FAZER LOGINFABIAN’S POVThe Old Mill district looked almost abandoned when I arrived.The warehouse was exactly where Cicero had said it would be.I parked several buildings away and continued on foot.The contact had sent Cicero a description of the man he’d seen. Mid-forties, dark hair, grey jacket and a slight limp on his right leg. That matched the description Kael had given us and with how quickly the man had disappeared, I had no intention of wasting time looking for confirmation before I moved.I slowed as I approached the warehouse.The large metal doors were shut and there were fresh tire marks in the dirt outside. Two vehicles had been parked there recently. One had left but the other was still there.I crouched beside the tire tracks.Fresh.Less than an hour old.My wolf stirred.There was a faint human scent around the vehicle and I followed it towards the building.The side entrance was unlocked.That bothered me.I pushed it open.The warehouse was dark except for a narrow strip o
AVIONNA’S POVFor several seconds, I didn’t move.I could still hear the faint sound of Avionna’s footsteps disappearing down the hallway, uneven and hurried, each one dragging farther away from the kitchen.My grip tightened around the bottle in my hand.My wolf was pacing.Not restless.Furious.I could feel him moving beneath my skin, agitated by what had just happened and making it difficult to think past the lingering scent she had left behind.Mate.The word came again, less like a thought and more like a demand. My wolf growled again and I clenched my jaw, gnashing my teeth together.I was just as furious as he was, but for a completely different reason. I was mad because he had gone completely still the moment Avionna walked into the kitchen, only to explode the second Reo’s attention shifted towards her.I was mad because I knew why he’d reacted like that and I hated that I even noticed how much her scent had filled this room.It wasn’t just ordinary heat.The air had been mu
AVIONNA’S POVI had been lied to my entire life.This was worse than anything I’ve known my entire life and it had only been one day.Every minute felt like an hour, painlessly going by and if anyone saw me, they’d had no trouble believing that I was sick.Last night, both Zolani and Martha had dropped by more times than I could count, doing the little then could to make me feel better.Martha had cracked open all the windows in the room then drew me an ice bath. Zolani helped for a while then came back to rub my feet.It’d helped with the soreness there while she did it but soon as she stopped, it returned.Even sinking into the tube of ice could not alleviate the heat coursing inside of me. In less than an hour, all of the ice melted and the water began to warm.I couldn’t even sleep. The bed was all wrong and the blanket too heavy and was now piled in a corner of the room in a pitiful heap.Inside of me, my wolf was huddled in a corner, sweat drenched and whimpering. Unlike me, she
FABIAN'S POVThe man was gone.That was the part that had been irritating me since yesterday.After leaving the gym with Cicero, I didn't think I would receive a call from Kael telling me he knew someone who could help with our investigation into the ATL but it had happened and this man that Kael mentioned was supposedly someone who could get us Intel that we couldn't get ourselves.He was a human but also the first useful lead we had gotten in days.The moment I heard that, Cicero and I had gone to find the man immediately, only to be told he was missing.It had taken a lot of conscious effort to not growl at the humans who had told us about his disappearance, leaking our identity as shifters.Often, the aggression was what gave us away but after dealing with humans for so long, I'd learned to keep some of that natural dominance in check until yesterday tested my patience.By the time I returned home, my patience had already worn thin then I saw the flowers and asked Martha who broug
AVIONNA'S POV That was impossible.Heat?Right now? Right here?It couldn't be.There was no way this was true, it couldn't be. But the faces of the women gawking at me had already confirmed it and deep down I knew it myself.No wonder I'd felt so dizzy, nauseous and hot since waking up. Now I understood why my nostrils were so sensitive and why nearly everything smelt so putrid.It was because I was going into heat."No, no, no. This can't be. It's not possible. I can't be going into heat. Why now? Why me? What do I do?"I was working myself into a frenzy and I knew it but I couldn't stop.As though she'd heard everything I said too, my wolf rose and had begun to prowl within me. It worsened the state of my mind but I was so caught up in what I'd heard that it didn't occur to me to get her to stop.I'd heard of heat before. Every female wolf knew what it was. Right from when we got into middle school, we had been taught about our body's physiology and our biological makeup even if w
AVIONNA’S POVI guess fate hadn't messed with me enough because I woke up feeling like I had been stuffed inside an oven.My breathing was wrong, my head felt woozy and my thoughts sludged through my brain.I picked up a scent from beyond the room and immediately wrinkled my nose. It smelled like a chemical approximation of lavender which somehow reminded me of a decomposing raccoon.When I kicked the blanket over my body away, I regretted it instantly when a shiver ran down my spine which didn't make any sense because beaded sweats trailed down my chin.My nightdress clung to my body, damp like clothes hung to dry on a misty morning while my stomach felt like I had the world's worst period stacked on top of food poisoning.The moment that thought settled, my eyes snapped open.Period.Was that what this was?I paused for a second but didn't feel that stickiness between my thighs. I couldn't sniff out blood from the air either.It wasn't my period but it did feel like a fever. I close







