind David how much of a burden I was without my wolf, so I kept my mouth shut and scuttled down the corridor connected to the parlor.

David sighed and grabbed my binoculars, taking them to his office.

After washing my feet in the bathroom, I lingered, hesitant to leave in case I crossed my adoptive father again. I took my time brushing my hair and tying it back, picking plaintively at the light brown strands that framed my narrow face. The girl staring back in the mirror looked as pathetic as she felt. Gangly arms, a thin and feeble body. There was no way a wolf was hiding in this body of mine, but every now and then, I swore I felt it. Wildness that made me want to dive into the forest. Hunger for something more. It frustrated me that even after eighteen years, I couldn’t be like the rest of my packmates enough that I wanted to shatter that mirror. How long would I have to stay locked up in Hexen Manor before David let me go?

Walking back into the parlor, I spied David’s jacket still on the floor. Leaving it would only give him another reason to scold me later, so I picked it up. After fixing it nicely on a hanger and dusting it off, I meant to return it to David’s walk-in in the bedroom on the second floor before the sound of the porch door sliding open scared me out of my skin.

I jumped and spun around, wide-eyed at the nine hunters from earlier—now human—clustered around the door. Alpha Gavin was at the head of them with the slain elk’s neck on his shoulder.

Blood smeared across his forehead, and sweat glistened on the hard musculature of his bare shoulders, his jeans stained. Dark hair teemed across his broad chest, brown locks slick against his brow, his eyes the colour of an ominous murk—and pinned on me. My heart raced. I begged my feet to move, but they wouldn’t. I couldn’t even look away. Dread welled up worse and worse, panic rising as I watched Gavin’s unpredictable anger come to life before me… and I was directly in the crosshairs.

Chapter 2: Gavin

The hunt had been a disaster. I was already furious about the mayhem I caused, so when I laid eyes on that scrawny wolfless girl in Hexen Manor, it was like she ignited the fuse inside of me. And the longer she looked back at me, the closer I was to detonating.

My shoulders ached from carrying the elk up from the valley. There were no roads down there and too many trees to get a truck through, so we had to haul it all the way up to the house. A couple of the Dalesbloom wolves carried the back legs, but Catrina wasn’t one of them. Of course, she didn’t help. She just trotted along beside me, swooning over my show of dominance during the hunt. It pissed me off even worse that she encouraged my loss of control. I thought once the hunt was over, I could relax and try to forget what happened.

Instead, I walked inside to that Jesper runt gawking at me like she knew every terrible thing I had done. I couldn’t hold back my anger. “What the fuck are you staring at, runt?” I snarled, dropping the elk with a heavy thud.

She flinched and bolted down the corridor.

Catrina squeezed through the door beside me, tittering as she grabbed my arm. “How sad,” she said. “She can’t even greet you properly.”

“Like I care,” I said, pulling my arm away.

The others all clutched the elk and dragged it through the porch door into the dinette. I gripped a handful of its coarse brown hide along its neck and heaved it across the floor, leaving behind a mess of dirt and blood. We had really done a number on the animal, but I didn’t remember most of it. I only remembered seeing red.