The Broken Aztec Princesses (Their Aztec Wolves #5)

1. Chapter One

Chapter One

Bellarose

E very night for the last year had been the same. I relived the death of my mate during the rogue attack that devastated my pack and life. Every night, I prayed for a new dream or even a dreamless sleep, but I didn’t know who I was praying to anymore. My faith in the Moon Goddess, the mother of all shifters and vampires, was shaken. I knew she existed because my family and I were descendants of her sister, Chantico and her brother, Huitzilopochtli, was my Uncle Helios. It was not that I had forsaken her; it was because she had forsaken me that broke my faith and trust.

After everything that happened to me last year, why would I still pray to her? I lost my mate, and I lost my unborn pup, I lost half of the pack I was responsible for keeping safe. She took me across the country from my family and then abandoned me here. I had no one close to support me, a pack on its last legs and nothing to show for it.

My twin, Cory Salonen, fared much better. As the firstborn, he inherited the alpha title of Crescent Moon from our dad. He found his mate, and she gave birth to two wonderful little boys at the end of last year. He got his happy ever after, even if it took him a while to get there.

I was happy for him. I was. Cory deserved the world, and now he’d gotten it. He was the best brother a girl could ask for, and thanks to our twin bond, I could speak with him every night despite the distance. A perk that probably stopped me from doing something crazy stupid more than once over the last eight years.

Every night, I was comforted by his words and news of home, but I still dreaded the dreams. I worked late most days and scrolled on social media so I could put sleep off for as long as possible, but it didn’t matter how tired I was or how good of a day I had. The moment my eyes closed and my consciousness left me, the dreams took me back to hell to relive one of the worst nights of my life.

I felt the tears falling from my eyes as I watched the life leave my mate’s eyes. The weak sparks disappeared altogether from where our bodies were touching. A heart-wrenching sob broke out of me as I realized what this meant. I was alone now. There was no happily ever after for me.

I woke up with a start, and it took me a few moments of panic to remember where I was, and to realize it was another dream. My heart clenched in pain as it usually did these days once I joined the waking world, when reality came back to me to tell me that today was another day. Another day where I had no mate, and I’d lost my pup. Another day where I struggled to keep my pack together, and I was alone, hundreds of miles away from anyone I loved.

‘ Bells…’ my twin’s mind-link reached me, and I sighed. Our twin bond is stronger than most, and he had been feeling my panic every morning.

‘I’m okay, Cory. Just another nightmare, ’ I assured him.

‘You’re hurting, Bells. Please come home. ’ The sadness and desperation in his voice tugged at my heartstrings, and in the mornings, when my heart was at its heaviest, I was always tempted to say yes. But I couldn’t.

‘No. My pack needs me. This is where I’m supposed to be. The Moon Goddess sent me here for a reason, and I need to see it through, ’ I answered sternly.

‘You belong with your family. We miss you, Bells. We want to help you through this, ’ he pleaded.

‘Then visit when you can. I have to go. I need to get some stuff done.’ I almost ended the mind-link angrily, but I couldn’t. Not with my brother. Not after everything that happened. I needed him to know. ‘I love you, Cory.’

‘I love you, Bells. Please think about it. I’ll try to visit soon.’

I got out of bed and showered, but before I went to my office, I stopped by one of the rooms on the Alpha floor.

“Wake up, sleepy. It’s time for breakfast,” I urged little Adam up. The rogue attack didn’t only claim the life of my mate but the lives of many pack members. Adam was orphaned during the attack, and in the months that followed, I took him in when I realized he had no one left to care for him. Something in his eyes tugged at my heart when I met him, and maybe it was because I was grieving my miscarriage, but I felt like we both needed each other. I was taking care of him until I found him a placement with a family that could better care for him.

If I were being honest, I was probably doing him a disservice because I hadn’t taken the time to even look yet. I needed him way more than he needed me. Some days, when I first took him in, I didn’t know who was helping who continue living.

Adam stretched and yawned, smiling up at me sleepily. He went through so much and was still such a happy little boy. He loved life, and I envied him that ability some days. There was still so much heartache in mine.

We went through his morning routine, walked downstairs, and I made both of us breakfast.

According to the council, the rogue attack was one of the largest recorded in werewolf history. A little over half the pack perished, and almost a quarter of those remaining found it too difficult to stay. The pack went from a healthy five hundred members to less than two hundred. We had a part-time chef for lunch and dinner, but everyone was on their own for breakfast. The pack grounds were big, mostly farmland, and we were struggling to make ends meet with the remaining members. Most of my pack were women and children now, and none had worked in the fields before.

I spent a lot of time over the last two months trying to recruit more members or at least hire temporary workers to help pick the harvest, but it was difficult. Humans were not allowed on pack grounds, especially since we still got the occasional rogue attacking, and the council wasn’t risking involving humans and declared our pack “at high risk of repeated attack.”

I had about forty acres of grapes to harvest, and if I didn’t find help, the pack would not survive financially. The pack depended on the profits of the vineyard we operated, and a huge part of that involved growing the grapes for it. What kind of vineyard could survive without grapes?

I was building a plan to transition the pack into a more lucrative and sustaining business, but I needed to keep it afloat until I could put the plan in place, and that needed capital. To do any of that, I needed the damn grapes to be harvested, pressed, fermented, bottled and sold.

We finished breakfast, and then I dropped off Adam at daycare and ran over to the fields. It was all hands on deck right now, and I was no exception. For a few hours every morning and afternoon, I came out to help the pack care for the grapes. There was less than two months before harvest should begin, and everyone was looking worried as we went through the fields to ensure the plants were healthy. If we lost the crops after all the investment we’d put into it, there was no coming back from a blow that hard, morally or financially. Mom would be proud of my tan right now. I now looked more Mexican than Finnish, barring the grey eyes.

After lunch, I holed myself in my office to get as much paperwork completed as possible. I only had a few hours each day to keep up with the paperwork before I left to help in the fields again. It was a good thing I was always a diligent student, and I could focus on a task pretty well, or I would have drowned under the burden. I was barely keeping my head above water as it was. I had one lazy beta and no gamma. No ranked females to help. Everything was sitting solely on my shoulders at the moment.

“Rose, dear, I want to visit my sister in California. Can you make sure to book my flight?” Brandon’s mother burst into the office without knocking.

I did my best to keep my face blank. I had instructed everyone not to interrupt me during these hours unless it was an emergency, but of course, for Martha, everything that involved her was an emergency.

“I’ll see what I can do, Martha. When did you want to go, and how long will you be gone?”

“Say in about six weeks? Let’s make it for the same amount of time. Thank you, Rose.”

I gritted my teeth as she exited my office. Not only did she insist on calling me Rose, but she was leaving for the entirety of the harvest. So much for all hands on deck. It was no secret to anyone in the pack that me and Martha butted heads, but I’d asked her to help me put up a unified front, even if it was just for show, for the pack. Every other week, I got questions about what we would do if we didn’t get all the grapes harvested and if I could call other packs to see if any were willing to take us in.

I wasn’t ready to give up. This was my chance to prove to everyone that I was the youngest twin, but not the weakest. I wanted to prove to myself that I could lead my pack well. The council was still breathing down my neck. A pack shouldn’t be without an alpha, and they wanted to either disband the pack or have me take a chosen mate of alpha blood to take over. After some persuasion, they weren’t completely opposed to me becoming the alpha of Redmon Moon, but I had to prove I could handle the responsibility of a pack and the transition into the role.

I was currently failing on both counts. People still called me Luna, and Brandon had left the pack in a bigger mess than I could have imagined. Despite the times I told Cory I was too busy with Luna duties to visit over the years, the truth was Brandon kept me away from anything important.

I was kept from important meetings and was barely aware of how the vineyard worked. Everything I’d learned about the business was from Eric, one of the older supervisors. I spent days following him around before the attack, looking for ways to make myself useful.

Brandon was a possessive man. He hated when I went back to Crescent Moon without him, but he was always too busy to come, so I had to make excuses to Cory to avoid arguments with my mate. I already had enough fights about finishing my degree when I wasn’t planning on using it.

At least, according to Brandon. He swore I would never use it—the irony. The knowledge I learned at school was the only thing helping me manage the river of paperwork and constant demands. I would have drowned without it.

I booked Martha her ticket and forwarded her the information, even though I knew she wouldn’t look at it. She would just ask me when it was the night before and leave. Hell, I was tempted to “forget” about it and force her to stay for the harvest. Behind the sweet mother figure she presented to the world, the woman was a cold bitch on her best days and a raging cunt on the rest of them.

I picked up Adam from daycare before dinner, and then we went to the fields. A few of us always brought the little ones while we worked, taking breaks to watch them as they played around the grapes and trees. It was far from ideal, but nothing was for any of us right now. We were all working hard to continue surviving.

Everyone except my slob of a Beta and my ex-mother-in-law, at least. I’d yet to see either of them working the fields since spring. Hugh was hurt during the rogue attack and somehow lost almost five weeks of time. We still didn’t know what happened to him. He took over the warrior training after Brandon’s gamma passed away and spent most of his free time in the gym.

He was obsessed with not going through the same thing again. Half of me wanted to believe his actions were due to his trauma, but the other half believed he was using it as an excuse to get out of doing real work outside of the training and picking up chicks. The wolf was a man-whore, and there were a lot of widows in the pack right now. I already had to interfere in a few fights between she-wolves claiming he was taking each one as a chosen mate, only to find out that he said that to at least five more.

The man claimed to be shit at paperwork, which begged the question of who the fuck had kept the pack running? Brandon was never as busy as I currently was. Ron, his gamma, was a fighter through and through. His mother didn’t help, so how did it get done? Even after twelve months, I still couldn’t figure out how the pack hadn’t gone bankrupt over the last decade.

There were a lot of things that still didn’t make sense a full year later, but I had very little time to think about them. No matter how many hours of work I put in, I couldn’t seem to gain any breathing room. Cory kept suggesting that I replace Hugh, but it wasn’t possible right now. Aside from the fact that I didn’t have time to look for a new one, there were not enough candidates to consider. I needed fresh blood in the pack, but with the council’s warning label on the pack, I felt like we were the kid with lice in school that no one wanted to get near.

There had to be a better way.

Please, Selene, let there be better days ahead, I prayed as I went to sleep that night, wondering if this prayer would be ignored like the rest of them.