Chapter 1

Vinny

Ring! Ring! Ring! My phone began to shrill out on the nightstand, my sisters name flashing angrily against the vibration on the cheap wood.

I was dreading this phone call. Not because I didn’t love my sister, of course I loved my sister. I was dreading this phone call because it was a summons. Alpha Liam and Luna Clementine had been slowly dropping hints over the last few months that it was time to end my sabbatical and come home to the pack. It was time to come home, meet my niece and stay for a while.

The pack had been raving about my niece, each time I had talked to one of them. Little Lacey! Dark hair and startling green eyes. She must have been at least ten months old by now, and other than the occasional facetime, I hadn’t really met her.

I was training to be a pack warrior at eighteen, with the plan to be in my sister and brother-in-law’s personal protective circle. Shortly after my twentieth birthday, however, I raced to my sister and very calmly asked her for an out of province assignment. I asked her if I could become a pack-ambassador instead. Her dark eyebrow raised at me as she took in my façade. I skilled my face to be unreadable. I demanded my heart to slow down. I stared at her with, what I hoped, was an equal look of respect and indifference.

That was five years ago. Five years of meeting other packs and representing the Blackfern Valley pack. Five years of trying to find my true-mate… or at least that’s what the pack thought. But the truth was I had found my true-mate on my twentieth birthday. I had found her; and fuck did I hate her!

Her pitch-black wolf looked at me curiously as I came out of the thicket of brush and followed my pounding heart. I watched as understanding crossed her dark brown eyes and horror, shortly followed by disgust and anger washed over her features. Well honey, the feeling was mutual.

She shifted back instantly, and I tried to not look at her perfect curvy little body that instantly made the blood run down to my shaft. She flicked her black hair over her shoulder giving me a look of such malicious contempt that it made my wolf Vali retreat and snarl before whimpering at the intense confusion he felt. The mate-bond and his instincts were telling him that this was his moon-given mate, his one true love. I was telling him this woman was vapid; this woman was horrid; this woman was unwanted and ultimately rejected.

As I opened my mouth to utter the words, her usual honeyed voice was raspy with anger. My dick spasmed but I forced myself to focus on the words, rather than the way her voice came out of her mouth, rather than the way her tongue flickered against her pearly white teeth as she spoke the words before I could.

Searing pain bit through my heart, cold and frosty, and leaving me with severe burns. Cold and frosty, much like her. Vali snarled angrily as the frostbite set in. I could taste the freezing cold in my mouth as Vali came forward, frothingly livid. My heart was still beating in my chest which surprised me. It had to be negative thirty degrees within my ribcage now, but my heart was slamming against the ice, hard and fast. With every pump it sent burning ice-cold pain throughout my body.

I finally allowed myself to look at her face, the warm brown hues of her eyes and the light-russet colour of her skin were the last thing I saw, before she turned, shifting on the fly and howling as she ran. Did she feel the pain too? No! There was no way that bitch felt anything. She was without emotion, as cold and rigid as the day I met her.

To everyone else, she was an angel. Charismatic, funny, always willing to help out the elderly or the kindergarten class with something. Always willing to be a friend in need. The glowing laughter would follow her wherever she was. But the moment her deep brown eyes met my green ones they would lower into slits; the iridescent smile would flatten into a disapproving line and her entire body would act like rigor mortis had set in.

I had spent the last five years trying to forget her. Moving from town to town, waiting to be invited into pack lands, meeting their officials, offering alliances, and sleeping with their she-wolves before I would boost out of town. Any time Vali would start to pine and lick his wounds I would find the nearest bar and drown myself in a waitress or two. He didn’t approve of my methods, but the alternative was to sit with the constant icicles that had inhabited my heart. At least if I kept moving, the icicles stayed still, they didn’t move or shift or threaten to end my life. They just stayed in stasis. Until I thought of her, and then the fragments would start to vibrate one shard at a time. She was the reason I hadn’t returned to my home for five years.

Sighing, I answered my phone, “Johan’s brothel, where we have two for one Wednesdays and all you can eat Mondays.”

“Cute.” I could practically hear the eye roll through the phone.

“What’s up Clementine?” I probably should have called her by her title, but I forgot. I often forgot that my short, slightly chubby, four-eyed, loser of a sister was now the most important she-wolf in my pack.

“I was just checking in. We haven’t spoken for a while.” I heard the squeal and coo and her gentle shushing noise with “Mommy is on the phone,” in a gentle but firm whisper.

“I really don’t need to hear what you call Liam in the bedroom, Clem. You could have called me afterwards.”

“Hardy-ha-ha. Your uncle is hilarious Lacey,” she said to her daughter before turning her attention back to me. “I was just checking in to see how you are doing—”

“And to tell me that I am needed back in the pack,” I interrupted her knowing that it was inevitable that the conversation would be manipulated that way.

“Well truth be told, I thought you would have been back by now—”

“I enjoy the road.”

“Dad misses you. You haven’t even met Lacey yet. You are a member of this pack Vincent, and the pack hasn’t seen you in five years!”

“Did you forget what I looked like? I can remind you; Tall, Green eyes, blond hair, well endowed, great in the sack,” I quipped.

“Wrong audience Vinny. Look, I know you enjoy being… what do you call it? Nomadic? But we could really use you home for now.” She fumbled a little bit which made Vali’s ears twitch. Something wasn’t right. Something she wasn’t telling me. Finally, she took a deep breath, her voice triangulating directly towards Vali. “Something happened.”

“Have more rogues attacked?” my tone changed instantly to a protective one.

It was well known that the Blackfern Valley pack had a half-breed as a Luna, and although our pack had accepted her, there were still outsiders and purists who thought that my sister was an abomination and an easy target. That was often their first and last mistake. My sister, calm and collected when she was unprovoked, but when she was tested, she was a hellcat with delicate ferocity. Then there was her true mate. Alpha Liam have seemed a gentle, fair and just ruler, but it was often rumoured that a small portion of his uncle’s essence had infused itself onto his own. That when Alpha Liam murdered his uncle’s only living son, that it stitched a part of his temperament into his own.

There was no way that Alpha Liam was as sadistic as his uncle or cousin, but I had been on enough enforcement missions when rogues attacked, I had witnessed firsthand how ruthless he could be. If my sister hadn’t been taken not just once but three times within five years, maybe Liam would have remained his passive self. But he was tested three times too many. His protective instincts became part of his ruling. Now he was as brutal as he was gentle. It was a fine balance, that many Alphas had struggled with, but Liam managed to maintain it and he was a better Alpha because of it.

I knew how he felt. My first ever shift was triggered when my sister was taken the first time. I was barely sixteen years old, and I had barely had time to register what was happening. I never even thought I liked my sister that much, but suddenly Vali was sprouting forward ready to kill anyone who would threaten her. She was not only his Luna but his kin, and she was in danger.

The next time she was taken I was eighteen, and I had just started training as a pack warrior. A rogue had kidnapped her from a gas station. Unfortunately for the rogue, she was with her friend Sophie and Sophie’s brother (the pack Beta), Ryan. The rogue didn’t get far, and when Ryan and Sophie caught up, the rogue didn’t see the other side of the hour.

The last time was shortly after I left, unfortunately for that rogue, my sister was over being abducted and sliced her claw through his eye socket, curling it and popping out his eyeball. It dangled comically before she pierced her claws through his soft underside and left him to bleed out. She had returned home before her bodyguard Luca even realized she had been taken.

“Not me,” she said softly. “We had some information that some rogues have learned about Lacey.” Vali growled in the back of my mind, his hackles enormously high and his teeth glinting with saliva.

“I am on my way.” I abruptly ended the call, throwing my clothes into a rucksack before grabbing my toothbrush from the bathroom sink.

I dropped the key into the drop box of the motel before revving my engine, twisting the gas a few more times to hear the engine purr, its throaty rumble making me grin. After attaching my rucksack, I slung my leg over my steel-black Boulevard C50 and skidded out of the parking lot.