4…

•Faye•

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about riding in the back seat of an Alpha’s car with two men who can apparently hear intentions, feelings, and probably my heart rate through the leather seats. It is a masterclass in silent panic.

I kept my eyes mostly shut the whole ride, playing the part of the fragile, freshly concussed damsel, while my brain ran laps trying to figure out how deep a hole I’d just dug myself. Fake amnesia. Fake ignorance about werewolves. A murder charge sitting behind me like a shadow with teeth. And now, apparently, a mate bond that came with bonus content, because Shaun’s wolf would not shut up.

‘She’s hiding something.’

I know, buddy. Join the club.

‘Doesn’t matter. She’s ours.’

I nearly snorted out loud at that one. Ours. Like I was a snack he’d already claimed off somebody’s plate.

The car eventually slowed, and I felt the road change under the tires, smoother, then rougher, gravel crunching, trees closing in around us if the way the moonlight flickered through the window was anything to go by. I cracked my eyes open just enough to see wrought iron gates swinging inward, and beyond them, a house that looked less like a house and more like something out of a gothic fever dream, all stone and dark windows and ivy climbing up walls like it was trying to hold the place together out of sheer spite.

Pack territory. I was actually doing this.

The second the car stopped, I heard it. Not sound. Thought. A whole wall of it, slamming into my skull all at once like someone had thrown open a door I didn’t know existed and shoved fifty radios through it at full volume.

‘Is that her?’

‘She’s human. An actual human.’

‘She doesn’t look like much.’

‘Shut up, he’ll hear you.’

‘I heard the Luna’s plus size, is that true?’

‘Focus. The Alpha’s bringing her in.’

‘Something feels off about her.’

‘You always say that.’

‘No, I mean it. Something feels off.’

I gripped the seat so hard my knuckles went white, because it was not just Shaun anymore, it was every single person standing outside that car, a whole pack’s worth of unfiltered thought crashing into me at once, and I had spent my entire life managing one voice at a time, learning to tune them down to a hum I could survive. This was not a hum. This was a flood, and I was drowning in it with my mouth clamped shut so nobody would hear me scream.

“Faye?” Shaun’s voice cut through, low, close. His hand found mine. “You alright? Your heart’s racing.”

“Fine,” I managed, which was a lie so obvious I half expected his wolf to laugh at me. “Just a lot of people.”

That was the understatement of the century. My skull felt like it was splitting down the middle, every thought sharper than the last, some curious, some suspicious, one deeply, aggressively horny about a man named Marcus who I sincerely hoped I would never meet. I pressed the heel of my hand against my temple and tried to breathe through it, tried to build the wall I used to build back home when my stepfather’s rage used to bleed into the air before he even raised his hand, but the wall kept cracking, because there was too much, too many, too loud.

And then, underneath all of it, something else. A single thread of thought that did not sound like the others. Colder. Older. Like it was coming from somewhere further away than the rest, somewhere that had no business being close enough to reach me at all.

‘There she is. Finally.’

I froze.

That voice was not looking for a lost human girl. That voice knew exactly who I was.

“Faye.” Shaun again, sharper now, his grip tightening on my hand like he’d felt something change in me even without hearing a word of it. “Talk to me. What’s wrong?”

I opened my mouth to lie, because lying was the only skill I had left that still worked, and the second I did, blood started dripping from my nose, hot and sudden, splattering onto the front of my borrowed hospital blanket like something out of a horror movie I definitely did not sign up to star in.

The last thing I heard before the world tilted sideways and my vision blurred to static was Shaun, roaring my name loud enough that I felt it in my chest, and underneath it, threaded through every panicked mind in that courtyard, that same cold voice, closer now, almost delighted.

‘Oh, she’s exactly what they said she’d