Chapter 2

FIA’S POV

I didn’t exactly know whether we were being attacked but by the time we reached the border, three wolve trackers were already searching around the broken mangrove roots, their flashlights moving over the mud. One of them, a large man with brown beards named Reyes, came over and shook his head at my father.

“The scent had gone cold Marco. Whatever that was, it didn’t want to be found at all.”

“Was it a wolf or something else?” my father asked.

"I can’t tell. It's weird. Doesn't smell like any pack I know." Reyes glanced at me, then quickly looked away, like even he had already heard about the ceremony. "You good, Fia?"

"I'm fine," I said, even though nothing about tonight had been fine since the second that bond snapped into place.

My father didn't relax the whole way home. He kept one hand on my arm, kept glancing back over his shoulder at the tree line like it might grow teeth and chew us up, and he didn't answer a single one of my questions, no matter how many times I asked.

My mother was already at the kitchen table when we walked in, both hands wrapped around a mug of coffee she wasn't even drinking. She looked at my father over my head, and something passed between them, I noticed some sort of silent conversation I wasn't part of. The mother turned to me.

"Sit down, Sofia," she said. Her voice had gone strangely soft, the way she usually sounds when she had something scary to say.

"It's time you knew about your grandmother."

I sat down slowly, my legs still shaking from the attack earlier, from the rejection, from a night that had already taken more out of me than I had left to give.

"She was Moonblood," my father uttered. "A wolf who could hold more than one true mate bond in her lifetime. It's very rare. Almost nobody's born like that anymore. There's a group that has hunted the trait for decades, they’re the Obsidian Circle. They wanted her for something. She died protecting the secret of where the bloodline went instead of handing it to them."

The room tilted a little "an-and you think it went to me?."

"We thought it skipped a generation," my mother said, her voice cracked. "We thought if you never stood out in this pack, if nobody ever looked at you twice that you would be safe even if you did carry it. So every time this pack overlooked you, every time they compared you to your sister and found you lacking, we told ourselves it was an armor…. And a Camouflage."

"Yo- you could have just told me that." I fired up. "Instead of letting me think I wasn't good enough for fourteen whole years."

"Telling you would have meant trusting you to hide it," my father said quietly. "You were barely 10 years old, Fia. You wanted to tell everyone everything. We were terrified you'd wear it like a badge instead of keeping it as the secret it is, and it would have gotten o the wrong ears."

"So instead you let a combat trainer laugh me out of tryouts and didn't say a single word."

My mother flinched. "We didn't know she’ll do that. And when she did-" She paused.. "When she did, some part of me was almost relieved, because a daughter nobody thought could fight was a daughter nobody would ever look at twice. I hated myself for feeling that. I still hate myself for it. But I felt it."

I sat there in silence, feeling twenty-four years of my life rearrange itself right in front of me. Every "she's just Camila's sister." Every wedding I ran from the back room while my sister got seated up front. Every single small cruelty I had absorbed and swallowed and told myself was normal.

None of it had ever really been about my body.

All of it had been fear, wearing my body like a mask.

"What about tonight?," I asked, standing up on my feet, my voice barely more than a whisper. "The bond with Kane?."

My father's jaw tightened. "If you're Moonblood, and the Moon Goddess bonded you to the Alpha King's heir," He shook his head hard, like he could physically throw the thought away. "Then his rejection might be the only thing standing between you and the Circle finding out what a bond to you actually means. Sofia, a quiet, humiliated girl is invisible. But a girl bonded to the future Alpha King is not."

"S-so I am supposed to be grateful that he humiliated me in front of the whole pack?."

"I'm not saying that." He took my hand in his which was shaking. "I'm only saying it isn't safe here anymore. Either way. Whatever tripped that border alarm tonight, I don't think it was mere coincidence, and I don't think we have much time before somebody else puts together what we know. I think you should go with the Everglades Alpha. Tonight, before anyone else figures you out"

Camila came down the stairs halfway through, still in her ceremony dress, and stopped dead in the doorway when she caught the tail end of it. "Wait. Go where? Fia, what's happening?"

"I'll explain in the car," I told her, because I didn't have it in me to say it twice.

I went upstairs and packed everything I owned in under twenty minutes. One duffel bag. My boathouse gloves, still damp with sweat. A hoodie that actually fit right, because most of my clothes were bought in a hurry by people who never checked the size twice. My phone charger. My mother's old recipe cards, because some habits don't care what kind of night you're having.

My father knocked once, then came in without waiting for an answer, which he never did. He held out a photograph, the frame cracked down one corner, and pressed it into my hands like it was the only thing left he had to give me.

A woman with my exact eyes stared back at me. Younger than I expected. Fierce, even in a still photograph, like she had known even then that being underestimated was a weapon if you used it right.

"Her name was Isadora," he said. "I was twelve when she died. I've spent twenty-four years terrified of watching it happen to someone else I love." His own eyes began to get wet, "Go. Be safe. Be angry at us for as long as you need to be. Just be alive to do it."

~~~~~~~

Diego was waiting by his car at the curb when I came out, his engine was was already running, Camila was standing beside it with her arms crossed like she had already decided to fight anyone who tried to stop this.

"Text me the second you land," Camila said, hugging me tightly. "I mean it, Sofia. The very second."

"I will."

"And if that idiot Alpha Prince comes near you again—"

"He won't."

I made a few steps oward the car before a voice stopped me cold.

"Going somewhere??"

I knew exactly who it was before I even turned around.