by May Dawson
“She doesn’t usually come to the trials.” I hadn’t seen the big team competitions since I was a kid, and things had changed a lot at the academy since my sister left her tenure as dean.
The unfairness of how she’d been kicked out of her position—even though she had started the academy—burned in my chest like always. She didn’t seem to care anymore, but it still bothered me.
“The Alpha Council will have questions about your mother if they find out she’s here,” Rafe said. “I don’t think we want to answer them.”
“I thought the guys would come get my…mom.” I only stumbled a little bit over the word mom. “When do I get to talk to her?”
It made sense to use the trials to smuggle my mother off academy grounds, without anyone from the Council noticing. My mother’s claim that she didn’t know if I was really a shifter would bring me attention I didn’t need. But I was still surprised.
Piper tried valiantly to pretend to be neutral on the subject of my mother. She’d encouraged me to have my own relationship with her. But Piper also tried to avoid her.
Given that my mother had stabbed Finn, one of Piper’s mates, neutral was pretty generous.
I didn’t want to talk to Rafe about any of that, though. Not right now, when he was striding quickly along toward the academic building. I had to rush to keep up with him.
“Talk to your mom? Or Piper?” he demanded.
“Both.” I was lost in my thoughts, and I didn’t notice until it was too late that Rafe stopped abruptly, his gaze sweeping across the campus as if he was judging if we were sufficiently alone to talk about my mother.
I crashed into his back, and he steadied me with his hands falling onto my shoulders. Just for a second, there was a flash of warmth in his eyes. Then it was gone.
“Watch where you’re going, Northsea,” he said, pulling away from me.
As he turned, I rolled my eyes. That man was going to eventually realize that there was no joy in being a condescending prick. I hoped I was there when he did.
“One day,” he muttered, and I realized he’d seen that.
“One day what?” I demanded, walking ahead of him toward the shadowed academic building. It was deserted right now, while everyone was at PT and the sun hadn’t yet risen.
The teachers weren’t here yet—the lucky staff did not join us on frosty fall mornings at o’dark thirty.
Rafe shook his head.
Typical. Most of the time, Rafe was completely outspoken and confident. Around me, though, he muttered these little asides. Sometimes, they matched the heat in his eyes when he looked at me. He murmured things full of desire or even affection, and then he pretended they were my imagination.
“You could give me a break, you know,” I said, before bounding up the stairs ahead of him.
The clinic was in the left wing, so I headed that way. I didn’t look back to see how he took that thought.
But I didn’t expect him to take it well.
My sneakers squeaked on the polished floors as I headed toward the clinic. The last time I was there, Rafe had stormed out and left me behind. Now, the hall was empty, the lights still off.
“You’re right,” he said behind me.
I turned on my heel. He took another step toward me, then abruptly paused, knitting his arms across his chest. Even with a frown crinkling his brow above his dark eyes, he was gorgeous.
“I think I heard you wrong,” I said.
When I had such a ridiculous crush on him, how come everything that I said to him came out sounding like I wanted to start a fight?
I was right, though. Having my mother around made me feel undone like nothing else ever had. Knowing she might not be my mother at all made my heart gallop at the thought of seeing her.
Stumbling in the yard was nothing compared to how much I was stumbling inside.
He lifted one perfect eyebrow. “You know what I said. Don’t push it.”
He strode past me, checking that the hall was still empty, then held the door to the basement stairs open.
The cells.
My stomach clenched around nothing, since I hadn’t had breakfast yet. We weren’t really going to the clinic at all. He’d brought me to see my mom, just as I’d asked.
“Thank you.” I ducked under his arm, which brought me close enough to his chiseled body to make me self-conscious. “Although I’m not sure I should thank you for letting me down here. After all, you threatened to lock me down here.”
“Well, you’re safe. You haven’t pissed me off lately.” There was an edge of humor in his voice.
“I pissed you off yesterday.”
“Is that really your idea of a winning argument?”
The two of us descended down the stairs. The concrete stairwell smelled musty, and guilt threaded through my gut that my mom was down here. I couldn’t do anything to help her. I wasn’t sure she even deserved my help. But the sense of guilt still washed over me, thick and full of despair, driving away the comfort I felt from Rafe’s playful scolding.
He glanced toward me. “I never would, you know.”
When I looked at him, he was already staring straight ahead again, his face handsome in profile.
“You’d never actually lock me in a haunted prison? That’s a relief.” My voice came out dry, but maybe it was a relief.
“You don’t trust me,” he said flatly. No matter how coolly he said the words, I had a funny feeling my tone had stung.
“Do I think you care about what happens to me?” In your own twisted way? “Absolutely.”
Did I doubt that Rafe cared about me? Not in the least. No matter what he said, the man would take a bullet for me. And he had. He cared deeply about following the rules, but he’d still break them for me…sometimes.
Rafe looked faintly satisfied, and I added, “But I do think you’re overbearing and bossy and might try to crush me into the ground, if you think it’s for my own good.”
His eyes widened at that admission, and then his lips quirked to one side, as if he didn’t mind the idea.
“And that doesn’t mean you’d be right,” I added.
His mouth straightened. “It’s my job to be overbearing and bossy.”
“No,” I disagreed. “I mean, sure, maybe to some extent. But it’s different. You know it.”
Even if he would never admit it.
He didn’t admit it, but he did add, “You’ve earned your place here. No one can deny that.”
“Did anyone else have to earn their place here?” I demanded, my voice acerbic. “Or did all the men deserve to be here? Because they’re shifters, because they want to protect our people… you know they’re just like me, except for one thing.”
I’d felt so lost about my mother. Now, I just felt angry, and it left me feeling…better. Stronger.
I glanced at Rafe suspiciously, wondering if he’d pushed me into anger, because he could see me coming undone.
“No,” he admitted, surprising me. “Nobody else has to earn their place here like you do, Maddie.”
At least someone admitted it.
He never used my first name, and the softness of it surprised me before he unlocked the door to the cell hall and led me down it. It was cold in here, and I shivered. But maybe it wasn’t a shiver of cold, but of fear.
I wasn’t scared of much, but I dreaded seeing her.
“I’m glad you’re here, though,” he said, half to himself. “Even if you have fucked up my world immensely.”
I was going ahead of him through the doorway, so he couldn’t see the sudden smile that arched across my lips.
I had such complicated feelings as I walked down the hall toward my…mother?
At least I had Rafe behind me.
Chapter Seven
My mother sat on the floor, her arms wrapped around her legs and her head resting on her knees. She wore her ashy blond hair in a long Dutch braid, like she had all my life, but she’d gone gray at the temples over the last few years.
&
nbsp; My view of her was obscured by the bars. My heart stuttered. If Rafe hadn’t been right behind me, a warm, solid presence, I might have been tempted to back away before she saw me.
She raised her face from her knees as if she heard our footsteps, and her face brightened.
The expression was gone in a second, replaced by uncertainty, but her first reaction when she saw me had been happiness.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I realized I’d stopped dead, and I forced my face to neutral, afraid of what emotions might show. I didn’t even know what emotions I felt.
“Hi,” I said. That word sounded so stupid, so commonplace, that I immediately hurried on, “Why are you here?”
She rose to her feet. “I had to see you.”
“Why?”
Her lips pressed together tightly. “I’m sorry, Maddie. I was trying to get on campus, to protect you, and then when they caught me I panicked. I said so much more than I meant to say.”
“You said a ton,” I agreed.
“Do you know?” She looked from me to Rafe.
“I know that you don’t know who I am.” My voice came out even. “Or what.”
She pulled a face. “I know who you are. I just don’t know how you got here. How you became… mine.”
She stumbled over that word.
Rafe looked to me as my lips parted.
“Am I yours?” I demanded. “Was I ever really yours?”
Her lower lip trembled before she got it under control. I thought she was going to say yes, and my heart rose in my chest. I didn’t know until that moment that I wanted her to say it.
Piper raised me, Piper loved me, and I wasn’t her biological sister. Even when the false memories fell away, our love didn’t.
But this woman, who was supposed to be my birth mother, paused. She couldn’t answer me, and my heart lurched in my chest. Then, slowly, I hardened. She’d hurt me dozens of times over the years. Maybe I’d been right to walk away years ago. I wasn’t going to let her hurt me all over again now.
“All right,” I said. “You came here for a reason, right? What the hell do you want?”
“What I want is to protect you,” she said, a flash of her underlying steel in her gaze as it met mine. “Whatever is happening, someone changed my memories for a reason. There’s some secret, some terrible secret in our past, and one way or another, it all comes back to you.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” I demanded.
“Find your father.”
Joan had always told me that he must have died out there somewhere, searching for me. But I’d known since I heard his voice, that strange night, that he wasn’t. I need you, sweetheart. Your mother won’t tell me where you are…
I should have tracked him down then. Guilt and regret washed over me. I’d promised him then that I would come find him. I should have left that night, left the academy behind and taken care of my family….
I forced myself out of the spiral of regret. I would have endless sleepless nights to obsess over the mistakes I’d made; I didn’t need to let them distract me now. “He’s not dead. You know where he is?”
“I thought he was.” There was a defensive edge to her voice.
Crazy old wolf still cared what I thought.
“Funny, because he claimed that you wouldn’t tell him where I was.”
Rafe’s eyes widened, confusion written across his face, as my mother frowned at me.
“When the hell did you hear from your father?” Rafe demanded. “Who is he?”
“It was some kind of magical message.”
“Relevant fucking information, Northsea.” Rafe stopped himself with obvious effort, then turned to Joan.
“What changed?” Rafe asked her, and now his voice was low and smooth, almost soothing. I wished I got Calm Rafe sometimes. He sounded nice.
“I had a message from him. Well, I think it’s from him.” She paused, rubbing her temples with her fingers. “I’m all mixed up.”
I stared at her drawn face, the dark circles under her eyes, and I wanted to hate her.
It would always have been easier to hate her. Sometimes I wondered—was it the witch Rippedthroat who stole my childhood, the one who gifted me my nightmares? Or was it my own mother?
But when I looked at her face, empathy for her washed over me, stealing away my anger. The other emotions that rushed in to fill their place left me drowning.
But I glanced at Rafe, at his impassive, handsome face, and it reminded me that I could choose who I wanted to be now. I could be kind and strong, no matter what dark memories dogged me when I looked at my mother.
“We’ll figure out what’s going on,” I promised her. “What kind of message did you get?”
Before she could answer, there was a clanging sound at the end of the hall. Someone had opened the door.
“You never saw us,” Rafe warned her in a harsh whisper.
He grabbed my wrist, his fingers bruisingly tight, and pulled me into a closet just down the hall. My ass brushed across his hips in the close confines as I closed the door almost all the way shut, leaving just a tiny sliver of light coming in.
Rafe’s hand slid across my waist, holding me close to him. He probably couldn’t help touching me, because we were in such close quarters, but my heart still hitched at the casual way he wrapped his arm around me. His breath stirred my hair as we waited.
No matter that we were hiding, I noticed too much about him, like the slow, gentle movement of his breath with his hard chest pressed against my shoulder blades. His heart didn’t seem to beat faster at the danger.
His calm made me feel safe. Unthinkingly, I leaned back into him, my head against his shoulder.
He didn’t react. Didn’t move a beat.
Then his fingertips curled into my abs as he held me just a little tighter. It was such a small gesture that he probably didn’t even notice.
There were footsteps coming down the hallway. It sounded like more than one person. They stopped in front of my mother’s cell. I couldn’t see them through the sliver of the door, but I didn’t dare move.
“God, it stinks down here,” one of them muttered to the other, and I relaxed slightly. They could smell that we had been here recently, for sure, but the musk and the scents of diverse human misery that permeated the basement might protect us.
“Who are you?” It was a different voice, gentle but nonetheless commanding.
There was a long pause, as if my mother refused to answer.
The voice took on a dangerous note. “My apologies. I should have introduced myself first. I’m Etan Clearborn, Alpha of the Delaware Valley pack, chair for the Council’s Own.”
What brought him down here?
“What’s that to me?” My mother demanded.
“Do you like it down here?” There was an amused edge in his voice. “I have questions about the way Dean McCauley runs this school, given that he has undocumented prisoners in the basement.”
There was another long pause. There was no reason for my mother to resist him, but it had always been her nature to push back against authority.
If I did share her genes, then maybe a military school was a poor choice for me, come to think of it.
“How long have you been here?” he demanded.
The door opened again with a clang in the distance. Rafe shifted behind me. His body language demanded, what the hell now?
Those footsteps came down the hall faster, the sound of a single pair of shoes clicking rapidly down the hall. Dean McCauley.
“Alpha Clearborn,” the dean said. If he felt flustered, it didn’t show in his voice. He didn’t dare question the Alpha for wandering down into the basement, but I was sure he wanted to.
“What’s the story with your guest?” Clearborn asked, his voice lazy, as if the question wasn’t loaded.
“Trespasser,” the dean said. “She doesn’t seem to be in her right mind, so we’re holding her until we can reunite her with her family.”
“How good of you.”
There was another pause, and then Clearborn said, “She looks familiar. What pack is she from?”
“The Atlantic pack.”
“The Northsea pack, now?” Clearborn corrected.
My mother had never seen herself as one of them. When the three packs united and took a new name—when I became a Northsea myself—my mother had refused to see herself as under Piper’s leadership.
“She seems to be a lone wolf now,” the dean said. “She’s...unwell.”
“And you didn’t contact the Council?”
“There was no need.”
“You know I don’t mind late night messages,” Clearborn said. “Part of the job.”
“I didn’t think there was anything urgent about this situation.”
“There was nothing for the Council to know?”
“Exactly. Nothing important, nothing that I can’t deal with on my own.”
“I see,” Clearborn said. “No threat to the academy.”
“No. Just a troubled woman in need of help.”
“Some help you offered her,” Clearborn said, a dour note in his voice as if he was looking around the cells.
“It’s the best I can do for now—”
“Enough with the lies,” Clearborn said, his voice low and threaded with steel. “So she didn’t claim there were witches at the academy?”
“Delusions.”
“Delusions. How confident you sound—as if you wouldn’t doom a generation of our young warriors if you turned out to be incompetent.”
“She’s sick—”
“And you are incompetent,” Clearborn went on. “Your students are undisciplined. The patrols graduating are unprepared. Your own son is…”
“Jensen is being punished.”
“If you can call it that. But I don’t give a damn about your brat of a son. There are reports of evidence of magic at the academy.” Clearborn’s voice dropped dangerously low as he added, “And those reports strangely didn’t come from you, but from your own guards, who are afraid the academy is in danger.”
“There’s no credible proof,” the dean went on, but there was a strained note in his voice now. “Nothing but Faro’s death, which I reported, and that turned out to be—”
