The Unseen Wolf's Fated Mates

1. Riley

Riley

Being half human and half wolf was the worst of both worlds. Humans hated my otherness, and shifters mostly wanted me dead. It was why I worked so hard to make sure I could protect myself.

Sweat trickled into my left eye, temporarily clouding my vision. The break in concentration was enough to give Danny the opening he needed. His fist slammed into my cheek, knocking me off my feet. I hit the mat with a sharp oomph, much to Danny’s delight.

“Ha! I got you good, Riley!” The human teen bounced up and down on the balls of his feet before offering me his hand, which I took. Suppressing a smirk, I yanked him forward, using his body weight against him and unbalancing the big bastard.

Danny’s eyes widened in surprise, not expecting my countermove.

“The bigger they are, the harder they fall,” I crowed, springing to my feet and dancing away so he couldn’t hook my legs out from under me.

“Damn. That was mean.” Danny pouted for a few seconds before grinning.

“Not mean,” our coach, Cal, corrected. “You were too busy showing off to pay attention to her body language. Anyone with half a brain could tell she wasn’t out for the count.”

“But…”

“Enough. Hit the showers. It’s late and some of us have a home to go to.” Cal strode away, grumbling under his breath, and a second later the lights over the mats went out.

Cal was one of the good guys: tough but fair. He’d seen a neglected kid with more energy than she knew what to do with and given her a way to channel it into something productive. If not for the gym, I’d have probably ended up in human juvie.

Or dead.

Either way, my mother wouldn’t have noticed.

“Need a lift, sweetheart?” Cal’s gravelly voice jolted me from my thoughts. Water dripped down my back, soaking through my thin jacket; there hadn’t been time to dry my hair after a quick shower. Not with Cal eager to lock up and go home.

Unlike me, who was always looking for excuses to avoid going back to the trailer park I laughingly called home.

I shook my head. “Nah. Felix will be here in a sec.”

“If he doesn’t show, call me and I’ll swing back.” He scowled. “This neighborhood has gone to the wolves lately, and I don’t want you hanging around too long.”

The shifter mafia had moved in, and a year later, crime rates reached record highs.

Not that Maximus Lightfoot, head of the Shifter Council, gave a fuck. He was likely on the mafia’s payroll.

I watched as Cal climbed into his beat-up truck and headed off into the night. The minute his taillights vanished in the gloom, I moved back into the shelter of the gym’s doorway and pulled my phone from my pocket.

The message from Felix on the lock screen gave me a bad feeling.

Felix: gonna be 20 mins late. Soz.

I cursed under my breath. Knowing my friend, he’d been too busy gaming to notice how late it was. Or chatting up some cute shifter online.

Either way, I was stuck here for a while longer unless I felt like coughing for a cab, which I didn’t, seeing as how I had no money.

After sending Felix a thumbs-up emoji, I reopened my chat thread with Lorna. There were no new messages. Nothing since August.

I was so busy scrutinizing Lorna’s messages for clues I might have missed that I failed to spot the two hulking males, both dressed in MC leathers. The moon tattoos on their necks told me they were wolf mafia goons from the local pack.

Brilliant.

My inner wolf opened one eye, yawned, and then went back to sleep, apparently unconcerned about our imminent death.

Praying Felix hurried the fuck up before these two clowns jumped me, I tucked my phone away and affected a relaxed demeanor. Experience had taught me showing fear to an apex predator was a good way to end up hurt.

Wolves loved to chase. The pair of them licked their lips at the sight of me, a slender female all alone in a dark alleyway.

“Look what we have here, Thad. A pretty little girly.”

I almost snorted. Any shifter with half a nose would know I wasn’t human. Sure, my wolf was a lazy bitch who almost never bothered showing herself, but I still smelled like a shifter.

Thad grinned, showing me a set of stained yellow fangs.

“Ooh, Grandma, what big teeth you have!” I gasped in mock horror.

“Grandma?” The first wolf frowned in confusion.

“Got a big dick too, little girl,” Thad added as his friend finally got my reference. What an idiot. The wolf mafia must have very low recruitment standards.

I pictured the ad: Meatheads needed for grunt work. Got a working brain cell? Apply today!

“You’re not my type, dude,” I said regretfully. “I’m not into rodent shifters.”

Both wolves growled, unhappy at being dissed by a female. They rushed toward me just as Felix’s SUV swung into the parking lot.

My fist connected with the first wolf’s jaw, knocking him sideways into his friend’s path. The pair of them tripped over each other and tumbled to the floor with a volley of curses and angry growls.

Before they could go full fur and tear my throat out, I dove into the passenger seat of Felix’s jeep.

“Go!” Behind us, the two meatheads were mid-shift.

“Never a dull moment with you, cupcake,” Felix grumbled, stepping hard on the gas. The truck’s tires squealed as we drove away from the gym, leaving the wolves behind.

Once we hit the main road snaking through downtown Grand Oaks, I relaxed. Shifters could run fast, but they weren’t stupid enough to try chasing a moving vehicle through predominantly human areas where bars and restaurants remained open for business.

“Sorry I was late,” he apologized eventually.

“Gaming?”

“No actually. I got a hit on Lorna.”

I spun around in my seat, the dumb-as-bricks wolf shifters forgotten. “And?”

Felix took the exit for our much shittier neighborhood.

“A security camera picked her up at a rest stop on the mountain pass near where the full moon parties take place.”

“When?”

“The day after the August full moon party.”

“That doesn’t tell us anything. She was still replying to my messages then.”

“Yeah, but I got a blurry image of the male with her,” he told me. “I’m using a program to enhance it, but it’s gonna take time.”

Finally, something positive after weeks of searching for a literal needle in a haystack.

“That’s good, right? If we can identify who she was with when she disappeared, we have a lead!”

“It’s a starting point,” Felix agreed cautiously.

“You think all this is a waste of time, don’t you?”

“Not a waste of time, no. But I can’t help thinking she’s just lost her phone or is too busy screwing some shifter to message you.”

“No. She wouldn’t be that selfish, Felix.”

Even though Lorna and I hadn’t grown up together, I knew she would never be so thoughtless. Lorna didn’t have a selfish bone in her body.

I was unaware I even had a sister until she walked into the diner where I worked weekends and announced we shared a father.

I hadn’t believed her at first. With her pale blonde hair and gray eyes, we looked nothing alike.

And whereas I was a hybrid wolf shifter, she was a full-blooded feline shifter.

But it turned out she was telling the truth.

Lorna was in the city for a medical appointment; shifters rarely got sick, but our father had sent her to a shifter clinic for a fertility check. She’d stopped at the diner to eat, and her beast had recognized mine as family, which had been a shock for both of us.

Even though Lorna was three years older than me, our father had kept her locked away on pack lands for most of her life. I hadn’t understood why until she let slip his plans for her.

Felix remained silent as we took the exit for my trailer park. Strip malls became rundown tract housing and weed-infested vacant lots, and a short time later, we passed the peeling sign signaling the entrance to the Paradise Trailer Park.

The truck bumped along the pitted central road lined with trailers. Some were still lit up inside, but at my end of the park, there were no lights on.

Felix pulled up outside my ramshackle trailer. Weeds punched through the concrete slab in front of the battered door, and I grimaced at the sight of several empty liquor bottles on the stoop.

“Lorna wouldn’t abandon me, Felix,” I said after a minute, still angry he dared to suggest it.

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“I do.” He’d never met her, but the least he could do was trust my judgment. Lorna was blood; she wouldn’t abandon me.

Unwilling to listen to more of his attempts to make me give up the search for my half sister, I grabbed my bag and opened the passenger door.

The door to our trailer swung open before I could dig out my key; Mom had forgotten to lock it again. The rancid smell of vomit and liquor hit me the moment I stepped inside, my feet crunching over broken glass.

“Riley,” Felix hollered from behind me, but I ignored him. A volley of curses colored the air blue before a door slammed. “Damn it, Riles! Walking away when something pisses you off is—” He ground to a halt when he spotted what I’d just seen. “Ah fuck.”