by Alisa Woods
“So I hear you’re in the technology business?” her mom started out.
Which brought a smile to Mia’s face. At least she was trying.
“Yes, Ma’am,” Lucas replied with a smile. “At least we try to be. We search out fledgling technology companies with potential and make sure they get the funding they need to grow. Mia has been a huge asset to our company since she’s been working there.”
Her mother arched an eyebrow, and Mia flushed. She knew her mom would see that for the flattery it was… not some kind of accurate assessment of how much Mia had helped SparkTech. She’d made her contributions, of course, but Mia could tell her mother was on the lookout for smooth talking and outright lies.
“I’m just an intern,” Mia threw out, trying to save it, “but Lucas has let me have a hand in several acquisition deals. It’s been a really good experience.”
Lucas took her hand and held it between his two. Just touching him eased tension out of her shoulders. But when she looked back to her mom, her eyes had narrowed.
“Once Mia finishes school,” Lucas said, “she’ll have a place at SparkTech for as long as she wants.”
“I’m glad you see how important it is for her to finish school.” Her mom’s voice carried even more tension than before.
“Of course,” Lucas said. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Mia’s mom narrowed her eyes further, which just made Mia’s shoulders hike up again.
“SparkTech is a really amazing company,” Mia offered, trying to keep the small talk going. “And they pay really well. I’m already halfway through my senior year now—it won’t be long before I’m out of school and working full-time. Then I should be making enough that we can get you a place away from Jackson Street.”
“This place is fine, Mia.” Her mother’s narrowed eyes turned into a full scowl. “You just concentrate on your schooling and don’t worry about me.”
Mia cursed herself for even bringing it up. This was an argument she and her mom had on a regular basis—the crack gangs were invisible to her. Ignoring them was the only way her mom could live on Jackson Street without being in a constant state of fear every time she went outside. She didn’t just live here, she worked here too, at the local grocery store for twenty years as a single mom while raising Mia. Which was part of why she was so determined that Mia be independent, on her own—and especially not reliant on a man who might leave at any second. Just like Mia’s father.
The silence hung in the air as her mom inspected Lucas. He bore the scrutiny without speaking for a few moments then squeezed Mia’s hand and said, “We wouldn’t have to wait, Mrs. Fiore. I’m sure SparkTech would be willing to give Mia an advance on her wages so you could move to a safer place now.”
But that was the wrong thing to say.
Her mom’s anger was just a slight tightening of her pretty face, but Mia saw it. “Well, now, Mr. Sparks, this might not be the fancy neighborhood you and Mia live in now, but I assure you, I’m quite safe.”
Lucas looked horrified. Mia figured it was just because he realized what a mistake he had made… but she was wrong.
“Please tell me you’re not serious,” Lucas said. “This neighborhood—”
“This neighborhood,” her mom cut him off, rising quickly up from her chair. “This neighborhood, Mr. Sparks, is my home. Did you have something else you wanted to say about it?”
Lucas pressed his lips tight.
Mia rose up from the couch. “Mom, Lucas just wants what I want: to keep you safe.”
“I’m perfectly safe here, Mia.” Her mom turned her narrow-eyed stare on Lucas. “What exactly are your intentions with regards to my daughter, Mr. Sparks?”
His intentions? Oh no. Her mother was going to ask Lucas flat out about why they were living together but not married.
Lucas rose up as well. “The only thing I care about is keeping Mia safe. I would give my life to protect her. And that goes for anyone in her family, too.”
Mia’s heart swelled with those words, because they were true and so very real—Lucas had already laid down his life for her—but her mother didn’t know any of that. She didn’t know about the magic bond between them. To her, those words were shallow promises… empty because there wasn’t a ring on Mia’s finger.
“Is that why you’ve moved her away from the university?” her mom asked, archly. “To keep her safe?”
“Mother!” Mia gaped.
Lucas’s frown grew increasingly dark.
Her mother matched his frown with a glare of her own, then said, “You can always come home, Mia. You will always have a place here.”
The words were for Mia, but her mother’s intense stare was for Lucas. Mia could feel Lucas stiffen next to her—she could practically hear his inner wolf growl. Her mother was challenging him, threatening to somehow take Mia away. The two people she loved most in the world were fighting over her as if they couldn’t both have a place in her life… and that was shredding her heart to pieces.
Mia brushed past Lucas’s rigid body and went to her mom. “Can I speak with you a moment privately?” she said harshly. Then she didn’t wait for her mom to answer, just grabbed her arm and spun her toward the kitchen. There wasn’t any privacy to be had except at the extreme back corner, next the refrigerator and the dirt-smudged window to the alley outside.
“Mother, what are you doing?” Mia asked, her voice rough. She couldn’t believe her mom would say those things to Lucas’s face. As if he were some kind of enemy.
“Why is he so protective of you?” her mom asked, her voice lowered as well. “There’s something wrong with that, don’t you see?”
“There’s nothing wrong with caring about the people you love!” Her eyes were starting to prick. She hated this. Why couldn’t her mom and Lucas simply love each other the way she loved them?
Her mom’s face softened. “Is that what he says to you, Mia? That he loves you? Because, honey, all men say whatever it takes to get you into bed. I’ve told you that a thousand times.”
“Not all men,” Mia said, her anger rising. Her mother wasn’t just insulting the man Mia loved—she was insulting her alpha. “Not this man.”
“Sweetheart.” Her mom’s thin, cool hand found Mia’s cheek. “I love you, you know that. But ever since you’ve met this guy, it’s like you’ve changed. He’s put you in some kind of haze. Don’t think I haven’t noticed what a tight leash he’s been keeping on my beautiful daughter. You work in his office, he’s moved you into his apartment, and now that’s not enough—he wants me to move out, too? There’s something very wrong with how controlling all of this is.”
“It’s not controlling,” Mia said, her voice hiking up. “It’s protective. It’s loving and caring for someone. It’s what being an alpha is all about…” But her voice faded at the look on her mom’s face.
“An alpha.” Her mom’s voice was dead.
Oh no. Mia couldn’t believe she let that slip out.
“I just meant—” She stopped because her mom was peering around the corner at Lucas.
When she pulled back, her eyes had gone so wide the whites were huge around her brilliant blue irises. “He’s one of them, isn’t he?” Her mother’s pale cheeks pinked up in a haze of fury. “What is he doing to you, Mia? Is he forcing you to be with him? Are you involved in drugs now, too?”
“What? Mom, no—”
Her mom took her by the shoulders but dropped her voice low. “Mia, you should have told me. Whatever he’s forcing you into, we’ll get it taken care of—”
“Mother!” Mia’s voice screeched.
Lucas sailed around the corner. His wide-eyed gaze flipped between her mother’s thin fingers digging into Mia’s shoulders and Mia’s enraged face. She couldn’t imagine what he was thinking, but he stayed at the edge of the kitchen, watching. Waiting. Letting her take the lead in this… well, it was time for her to set some things straight.
“Mother, Lucas is a shifter. But he’s good a
nd kind and decent—he’s nothing like the gang shifters. He’s one of the finest men I’ve ever known. And he’s my… he’s my… mate.” She paused, breath frozen in her chest. Her mother’s hands dropped from Mia’s shoulders, her face increasingly horrified with every word.
“I’m a shifter, too.” It came out a whisper, but it felt like a shout that echoed off the walls.
Her mom blinked once, then twice. Then she seemed to collapse a little, falling back against the refrigerator in a kind of shock that kept her face slack and her eyes searching Mia’s face. Then a slow rolling fury climbed up from her chest, turning her neck and then her cheeks red. She whirled away from Mia and stalked toward Lucas, who stood stock-still and wide-eyed at the edge of the linoleum that marked the kitchen area.
Her mother stopped right at the dividing line and glared up into Lucas’s face.
“Get out of my house.” The words were low but clipped… and so full of hatred that her mother didn’t even sound like herself.
Lucas searched her face for a long moment. Before Mia could decide what she wanted him to do, he dropped his gaze, turned, and marched out of the apartment. Only when the door closed behind Lucas did Mia realize she should have come to his defense. She should have told her mother that she had no right to treat him that way. But then her mother turned to Mia, her face full of leaden pain.
“I always thought… I had my suspicions…” Her mom braced herself against the chipped Formica of the countertop. “Your father. I thought he might have been one of them. And now you’re… Mia, honey, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I would never have…”
Mia’s stomach writhed like it was filled with snakes. “You would never have… what? Had me? If you’d known?”
“No! No, Mia, honey, that’s not what I meant.”
Mia stormed past her mother’s weak protests, tears jumping to her eyes. But before she could reach the door, before she could flee from the idea that her mother wished she had never been born, a hand caught her arm and stopped her. Mia wanted nothing more than to run from this hellhole and never return, but her mother’s grip on her arm was strong… and Mia’s anger wasn’t enough to wrench her free.
“Mia, honey, please look at me.”
Mia dragged her gaze from the scuffed floor and looked into her mother’s pained face. “I can’t help what I am, Mom.”
“No, of course not!” She tried to pull Mia into a hug, but Mia just twisted her face away. “Mia, I love you. I’ve…. I’ve never regretted having you. I only meant that, if I’d known your father was a shifter, I would never have spent that night with him. I wouldn’t have wanted that life for you. I would take it away if I could.”
Mia eased out of her mother’s hold, gently but firmly. “Being a shifter isn’t bad. I’m proud of what I am, Mother. It’s powerful and amazing. And so is Lucas. He’s my alpha and my mate… and that means something to me. Something you’ll probably never understand. I wish you could, but if you can’t… then you can’t. But there’s nothing wrong with what we have together. In fact, there’s something very, very right about it.”
With that, Mia turned and strode out of her mother’s apartment. Tears battled to break free of her eyes, but she held them back. She didn’t have to go far—Lucas was waiting for her on the street.
“Mia.” His voice was anguished, and he tried to draw her into his arms, but she pushed him away. As much as she loved him—and she meant every word she said to her mom—all of this could have been avoided if he had simply made this right in the human world by marrying her. Maybe it paled in comparison to the magical bond they had, but it meant something to everyone else. It would have reassured her mother… and they could have left it at that. Her mom would never have had to know they were shifters at all.
All her anger, all her tears, surged up and clenched her fists at her side. “Well that went exactly as I expected.” The bitterness in her voice was pointed at him, pouring all her emotion into her words.
“Let me fix this—”
“You can’t fix this, Lucas!” It was too late for that; the damage was done. Mia wiped the tears off her face, and she spun away from him, stalking down the sidewalk. She wasn’t going anywhere in particular, she was just blindly moving away. Away from her mom. Away from Lucas. Away from this damn neighborhood, her past, her deadbeat shifter father who made all of it happen… she was so done with all of it.
“Mia, where are you going?” Lucas caught up to her side in an instant, hovering protectively over her as if the drug dealers were going to gun her down at any moment.
“Away.” It wasn’t fair to blame Lucas, she knew that… but she was suffocating on all the emotion flooding her body. She needed to get away for a while: regroup, calm down, get a cool head before she did anything rash. And she couldn’t do that with Lucas’s hulking form by her side.
“Mia, wait.” He had one hand on her arm.
She almost wrenched free in a pique of anger, but then she saw he had the other hand in the air, hailing a taxi lumbering down the road toward them. She let him hover and keep her safe while the taxi pulled to a stop. He opened the door for her and gave his apartment address to the cabbie.
“No,” Mia said to the startled cabbie. “Take me to the University of Washington.”
Lucas frowned at her, but she just held up a hand to keep him from getting into the cab after her. “I just… I need to be alone for a while, Lucas.”
She reached for the door, and he barely stepped back in time before she pulled it closed. She left him on the sidewalk as the cab trundled away.
“You know, I’m your friend, not your personal secretary.” Jupiter’s voice drifted past the music pumping through Mia’s earbuds, barely resolving into words, but Mia got the gist: her best friend was sick of running interference between Mia and her mate.
Mia yanked out the earbuds and dialed down the blues music still thumping through them. “Just tell him I’m sick, and he should stop annoying you.”
“I am so not lying to a six foot three hunk of shifter muscle.” Jeeter tossed Mia’s phone and it landed next to her in the puff of blankets heaped around her.
Mia had spent most of the last twenty-four hours curled up on her old dorm bed, stewing, listening to music, sleeping, and generally trying to tune out the world and make it disappear.
So far, no luck.
She picked up the phone and glanced at the texts—there were over a hundred messages now, most from Lucas, some from Lev. Which was just Lucas’s attempt to get her to answer through his brother. It worked in a strange sort of way: when Lev started texting, Jupiter, in a fit of overly-dramatic frustration, grabbed Mia’s phone and stabbed at it, trying to turn it off. She inadvertently answered the text, but it was gibberish. Then she sent another saying they shouldn’t be alarmed, that Mia was alive and just being ornery. Then Jeeter started a whole conversation with Lev. After that, she just answered the texts as they came in.
Mia ignored them all.
She held out the phone to Jupiter. “Tell them I’ll be better and back to work on Monday.” Jupiter just gave her a dirty look. It was only Saturday night—that gave Mia another whole twenty-four hours before she would have to deal with the fact that her mate and her mother were polar opposites and both wanted her to live solely in their worlds. When the truth was she didn’t belong completely in either one.
Mia shrugged, tossed the phone to the foot of her bed, and plugged the earbuds back in. Jupiter marched across the room and yanked them back out.
“Hey!” Mia said. “Eardrums. I might need them in the future.”
“You need to get dressed.” Jupiter loomed over Mia’s little nest in the bed. Only then did Mia realize her roommate had already put on her outfit for the Tree Lighting party.
Mia snarled. “I’m perfectly dressed for tonight.” She had on flannel cat pajamas she had borrowed from Jupiter. Very stylish. But they were warm and all she would need for another evening of solitude in her dorm bed. “But if you
’re going home with Colin tonight, please go to his place. That is not something I want to see.” The last thing she needed was a reminder of the alpha she turned down… the one she was sure would have married her in a heartbeat. Which would have been very convenient—the only problem being that she didn’t love Colin. She loved Lucas. And that thought just made her shoulders droop.
Jupiter had gone back to ignoring her, which was just as well. Mia was a mopey mess.
She had thought getting some space from Lucas would help clear her head, but her inner wolf had spent the whole time whining. And it was just getting worse. The moon was full tonight—which didn’t mean her wolf was coming out or anything like that; those were just fairy tales—but the lunar cycles did seem to stir around the magic in her blood, now that she was mated. And tonight, her longing to be connected with her alpha was running stronger than usual.
Or maybe she just missed him.
She really did need to pull it together. There was no way she could face the packs of SparkTech in this state. She’d skip the party, stay in her cocoon a little longer, and then eventually, sometime tomorrow, drag her sorry butt back to Lucas and his fancy downtown apartment. And deal with the fallout then.
Jupiter was digging around in her closet, which was strange since she was already dressed. Mia would have thought the Tree Lighting party was actually a costume party given the lumberjack outfit Jeeter was decked out in, but she said something about everyone dressing for the weather, and the tree being buried in the Olympic forest. Mia didn’t put it all together until Jeeter withdrew from the closet armed with a second pair of jeans and a midnight-black fuzzy sweater.
She tossed the clothes at Mia. “Get dressed.”
Mia just stared at the clothes then peered up at Jupiter. “Maybe I wasn’t clear. Not going to the party.”
Jupiter stalked over and crossed her arms. “I don’t care. You’re getting dressed, regardless. Because Colin’s going to be here any minute, and I am not letting him see you in this miserable state. He’ll get way too much satisfaction from that.”
