~ 2

Chapter 2

~ Natalie ~

Nikolai Wellington walked across the wide entry hall toward us, and even half-asleep under her blanket of pills, my wolf lifted her head and stared at him.

At a human. At a rock-throwing, motorcycle-riding human.

‘That's not possible,’ I told her. ‘We don't feel things for humans. That's not how it works.’

She kept staring anyway.

Up close, he was worse. Dark blue eyes that locked on mine and would not let go. A strong, sharp jaw. And on his temple, an angry red mark exactly the size of the stone I'd thrown.

His heartbeat was slow. Steady. Curious.t.

"Nikolai, come meet your future..." Jeremy paused, clearly working out our strange family tree, "...step-aunty." He laughed at his own joke. "This is Natalie, Fanny's step-sister. And her friend Allie."

Nikolai said nothing. The silence stretched until it hurt.

"We've met," he said at last. His voice was low and rough. His eyes dropped to my shoulder — the exact spot where his stone had hit me — then came back up to my face. "Haven't we, Natalie."

The way he said my name made my skin prickle.

"You must be thinking of someone else." I lifted my chin.

"Right." His mouth curved into that slow, dangerous smile. "Someone else. Same car. Same mouth." A pause. "Same arm."

"That was quite a throw, by the way," he added, like we were discussing the weather. "Perfectly straight. Did you play ball somewhere?"

"Beginner's luck."

"Hm." He touched the mark on his temple without even wincing. "Lucky me."

"Do you two know each other?" Fanny asked, looking between us. I heard the small skip in her heartbeat. She'd sensed the tension, and she didn't like it.

"No," I said.

"Not yet," he said, at the exact same time.

Jeremy laughed, missing all of it. "Well, you'll have two weeks to get acquainted! You've come at the perfect time — the Winter Solstice is a Wellington tradition. The whole family gathers, half the city comes to the ball, we eat too much and toast the ancestors. One big happy family."

"The... Winter Solstice?"

"Family tradition," Jeremy said proudly. "Older than the house itself. My great-great-grandfather started it — a grand feast held on the night of the December full moon, every single year." He chuckled. "Strange old man, by all accounts."

Humans throwing a party timed to the full moon, while two actual werewolves stood in their front hall wearing fake names. If God has a sense of humor, He was laughing at me right then.

And under the joke sat a colder thought: the December full moon. I had counted the days before we left home. The full moon rose tomorrow night.

The pills Fanny and I take do two jobs. They hide our scent, and they keep our wolves quiet. But no pill on earth can stop a full moon. When the full moon rises, the wolf comes up — period. The only choice I get is where. If I'm somewhere safe and hidden, I let her out, she runs, and by morning I'm myself again. If I'm trapped in a house full of people...

I didn't want to finish that thought.

"So." Nikolai finally looked away from me, and I could breathe again. He crossed his arms and faced his father. "This is really happening."

"Son…"

"Three months." His eyes slid to Fanny, who suddenly found the marble floor very interesting. "You've known her for three months, and there's a ring on her hand and a wedding on the calendar."

The temperature in the hall seemed to drop.

"Nikolai." Jeremy's voice stayed pleasant, but there was iron underneath it. The kind of iron that had ended men's careers. "Enough."

"What?" Nikolai spread his hands, all innocence. "I'm happy for you. Truly." Then his eyes cut back to me. "It's just been a whole evening of surprising women."

I understood him perfectly. He thought Fanny was a gold-digger who had tricked her way into his family's money.

The maddening part? He was close to the truth. He'd just picked the wrong lie.

…

The guest room Fanny gave us was bigger than my whole apartment.

Two queen beds with white silk sheets. A velvet couch. A bathtub big enough for four people. Floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the gardens — and past the gardens, a thick dark forest that belonged to the family.

Forest. My wolf stirred at the sight of those trees, and for once, I didn't scold her. Tomorrow night, when the full moon came up, I was going to need them.

"I could die here," Allie announced, spread out flat on one of the beds. "Happily. Bury me in these sheets." Then she rolled over, and her face turned serious in that sudden way of hers. "Okay. Real talk. Your sister is marrying a Wellington. There will be a wedding announcement. In newspapers. With her face in it."

"I know."

"Does she remember that a certain someone has people looking for you in every city…"

"She remembers." I shoved a sweater into a drawer harder than I needed to. "She just thinks money is a better wall than distance. 'Nobody looks for two dead girls in a place like this.' Her exact words."

"And what do you think?"

"I think every wall has a door," I said.

Allie was quiet for a moment. Then, because she's Allie, she bounced right back. "Well. If our past is going to eat us, I'd like to enjoy the good life first." Her grin sharpened. "Starting with the son. Nikolai. He's on my list."

My stomach did something strange. I ignored it. "He chased us through the streets, Allie."

"After you split his head open."

"After he hit me first!"

"By accident, probably. Those arms weren't an accident, though." She sat up, eyes bright the way they always got when she'd picked a target. "Two weeks in a mansion with a gorgeous rich heir. Girls would kill for this."

"He's suspicious of me. Of the throw."

"Then I'll be a lovely distraction." She blew me a kiss. "You're welcome. Watch me work."

Dinner was five people huddled at one end of a table built for twenty.

Fanny had cooked — ham, roasted vegetables, some potato dish with a fancy name. It all tasted like paper in my mouth. Jeremy asked kind questions about our trip, and I gave him the practiced answers — the fake hometown, the fake jobs my fake dead parents had — and hated how smooth the lies had become. Fanny laughed too loudly at everything. Nikolai barely spoke. He just watched his father and my sister over the rim of his glass with a look I couldn't read.

Twice, I felt his eyes move to me. Both times, my wolf leaned toward him like a flower toward sunlight.

‘Stop that,’ I told her. ‘He's a human who is likely an enemy’

By the time I came back from the restroom after dessert, Allie had already pulled Nikolai away from the table. They stood by the windows, and he was actually talking to her. Asking her questions. Even smiling. And Allie glowed under it — touching his arm, tilting her head, using every weapon she had.

I sat down next to Fanny and watched them, and something hot and ugly turned over in my chest.

"They've hit it off," Fanny said.

"Yeah," I said, and left it there.

So that was everyone, then. Jeremy had Fanny. Allie was reeling in Nikolai. And I was just... there. Watching other people live.

The story of both my lives. The real one and the fake one.

…

By ten o'clock I gave up on company and went upstairs with my laptop. I had a work presentation due after the holidays, and feeling sorry for myself had never finished one yet.

I typed four words in an hour.

Outside the windows, the gardens lay silver under a moon one night short of full. I could feel it the way you feel a storm coming — a pressure behind my chest, an itch under my skin. My wolf paced inside me, restless, wanting out, wanting the trees, wanting everything I'd denied her through eighteen months of pills swallowed in locked bathrooms.

Tomorrow night, I promised her. Somehow.

A walk, then. The house was enormous. Surely I could wander a little without meeting anyone.

I slipped out barefoot in my sleep shorts and tank top. The hallways were dark except for small lights along the floor. I drifted past closed doors, down the grand staircase, through rooms full of furniture worth more than my car.

Then I heard it.

A moan. A woman's. Breathless.

I froze.

With ears like mine, I'd caught it from three rooms away — which means I have no excuse at all for what I did next.

My feet moved before my brain could stop them. Down the hall. Toward the strip of light spilling from a door left open a crack.

Don't look. Do not look. Natalie, I swear…

I looked.

Fanny, pressed against the wall, her dress pushed up around her hips. Jeremy's silver head bent to her throat, his hands gripping her thighs, moving with her, slow and sure. Her head thrown back. Her mouth open. Making sounds I hadn't made in years.

Jealousy hit me like a punch to the chest.

Two years. Two years since anyone had touched me — and even then it had been polite. Routine. Boring. Nothing like what was happening on the other side of that door.

Heat flooded through me, sharp and shameful. And my wolf — traitor that she is — stirred toward it too, while the almost-full moon pressed down on both of us at once.

I fled.

I needed Allie. A movie, some gossip, anything to drown out the growing fear that something inside me was quietly, invisibly broken — something no pill had a dose for. I headed for the back of the house, toward the pool I remembered from Fanny’s tour.

The water glowed soft blue in the dark. And there, in the shallow end…

Allie and Nikolai. His arms around her waist, holding her against him in the water. They were laughing about something, faces close together. As I watched, he lifted her, and she wrapped her legs around him like they'd done it a hundred times.

My hand hit the glass door. In the silence, it sounded like a gunshot.

His head snapped up. Across the glowing water, through the glass, his eyes found mine — and held.

Allie never even noticed. She kept talking, trailing her fingers through the water, and after a long moment he looked back down at her.

I ran.

Up the stairs, down the hall, into the room. I slammed the door, leaned against it, chest heaving — and then made the mistake of looking in the mirror.

Same face as this morning. Same body — the curves, the hips, the chest, the backside that pulled stares I never asked for. I'm not blind. I know what I look like. Prettier than Allie, if I'm being honest. Prettier than Fanny with her sharp little fox face.

So what was it? What invisible thing did every other woman have that I didn't?

Fanny could burn down my only relationship, get us both chased out of our own lives, and still land a rich man who adored her. Allie could walk into a stranger's mansion and have his son's hands all over her within six hours.

And I couldn't get one man — human or wolf, in either of my lives — to look at me twice in twenty-eight years.

I pressed my palms flat against the mirror until my reflection blurred.

Somewhere below me, my best friend was wrapped around the one man in this house who'd spent all of dinner adding up everything wrong about me.

And God help me — I couldn't tell which of them I was jealous of.