by Liv Rider
The Broken Faewolf’s Mate
Liv Rider
The Broken Faewolf’s Mate
Liv Rider
The Broken Faewolf’s Mate © 2019 by Liv Rider
Cover design by Camberion
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except where permitted by law or for the use of brief quotations in a review.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
A note from Liv Rider
Special Sneak Preview!
Chapter 1
Dev woke to confused discomfort, his cheek pressed into a hard, scratchy surface. What the hell is wrong with this pillow? he thought blearily, trying to roll away from it without success. Opening his eyes revealed why his pillow sucked so much; he was lying on the ground with his face mashed into the carpet. Specifically, his office carpet.
Okay, so that solved the immediate pillow-mystery, leaving only the giant remaining question of why he was lying on the floor like a felled tree. He sat up. A gray, muzzy pain washed over him in a full-body hangover. Except he didn’t drink. He’d seen too much of what drink could do to the wrong man, and he’d be damned if he’d risk turning into his father.
—A figure looming, reeking of cheap beer. Plates smashing, the sound impossibly loud but not loud enough to drown out his frightened heartbeat—
Dev slammed the door on the childhood memory. The past was the past, and he wasn’t wasting mental space on a man he hadn’t seen since he was eight years old and hopefully never would again. Especially not when he needed to figure out what was going on in the here-and-now.
Groaning, he got to his feet, every joint protesting. God, even his toes ached. He glanced at his wrist and frowned at the glowing digits: 9.37 p.m. The hollow silence from the rest of the office—and Dev had sharp hearing, even with the door shut—said the last of his employees had long since left. How long had he been lying here out of it?
He frowned, trying to remember. It was like wading through thick fog. Okay, his assistant had put her head round the door to say she was leaving now in a pointed so-should-you way just before six. He remembered telling her he planned to go through the tenders on that development contract before calling it a night. She’d given him a look and said something about them still being there tomorrow, and he’d made a promise he had no intention of keeping. She left, he settled down with the documents as the office emptied out, and then…?
He prodded his memories, but there was nothing in them to explain his current state or the foggy blankness that hung over the last few hours. The various tender documents were still stacked on his desk, only the top few pages disturbed. He hadn’t gotten very far through them before whatever had left him taking the random floor-nap had happened.
Behind his desk, the city’s lights twinkled through the rain-flecked floor-to-ceiling windows. A crescent moon glowered, partially hidden by storm clouds. Usually he found the view peaceful, but tonight his gaze went straight to that sliver of moon, and a chill ran down his spine, a chill that wasn’t just physical. It went deeper, as if he were a tuning fork that had just been struck.
Something bestial stirred in his soul.
He forced himself to turn away from the window, but it didn’t help. Run, the beast said. Change.
No. He put his hands flat on his desk, taking deep breaths, as panic spiked. It wasn’t even full moon! This couldn’t be happening. Even at full moon, the urge had never been this strong before, a primal longing to hurl himself into the night, to become a creature—a monster—of claws and fur and fangs.
His gaze fell on the silver-framed portrait propped up next to his screen: his mom, stepdad, and half-sister holding his baby niece. His chest constricted. The reminder of everything he stood to lose pushed the savage urge back an inch, but only an inch. Oh god—why was it so strong tonight?
Run, run, run, the beast said. Run and change, and before he realized what he was doing, Dev had closed the distance to his office door and flung it open. The door slammed against the wall, and his stride jerked. What was he doing? But now that he’d started moving he couldn’t seem to stop, prowling restlessly past empty cubicles.
He had to get outside. Yes, the beast growled. Outside. Change. Run free. Dev gritted his teeth and tried to deny it. His skin was too tight, his blood too hot, his heart pounding hard enough to hurt. The beast wanted dirt under its four paws, the cool night air ruffling in its fur, wanted out, out, out of this human shape. But Dev couldn’t—wouldn’t—give it that, not tonight. Not ever. He knew where that path led.
He tore off his shoes, his tie and button-down following as he tried desperately to cool down. Standing in singlet and socks didn’t make any difference. Sweat slicked down his spine, and he suddenly needed the cold rain against his skin like he needed air.
Somewhere deep down, his logical mind screamed, but he couldn’t hear it over the roar in his ears.
He shoved open the door to the stairwell. They were on the twenty-third floor, but he couldn’t stand the idea of being caged in a lift even for a few moments.
Sprinting down dimly lit flights of stairs was reckless, but Dev couldn’t stop. The floors passed in a confused blur of look-alike frames, the slap of his bare feet against hard linoleum. He burst out into the storm, raindrops hitting his overheated skin but bringing no relief, soaking his singlet in seconds.
Run.
He ran, trying not to become a monster.
Chapter 2
“You’ll be okay?” Mahon asked him, his bulk outlined by the glow of headlights from the waiting car.
Aidan glared at his twin. Some emotions were hard to convey with a wolf’s face, but glares were easy. Wolf eyes rocked for glaring, especially at night when reflected light meant you got bonus ominous glow at the right angle. Aidan had had a lot of practice at wolf expressions, since he’d spent his entire adult life trapped in this form.
But maybe his glare still needed work, because instead of leaving, Mahon hovered on the threshold. “It’s not too late to ask Zeke to house-sit with you. Or someone from the pack. You don’t need to be alone.”
Through the open door behind his brother, a steady curtain of rain fell, marking the point where the shelter of the eaves ended. Mahon’s new mate, Oscar, stood just inside the shelter, bundled up in scarf and jacket, watching the conversation with a slightly amused expression. The tips of his pointed ears showed through his hair, a marker of his heritage. Oscar was pure-blooded high fae—unlike Mahon and Aidan, who were half-fae, half-wolf hybrids.
Not that you’d really know it to look at Mahon, Aidan reflected. Mahon had inherited his looks mainly from their werewolf side. Appearance-wise, Aidan was the one who took after their fae mother—or at least he had back when he’d still been human-shaped. Which is pretty much the definition of irony, since I’m the one stuck as a wolf.
Aidan said using mind-speech. Oscar had come with a tiny angry cat attached—a cat who hated everyone except Oscar, although she slowly seemed to be hating Aidan and Mahon slightly less than the rest of the population now she’d lived with them for a few weeks. Aidan had almost grown fond of the bad-tempered feline.
“Don’t give her more than one lot of canned food a day, even if she begs,” Oscar piped up.
Oscar rolled his eyes and tugged on Mahon’s elbow. “We better go. We’ll miss our flight.”
Mahon gave his mate a look that was both fond and edged with concern but didn’t move. “In a sec.” He met Aidan’s eyes, his expression uncharacteristically uncertain. “You sure about this?”
It struck Aidan suddenly that all this nagging might not actually be about him. Mahon and Oscar weren’t traveling for fun, and Mahon had to be worried about the reception they’d get in DC. They had been summoned by the Triumvirate—the ruling body for supernaturals in North America. But of course, his dumb twin couldn’t come out and say that was why he was procrastinating, or that he was looking for reassurance.
Aidan huffed but gave Mahon the reassurance anyway.
Mahon let out a long, slow breath. “Yeah.” He and Oscar leaned into each other, an instinctive, intimate gesture of comfort. Aidan couldn’t help a pang of complicated envy. He liked Oscar but being thrust into the role of third-wheel took some adjustment. I won’t be a burden to them, he vowed silently. Or anyone else. He might be broken, but he wasn’t a child that needed taking care of—no matter how Mahon refused to see that sometimes. His twin had been born with an outsized dose of protectiveness.
Jamila couldn’t reply, since she wasn’t in wolf form, but a car horn blared loudly.
Oscar grimaced at the sound. “We better get going. Bye, Aidan!”
Mahon was still frowning. “Remember Zeke set my tablet up to auto-text him if you need a hand.”
Mahon grinned and gave him a one-fingered salute before the pair dashed out through the rain, and car doors slammed as they got in. Aidan watched until the car’s taillights disappeared into the night, suddenly aware of the house’s emptiness despite the wild sounds of the storm. Then he shook his head and went inside, slamming the door with an idle thought and a gust of wind, using his elemental air magic.
Aidan’s magical abilities came from his fae mother. He and Mahon were the legacy of their mother’s brief walk on the wild side—a walk she’d made it clear she regretted. Aidan had been thrown out of his mother’s court as a child after getting stuck as a wolf and later, as a teenager, his father’s pack when his magical abilities manifested.
That had been a decade and another country away. Now he and Mahon were both part of the BlackEdge Pack, thanks to the open-mindedness of an Alpha who’d accepted not just two faewolves but Mahon’s new pureblooded fae mate, despite the political fallout and despite the fact that in the rest of the supernatural world, fae and wolves didn’t mix. The rest of the BlackEdge Pack had followed their Alpha’s lead and enthusiastically embraced their newest members.
A curl of warmth lit in Aidan’s chest at the thought, even though wolf enthusiasm was a bit of a double-edged sword. He’d bet good money he was going to spend the week fending off helpful werewolves who ‘just happened’ to be in the neighborhood and thought they’d drop by.
Aidan eyed the clock on the wall of the kitchen. Twenty minutes till he was due to start patrol. Sabas—the Alpha—had increased patrolling frequency since the recent incident with the fae court, but Aidan didn’t mind. Patrolling didn’t rely on human hands or form, and Aidan’s unusually sharp sense of smell and extended mind-speech range meant he was better at it than most of his packmates. It was good to have something of value to offer the pack despite his limitations.
“Mrow?” A tiny, cream-colored, and extremely fluffy cat peered down at him from the kitchen bench.
he told the cat, because it seemed less lame than laughing at his own jokes.
Marshmallow hunched down and growled, resisting the pressure of Aidan’s magical pushing. Before he could push harder, she jumped up and ran along the bench, knocking a coffee mug off one of the hooks. It smashed onto the tiled floor, ceramic fragments scattering in all directions. The sound startled the cat, who sprinted out of the room with a yowl.
Aidan glared at the broken bits of mug, trying not to take this as an omen of how the rest of the week cat-sitting was going to go. Bloody cat. He took it back; he wasn’t fond of Oscar’s cat at all. With hands, it would’ve been a two-minute clean-up job, max. Without them, sweeping the shards up into a whirling funnel while opening the trash to receive them required enough time and concentration that by the time he was done, he was late for patrol and tired, the fine-motor-control magic draining him.
He left the house at a run, heading for the reserve that the yard backed onto. The air was cold against his nose, but the rest of him remained warm. It would take a while for the rain to penetrate his thick fur. He reveled in the loamy scent of wet forest, the sound of wind curling through leaves, the soft ground under his paws. Here, he was in his element, an asset rather than a liability.
Running through the storm soothed his inner animal, and petty frustration fell away as his paws dug into the soft earth. Sometimes Aidan wondered what it would be like to give up all pretense of humanity, to fully embrace his wolf side. America was so much bigger than Ireland, so much less domesticated in places. Maybe he could lose himself in one of those wild places. He’d never have to worry about being a burden on anyone again if he did that.
