Chapter 3
THREE
JACK
Ever since entering high school, I’d always spent my summer vacations playing soccer, with the goal of being able to afford college.
And it worked. I got the scholarship. But because of soccer, I never really had any downtime during those breaks between practice and part-time jobs. Going back to school was more relaxing.
This summer was different. High school leagues and college leagues were not on the same wavelength when it came to summer training.
A lot of athletes paid for fancy intensives, and that was well and good but also so far outside of my price range.
Other than kicking the ball around and running, I wasn’t going to be doing much of anything sports-related.
That left me with free time I wasn’t used to, and I wasn’t really sure what to do with it. My part-time jobs were enough to keep me from becoming a slug on my couch, but not enough to keep my days and nights filled. Maybe I needed a third job.
If the year had been a typical one, it would’ve been different, but it hadn’t been.
And the last day of school? Everything went haywire.
It was only the first Sunday of vacation, and I was already wanting to be back at Sombertooth to try to figure out how everything went wrong, and attempt to find a way I could help.
Rawling left school without saying goodbye. At first I thought he’d contact me the next day. Nope. Not only that, he let me know he wanted to be left alone.
I got it. He was spiraling. How could he not be after looking down at those two little lines?
And on top of that, Phelan had mated him.
Normally that would be considered good news.
If you had to be knocked up at nineteen, having a mate meant you weren’t alone.
In this case, I feared for Rawling. Phelan seemed like he cared about Rawling, and I was sure if he was asked, he’d say he loved him.
Problem being, he didn’t know Rawling, not really.
It was one thing to mate a latent. It was looked down upon nearly universally in shifter circles.
Only Rawling wasn’t latent, he was human, and I wasn’t sure how Phelan, and more importantly his family, would respond to that.
Shifters had been disowned for far less than being with a human.
It was one thing to love your mate and another to be willing to give up everything for them.
Rawling had to be beyond terrified, knowing that the person who mated you could easily detest you over that one little fact. Adding the family’s reaction to the mix only made it worse.
I didn’t know if Phelan knew about the pregnancy yet. I’d like to think that if he did, he’d be stepping up, but college kids were college kids, so it was hard to say. The more I thought about it, the more I worried about my friend. For all I knew, I was the only one who knew he was pregnant.
If there was no one who was going to be able to take care of him, I needed to do it.
I grabbed my phone and ordered some prenatals delivered to him, and it recommended a book about what being pregnant was like, so I popped that in as well.
It wasn’t a lot, but it was something. Unlike me, he had no family. He was completely alone.
No. He had me. I was going to make sure he knew that.
My two summer jobs were enough to cover what my scholarships didn’t and both started tomorrow. I was looking forward to it, loving that I would have something to distract me from all the what-ifs playing in my mind.
Knox had called a few times and sent a couple messages since school got out.
I tried to get myself excited that the cute boy from school was still paying attention to me, but the truth was, I liked him fine enough.
He was pretty fabulous, especially the way he treated me.
Did I love him? No. But could I? That wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.
I justified staying with him, telling myself I wasn’t leading him on, telling him he was my one and forever… that he knew the score.
Still, there was guilt, especially when I thought about how the sex with him was good, only to have memories of Atticus’s well-endowed body flashing through my mind. That was a problem for a different day, thanks to my phone ringing.
It was Bardoul.
“What’s up?” It was nice to hear from someone who wasn’t involved in any of the drama that was playing out in my head on repeat. He was involved in a lot of what had happened last year, but the whole “Rawling is pregnant and alone and I was horny for the wrong guy” thing—he had no part of that.
“I just talked to Channon,” he said. “He’s not coming back.
“He, like, dropped out?” That didn’t sound right, but a lot played into whether you stayed in school or not, including money, family, and, frankly, desire. Not to mention last semester was hardly what you’d call uneventful.
“No, he’s staying in school,” Bardoul said, “but he’s gonna do it online, like long distance learning or something. I don’t know how he did it, but he worked it out with the admin. He got a doctor's note saying that his mental health needed a break.”
“Was he struggling that much with his mental health?” Great. I was officially a shit friend.
“Not so much that he really wanted to just be away for a while, from what I could tell. But when money can buy you that doctor's note, I guess it doesn’t matter.”
I wasn’t sure I bought into Bardoul’s understanding of the situation.
Sometimes, if you’re willing to pay for a doctor’s note, it’s because you really do need that break.
Until I talked to Channon, I wouldn’t understand his thought process, and in either case, us conjecturing about his reasoning wasn’t good for anyone.
“Hey, so I wanted to tell you something,” he said.
I did not like the sound of that tone.
“Listen, Rawling is human.” He didn’t wait for me to respond, which was good because I wasn’t sure how he knew and if he knew I knew. “I wasn’t supposed to say anything, but Channon’s grandfather warned him about Rawling.”
“Wait, he warned him?”
“Can you please forget I said that?”
I really wished I could.
“Rawling is trustworthy.” I went into full-on defensive mode. “He’s not going to tell anybody about shifters. You can trust him.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll let Channon know.”
Was it good if he did? I supposed friend to friend wouldn’t matter as long as he left out the part where he told me Rawling was human. He didn’t need to admit to breaking a trust, and I didn’t want to get sucked into shit with Channon’s family. I was doing a great job getting into messes on my own.
I hated phone calls. It was so much easier face-to-face when I could at least see people’s facial expressions.
“I don’t want to go back to Sombertooth either,” he admitted. “But if I don’t, I’ll lose my scholarship. I don’t have a choice.”
“We have a whole summer between now and then,” I said. “And you know what? I have a bed in my room.”
“What about Rawling?”
Bardoul didn’t know about the pregnancy, and I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him.
“I think he’s looking for a single.” There was no way they’d allow a pregnant omega into our house.
“Can I get back to you? It’s a big maybe.”
“A maybe works for me.”
I really needed to talk to Rawling. There were too many puzzle pieces being juggled in the air to figure out what was happening and what I should be doing about it.
Atticus
Being home for the summer, I had one plan…
doing nothing. It sounded great at the time, but I was already so over it, and we were only the first Sunday in.
As much as I hated to admit it, my beast needed me to be on a schedule.
I had no training and no job. Shit, I had no structure.
I was living every person’s dream, not having to answer to anybody or do anything, and I realized that dream was a nightmare.
It didn’t help that I couldn’t get Rawling out of my mind. There was no sugarcoating it, I hated him. I hated everything he stood for. He was a freaking latent, the bottom of the barrel, and yet, in archery, he surpassed me every single time. He had to be cheating. There was no other way.
And Jack choosing his friendship over her situationship with me didn’t make sense.
She’d say that wasn’t what happened, but we both knew it was.
I was so far outside her league, she wouldn’t give that up on her own.
He’d manipulated her, using his roommate status to poison her against me.
He was latent garbage, and still, he kept coming out on top.
I convinced myself I was only doing it because I was bored when I decided to put an end to my hyper-fixation by digging deeper to find out what the deal was with Rawling. If I found all of his dirt, I could destroy him and rid the school and my life of his presence.
My searching found nothing. Not about him, and more importantly, not about his parents.
I couldn’t find their job history. I couldn’t find criminal records for them.
I couldn’t find a single social media post. Nothing.
I even threw money at the problem, using one of those sites where they take your money and are able to track down all the details. Nada.
“No one’s this clean.” I grabbed the bridge of my nose, willing the headache that was beginning to brew to run away.
If his family was scrubbed from the internet, it meant they were into some shady shit, and if they were, Rawling was too.
My wolf pushed and pushed, needing to break through and devour something cute and furry. I needed to get out of here, too. The walls were closing in.
I ran outside and let my beast burst through, not caring about the clothing I was wearing.
My wolf took off, scenting the air and looking for his prey. It wasn’t long before he felled a rabbit, tearing it to shreds and downing his flesh. Next came a fox, then a squirrel. But they weren’t enough.
None of them sated my beast. This wasn’t working, it wasn’t calming me down. I forced him to go back home. The shift back was painful, my wolf fighting me every step of the way.
“Fuck this noise.”
Maybe I just needed to suck it up and ask my parents to investigate. They had far more power to find information than I did using my credit card and a sketchy website. But then what? The odds of them saying yes and following through were slim.
They were more likely to tell me to focus on school, to be the best, to be the most powerful. They’d want me to focus on my future, my power, my image, not some random latent. And they were right. I should be.
But it wasn’t that easy.
Phelan wasn’t talking to me.
Jack wasn’t talking to me… or more importantly fucking me.
Rawling was turning into the golden child.
Everything was going wrong.
Rawling needed to be expelled. That was the bottom line, and I was going to make sure it happened.
I needed to protect the school.
Because if I didn’t, no one else would.