by Selena Scott
He watched her go and then adjusted himself in his pants. He caught his own eyes in the mirror and barely recognized himself. He looked insane. Feral. Wild. Wolfish.
“Fuck.” Seth dropped his hands back to the counter and let his head sag. What the hell was he doing? “You’re dangerous for her, you prick.”
He picked his head back up and strode back down the stairs, reheating the pasta, setting the salad in a bowl, and warming up the garlic bread.
A few minutes later, Sarah came back downstairs in a humongous sweatshirt, baggy sweatpants, and large, bunchy socks. Her hair was caught under the collar of her sweatshirt and as she wordlessly slid into her seat at the dinner table, she pulled her hood back up.
Seth knew instinctively that these oversized clothes were a sort of personal armor she was donning. He also knew that the armor wasn’t to protect herself from him, it was to protect herself from her father.
“I wasn’t sure you’d still be here,” she said, watching him spoon pasta onto her plate. He put an extra scoop of the meat sauce onto her dish. She needed the protein.
“You thought I’d bail?”
“I mean, that seems to be your m.o. after we swap spit.”
He smiled. “Technically, the second time we kissed, I didn’t leave, you closed the door in my face.”
“Ah,” she smiled faintly. “Right.”
“Sarah,” he said after a quiet minute. “Is everything all right? You seem really… deflated.”
If it was possible, she deflated even more, her shoulders falling even further. Seth frowned and put some salad on her plate before he reached over and landed a palm on her back, rubbing her in a small circle.
He was relieved when she pushed into his touch a little bit, like she was welcoming it. “Things with my dad are really complicated. He’s not a great, um, influence on me? I guess?”
“What do you mean?”
She sighed and finally lifted her head, shoving her hood back. She pushed the food on her plate around and around. “I mean that he’s really charismatic and he can talk anybody into anything. He has this way of making bad things sound good. And before you know it you’ve been living a shitty life for years.”
“He’s manipulative.”
“Bingo.”
Seth paused, unsure of how far he was allowed to push this. “Wasn’t he your Olympic coach?”
Sarah sighed again. “Yeah, and manager. He’s a damn good archer. Just a shitty person.”
“Who made you live a shitty life.”
“Yup,” she popped the p and frowned down at her food.
“What was so bad about it?” he asked tentatively.
She was quiet for a long time, pushing her food around. Then, to Seth’s immense relief, she took a huge Sarah-bite of her pasta and spoke with her mouth full. “Have you ever seen my Instagram page?”
He shook his head.
“Bring it up on your phone,” she told him.
While he fiddled around on his phone, he was happy to see that she polished off her plate of food and took seconds.
A minute later, he had her page brought up on his phone. “Um. Wow.”
It was not what he’d expected in the least. The most recent post was from a month or two ago—she hadn’t posted since she’d moved to Boulder. But it looked like previous to that, every few days she’d posted photos of herself. A few of them were her with her bow, or her working out. But most of them were these very un-Sarah, heavily makeup-ed, heavily filtered photos of her. In one, she leaned against a brick wall with a huge hat and sunglasses, flashing a hell of a lot of leg. In another, she lounged in a bikini on a boat, the sun bouncing off her bare skin. In another, she seductively sipped wine, her eyes pinned on the camera.
“Surprised?” she asked.
“Um. Yeah. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with these photos… they just don’t seem very you.”
“They’re not. At all. Keep scrolling. Go to the beginning.”
He did as she asked and could barely contain his grin when he saw the photos there. Sarah sweaty and red and grinning as she lifted weights. Sarah doing a very un-ladylike victory dance in front of a bullseye. Sarah teaching a group of kids how to shoot. Sarah shoving half a burrito into her mouth, crossing her eyes in exaggerated pleasure. “Now these, I love.”
“Right?” she agreed with a small smile. “I know.”
He set the phone down and went back to his meal. “So, why the big change?”
Sarah cast her eyes down again. “My dad decided that my image needed an overhaul. Archery isn’t the most lucrative sport, you know. So, he figured we’d need to find sponsors using ‘all of our assets’. Which unfortunately included my personal T and A.”
Seth’s stomach dropped. “You don’t mean that he—”
She laughed and shook her head. “He didn’t pimp me out or anything. But whether or not I looked hot became way more important to him than whether or not I was at the top of my game. For a long time he was just my coach and manager. But after I started getting an online following, he fired my trainer and my nutritionist. He said it was to cut costs, but now I know better.” She took another defiant bite of food. “He just wanted to control every aspect of my life without supervision from anyone else.”
Seth thought back to the videos of Sarah at the most recent Olympics looking dull and out of it, almost weak. She’d looked nothing like the vibrant, alive woman in front of him right now, sparking with anger and defiance.
“He cut my caloric intake in half, upped my cardio, reduced my weight training. After I qualified for the games, he would scream at me if I trained with my bow for a second longer than he wanted me to. He figured that it didn’t matter how I did at the Olympic games. All that mattered was that I looked good doing it. It’s the hot people who get the sponsorships. It’s the hot people who get the followers. And to him, that’s where the real glory was.”
Seth felt cold. He set his fork down as he tried to make sense of this horrifying story. “He cut your caloric intake in half?”
Depriving an Olympic athlete of food was akin to abuse. Her body would have revolted, turned against itself.
She nodded tersely. “And my water intake. Because you can’t get your skin to stick to your six pack and cheekbones unless you’re dehydrated as hell.”
“You have got to be kidding me.” Seth folded his hands in front of his face and tried to calm down a little bit, but his adrenaline was coursing through his veins. He couldn’t remember a time he’d been this outraged.
“I wish I was kidding. But nope. That’s dear old Dad for you.”
He took another calming breath and looked up at her. She looked sad and mad, but she didn’t look quite as deflated anymore. He took in the oversized clothing and it took on another layer of meaning. Just speaking with her father had her hiding her body from the world. The man had fucked up her body image so much that getting a phone call from him was enough to have her slipping in on herself.
“No wonder the Olympics were such a rough time for you.”
She laughed humorlessly. “Yeah. The chance of a lifetime and I was too fucking hungry to even appreciate it, let alone compete at any sort of level. Because I’d done so badly, they didn’t test me for drugs or anything like that when I was being investigated. But I wish they had. I wish the Olympic committee could have had proof of just how undernourished I was. How dehydrated. I wanted it to go on record what that asshole did to me. But they didn’t.”
“You left early,” Seth remembered from an article he’d read. “You left the Olympics before the closing ceremonies.”
“Bombing that hard was what it took to snap me out of my stupor. I realized then, all at once, that not only was he destroying my body, he was destroying my dreams as well. Everything I’d worked for. It hit me that he didn’t give a fuck about what was best for me. I realized just how selfish he really is. And I just couldn’t spend another minute with him. I hopped on a plane. It didn’t take much to pull out o
f my sponsorships, they were all pretty underwhelmed with my performance anyways. By the time my dad got home, I had packed up everything from our house in New York and had already driven to Aunt Lynn’s. She helped me buy this house and the rest is history.”
“He didn’t try to follow you?”
She shook her head. “No. But I’m not exactly sure why. I thought for sure he’d pull out all the stops trying to convince me to get back in the game. But maybe it’s because I went to Aunt Lynn. She was my mother’s sister and she’s always scared the shit out of my dad. I think he didn’t want the hassle of getting past my guard dog.”
“What did he want just now?”
Sarah’s shoulders wilted. “Who knows. He was pretending just to say hi to me, but he was really fishing for information about my life. My plans. I’m sure he’s cooking up something in that manipulative head of his.”
She rose up to clear their plates, but Seth caught her by the wrist. “Sarah, just so you know, no matter what happens between us, if your father tries to get to you again, Lynn isn’t going to be the only guard dog your father has to get through.”
Sarah smiled at him sadly.
She had no idea how literally he’d meant that.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Seth needed this.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked forward to a full moon, if he ever had. But it was finally here and he was revving to go.
Dinner had been a quiet affair. Bauer was always quiet, but the three brothers were even quieter, contemplating what was about to happen and wondering if this particular moonrise was about to change the course of their lives.
Bauer had worked with them every day for the last two weeks and today was the big test. If any of it had worked, if any of his teachings had helped, then they would be able to resist their shifts as the moon rose. At their leisure, they’d be able to calmly, painlessly shift.
Usually Seth thrived on being tested. He was an over-preparer for things like this, whereas Raphael was more of a by-the-seat-of-his-pants sort of test taker. But regardless, they both looked equally nervous sitting at their mother’s dinner table.
Seth wished that Nat were here. She’d be able to fill this terrible silence. But as they hadn’t found a way to describe Bauer’s place in their lives and they didn’t know what the evening would bring, Raph had asked the sisters to stay far away from here.
Seth also wished that Sarah was there. But that wasn’t anything new for him. He found that he was constantly wishing Sarah was around. Ever since the night, over a week ago, that they’d made out in the bathroom and she’d told him about her dad, Seth’s desire for her had become an almost overwhelming ache. He felt it at every moment, ever-present, beating in his gut like a second heart. He wanted her badly.
After she’d told him about her father, he’d helped her clean up and the two of them had watched some television together, of all things. Seth had done his fair share of hooking up, but besides with Natalie and Kaya, he’d never really just hung out with a girl, doing something mundane. He’d thrilled to it. But as soon as she shut the TV off, announced she was tired and headed up to bed, reality had collapsed down on Seth and he’d hightailed it out of there.
He’d realized that the entire night he’d acted like her boyfriend. First, her jealous boyfriend, poking around about her relationship with Jackson. Then her pervy boyfriend, fantasizing about her in the shower. Then they’d made out in the bathroom, something her boyfriend would have the privilege of doing anytime the fancy struck. And then, he’d listened to an emotional problem she was having, helping her sort it out and sticking up for her, which was basically smack dab in the middle of Boyfriendlandia. And perhaps worst of all, he’d cuddled her on a freaking couch with an afghan on their laps and zero sexual shenanigans. Just snuggles for all. What the hell was that?!
Suicide was what it was.
Instead of just jumping off the cliff and being with her, he was killing himself in small increments, all the while telling himself that he wasn’t doing what he’d said he wasn’t going to do.
Bottom line, he wanted her. He still couldn’t have her, because as of the moment he was born, he continued to be a shifter.
Basically, the last week had been a hell of his own making. He’d avoided Sarah at every turn, even going so far as to stay at Jackson’s sad-ass house a few nights. He’d dropped off dinner on her front porch only twice, because he couldn’t resist. But beyond that, he kept himself up to his ears in business and shifter stuff with his brothers. He figured that he wasn’t to be trusted when it came to Sarah. She was too tempting. So he was just going to have to avoid her.
He pushed the mashed potatoes around on his plate and pictured himself as he’d be in about twenty minutes, streamlined and furry and strong and wild and racing through the woods. He thought he might just run as far up the mountain as he could go tonight. He needed to lose some of this toxic energy. He needed to burn through this.
But first, the big test. Whether or not he and his brothers could hold it together during the shift.
“You better finish that plate, son,” Bauer said from across the table, eyeing Seth’s half-eaten meal. “You know a hungry shifter is harder to control.”
“That’s one lesson we learned on our own,” Seth replied, catching Raph’s eye.
“Yeah, and we learned the hard way.” Raph grimaced. “We were kids. Maybe fourteen. And we’d shifted back in the morning to realize we ate garbage the night before. You only make that mistake once.”
Silence reigned again until Seth stood abruptly from his chair. “I’m gonna wait outside.”
It was only eight or so minutes until moonrise and he wanted to spend the time getting ready.
A few minutes later, Raphael and Bauer came out to join him in the secluded backyard.
“Where’s Jacks?”
Raphael gave Seth a pointed look and Seth felt his mouth dropped open. “You’re kidding. After all the training we’ve been doing, he’s still going to chain himself in the basement?”
Raphael sighed as he stripped out of his clothes. “You know him. He says he’ll know if he can control his shift just as well in the basement as he could out here with us.”
“That boy is stubborn as hell,” Bauer growled. “How he survived to adulthood without someone strangling him, I’ll never know.”
“Mom came close a few times,” Raph replied, surveying the sky and waiting for the celestial body which had such a hold over them. “Look. Here she comes.”
His eyes were focused on the horizon and sure enough, there came the orb of the moon, a glowing ghostly white.
Muscle memory kicked in and Seth’s body braced for what he knew was coming. But then Bauer spoke.
“Deep breaths. Don’t fight it. Tame it. Work with your animal, not against him.”
It was a mantra that Bauer had repeated to them a hundred times over the last weeks. Seth had to admit that it had meant almost nothing to him.
Until now.
He felt his shift coming over him, the tidal wave of pain and discomfort that lasted maybe twenty seconds or so. But he did his best to follow Bauer’s words. He breathed deeply and attempted to relax his muscles. He felt it coming and channeled an image of a wave washing over him. Either he could be a lighthouse in a tidal wave or he could be a surfer in a tidal wave, but either way, the wave was coming.
Seth’s eyes, trained on the moon, felt that familiar blurring sensation as the irises began to change, the shape went larger, more almond, his eyelashes went white and fuzzy. Normally, his elbows would crack, then his knees, and he’d fall to the ground as his bones changed shape.
But tonight, for a few tenuous seconds, Seth just swayed where he stood, still in his human form. He found, just for a moment, that when he wasn’t attempting to fight with his shift, it wasn’t attempting to fight back. He felt as if he stood in the doorway of a great room, looking out at the animal his body was trying to make him become. Normally, that an
imal broke the door down, shook him out and took over. But tonight, for the space of a few breaths, Seth and the animal eyed one another, made a certain truce.
And then, the urge to shift was too great and Seth felt himself step back from that metaphorical doorway. The beast came into the house and Seth’s muscles and bones cracked and stretched viciously. He attempted to relax into the pain, the way that Bauer had encouraged them, but it was too much, it was too great.
Half a minute later, Seth sat on his haunches and howled at the moon. There was no more thought, only instinct and scent and his brother.
The great, furry beast that was Raphael brushed against Seth’s back as he walked past. That was when Seth caught another scent.
His hackles rose and his teeth exposed as Seth rounded on the coyote that was standing in a defensive position not ten feet away.
Seth started to growl, stalking toward the intruder. But Raphael positioned himself in between Seth and the coyote, and then again when Seth swerved around him.
Something tickled in Seth’s canine brain. It was important, different than instinct, different than hunger or fatigue or fear. It was just as real as those things and the sensation was foreign in Seth’s wolf body.
He took one more step toward the grizzled coyote and something like a memory crossed his brain and he realized what that tickling feeling really was. Friend.
This animal in front of him was friend.
Not enemy.
Previously, Seth’s wolf brain had split the world into two. There was brother and not-brother. But now, there was a third category. Brother, not-brother, and friend. Coyote was friend.
Seth sat back on his haunches and cocked his head to one side. Then, a scent on the wind beckoned to him, as it did to the other two animals, and the three of them took off into the woods.
***
Bauer was proud of the two young wolves striding along in the woods beside him. He’d seen them do the work tonight. Seth had held out for longer than Raphael had, but Raphael had shifted with what looked like very little pain. And he’d protected Bauer from Seth, which implied that Raphael had some sort of human consciousness going on right now.
