All Chapters of Claimed by The Wolf l Ran From : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Local Man Claims He Saw a "Werewolf" Near Blackwood Forest. The caption glared from Emily's phone screen. Beneath it, shaky footage showed a dark shadow darting through the trees. It could have been anything—a deer, a stray dog, or someone’s uncle in a bad costume. Three hundred thousand views. Two thousand comments. Most of them were some version of I believe it!! paired with a crying-laughing emoji. "People will believe anything these days," Emily muttered, tugging her hood up against the biting wind. Behind her, the porch light of Sarah's house clicked off. Four hours of quizzing her best friend on the Krebs cycle had left Emily's voice hoarse and her patience thin. But Sarah was going to pass that biology final if it killed both of them. You showed up for the people you loved. Even at eleven at night. Even when your own homework sat untouched on your desk at home. Emily didn't scare easy. She'd learned that the year her father walked out the door and never came back. It

Stress. That was all it had been.Emily lay staring at her ceiling as gray morning light crept in around the curtains, running through the explanation for the fourth or fifth time like she could wear it smooth enough to believe. Finals were coming. She'd been up half the night helping Sarah cram. She'd gotten caught in a storm, spooked herself half to death cutting through Blackwood in the dark, probably tripped over an actual dog, and her exhausted, overworked brain had filled in the rest with nightmare logic. People saw all kinds of things when they were running on no sleep and too much adrenaline. It happened. It was practically science.She almost believed it, right up until she closed her eyes and saw gold again — patient, glowing, inches from her face.She was going to be fine. She just had to act normal. Normal was a muscle, and she was going to flex it until it stopped shaking."Emily." Her mother caught her wrist at the front door, turning her arm gently to look at the thin re

The light pulsed once, bright enough that Emily had to squint against her own wrist — and then it was gone, fading back into pale, ordinary skin as if it had never happened at all.For a long moment, nobody moved.The courtyard that had been screaming chaos thirty seconds earlier had gone utterly silent, dozens of faces turned toward her, toward the place on her arm where silver light had just been burning in broad daylight. Emily stared down at her own wrist like it belonged to someone else.Damien hadn't moved either. He knelt in the torn-up grass exactly where he'd landed after shifting back, and the look on his face was one Emily hadn't seen on him yet — not the cold disinterest from homeroom, not the fierce authority from the fight. Something closer to fear."What was that?" Emily's voice cracked as it came out, equal parts demand and plea. "Who are you? What am I?"Damien's jaw tightened. His eyes flicked past her — to the crowd of students still staring, to the teachers shouting

"No."The word came out of Emily before she'd even decided to say it, sharp and immediate, a wall thrown up against something too big to let in all at once."I'm human. I have a birth certificate. I have a pediatrician, Mom. I've had the flu. I broke my arm falling off my bike when I was nine. Human people do all of those things." She heard how ridiculous it sounded even as she said it — arguing biology at a woman crying in a hallway while a dozen wolves waited in the yard outside — and said it anyway, because the alternative was letting the floor of her entire life fall away completely.Her mother didn't argue. That was almost worse than if she had. She just stood there, tears cutting silent tracks down her face, looking at Emily like she was seeing her for the first time and saying goodbye to something at the same moment."I wanted you to have a normal life," she said. "For as long as I could give you one.""So it's true." Emily's voice cracked down the middle. "You've been lying to

Emily laughed.It wasn't a real laugh — more a reflex, some last defense mechanism firing off in a brain that had simply run out of room to process anything else. "That's — no. Vampire. Witch. Mom, do you hear yourself right now? You sound insane."Her mother didn't laugh back. She stood in the wreckage of the doorway with tears still wet on her face, and there was nothing in her expression that looked like a woman who'd lost her mind. There was only exhaustion, and grief, and something that looked horribly like relief at finally saying the words out loud after eighteen years of swallowing them."Prove it," Emily said, voice cracking around the demand. "Prove any of this.""I don't have to." Her mother's gaze dropped, pointed, to the two glowing symbols still burned into Emily's palms. "You already are."Emily looked down at her own hands like they belonged to a stranger."The supernatural world has been hiding you since the day you were born," her mother said. "I never told you becau