by Bella Jacobs
Wolf Queen
A Dark Mafia Shifter Romance
Bella Jacobs
Contents
WOLF QUEEN
About the Book
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Sneak Peek
About the Author
Also by Bella Jacobs
WOLF QUEEN
Wolves of New York
By Bella Jacobs
Copyright Wolf Queen © 2021 by Bella Jacobs
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. This contemporary romance is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners. This ebook is licensed for your personal use only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with, especially if you enjoy sexy, fast-paced urban fantasy reads. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work. Edited by Fedora C. Proofing. Cover Design by Violet Duke.
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About the Book
The shifter world is running out of time…and so am I.
Maxim Thorn is a dangerous—even deadly—man who betrayed my trust and the love growing between us. But compared to his brother, Bane, my alpha kingpin is a freaking teddy bear.
Bane is pure evil and out of what’s left of his mind. And now, I’m his captive.
It’s looking like there’s no way out when an unlikely ally emerges, promising to help me subvert the dark prophecy that has me in its crosshairs.
All I’ll have to sacrifice is a piece of my soul and the man who would have been my fated mate…
But can I doom the person I still love to an eternity of suffering, even to rise as queen? Or can I find another way to stop his brother before it’s too late?
Chapter One
Maxim
Fourteen years earlier…
One month.
One month, and I’m free. I’ll be done with high school and fucking AP Statistics and out of my big brother, Bane’s, shadow for good.
Or at least for a year or two.
Dad finally okayed my extended trip to Europe, provided I take along a security detail. Come June, I’ll be on a plane to Prague. Then Croatia. Then to an island off the coast of Greece where European shifters meet up every year for a Midsummer party unlike anything boring, stick-up-its-ass North America has ever seen.
My friend Aaron says they eat these special mushrooms and dance until they can’t stand, and that he had more sex in three days than in the entire rest of his life combined.
Though I’m not sure that’s saying much.
Aaron is a cool, funny guy, but super shy around girls. Add in the fact that none of us are supposed to mess around with the other wolves in our pack, and there’s a good chance he was a virgin before his trip last summer.
But still…his tales have fueled the fire that’s been burning inside of me since sophomore year, when it became apparent my teachers were still going to mention my brother’s name every freaking class period, even though Bane graduated the year before. I make better grades than my brother and cause far less trouble, but his devil-may-care charm lingers in people’s brains.
Hell, it lingers in my brain.
I love my brother. He’s cool as hell and so much fun to hang out with.
But he’s also inconsiderate, has a Godzilla-sized ego, and struggles to focus on anything other than Bane—or his girlfriend, Kelley—for more than ten minutes at a time.
He hasn’t been to visit Mom in months. He sees Dad every day for Alpha training, but he’s too busy to head up to the family apartment at the end of the day to have dinner with Mom or play with our little sister, Diana.
I spend my fair share of nights out with friends or grabbing a quick meal in the Atrium while studying for AP Statistics—a class I’m convinced was created by the devil himself—but I always make time for Mom and Squirt.
Especially Squirt.
At four, my little sister is fucking hysterical. She barely comes to my knee, but bosses me around like a little queen. The second I’m through the door, she grabs my hand and drags me off to her room to play dolls or hide-and-seek or “Murder Kitchen,” a game she made up. Dressed in her chef costume, she’ll feed me plastic food from her Kids Cook playset, only revealing if it’s poison after I’ve pretended to eat it.
Then, if I’ve gobbled up a murder plate, I’m obligated to perform a dramatic and prolonged death scene, while Diana giggles hysterically like the sick little cookie she is.
Mom finds the game morbid and jokes that Diana’s going to grow up to be a contract killer or something if we keep it up, but I think it’s awesome.
I love how weird and creative and silly Dee is.
Because she’s sweet, too.
After dinner, we usually head into the living room to watch something on TV. And each time, she crawls up into the big armchair with me because I’m “very good at snuggling,” while Mom watches us from the couch with a smile.
And at bedtime, when I carry Dee into her room to tuck her in, she always says, “I wuv you, Zim-zim,”—Maxim is too hard for her to say—before she curls up into a tiny ball beneath the covers.
My heart twists in my chest every time.
She’s just so tiny and cool and I love her so much.
Honestly, I’d do anything for her, though I try not to let her know it, since she’s also a pint-sized tyrant who would absolutely abuse her power over me if she realized she had it.
“You’re going to be a great dad someday, baby,” Mom said the last time I emerged from tucking in my little sis, pulling me in for a hug before I headed down to the apartment I share with Aaron and a couple of our friends on a lower floor. “I’m so proud of your big heart. Dee and I both love it when you come hang out with us.”
I rolled my eyes, but returned the hug, dropping a kiss to the top of Mom’s head as I said, “Yeah, yeah. I guess you guys are all right.”
“All right?” Mom pulled away with an arched brow. “We’re cool as hell, kid. Not to mention I’m the only one who knows the recipe for that sausage pasta you’re obsessed with, and don’t you forget it.”
“Oh, I won’t. Love you.” I laughed and hugged her again, before hurrying out the door.
Aaron and I were going to play video games before bed, I think.
Or I was wanting to text with a cute fairy girl I’d met at a club the previous weekend.
T
here was some reason I was in such a hurry that I noticed Mom’s hug felt a little weaker than usual but ignored it.
But even if I hadn’t, even if I’d said something to Dad about it, there was nothing I could have done to save her.
Afterwards—after the funeral and the mourning rituals and holding my dad while he cried in front of me for the first time—I worked up the nerve to ask the doctor about it. He said even if she’d been put on bedrest and agreed to terminate her pregnancy, she still might not have lived through it.
And Mom wouldn’t have agreed to that. She wanted to give Diana a little sister too much.
The baby who died along with Mom was another girl.
Another girl…conceived naturally even though Mom was forty-eight years old and should have been done having kids for fuck’s sake.
She and Dad should have taken precautions. They should have realized that she was too old for it to be safe for her to get pregnant again. They should have realized how much the kids they had already needed their mother.
Later, I would work through a fucking truckload of anger with both my parents and Fate and even that poor little stillborn baby.
Later, I would grieve and change and harden and become someone so different from the boy I was before.
But on the afternoon I push through my parents’ front door after school, bursting to tell Mom the good news about my trip, only to find Diana cowering under the coffee table in her wolf form, keening like the world is about to end, all I feel is…terror.
Dropping my backpack to the floor, I race across the room, falling to my knees by the table and reaching for my sister.
“Dee dee, baby, what’s wrong?” I hook my thumbs under her front legs and gently pull her into my arms. Sitting back on my heels, I cuddle her close and stroke her fuzzy white fur, still not as coarse as a grown wolf’s. “Hush, Squirt, it’s okay, I’m here. What’s wrong? Where’s Mom?”
She whimpers harder and squirms in my arms.
I reach out telepathically, Hey, there, sis, don’t cry. I’m here. Just calm down and talk to me, okay? Can you hear me in your head? If so, nod once for me, all right?
But she doesn’t nod, she continues to keen and moan, which isn’t really a surprise. She’s a precocious kid and has already found her pack gift years before most kids even understand what that is. But developing telepathic powers before puberty is almost unheard of.
So, she’s still a wolf pup when I pick her up, carrying her with me as I move through the apartment, calling out for Mom.
Dee can’t speak in her furry form. She has no way to tell me that I’m about to turn the corner in the master bedroom and find our mother lying by the bathtub in a sea of red.
There’s so much blood it almost completely covers the tile.
Only Mom’s face—so pale it’s whiter than the marble countertops—is blood-free. It makes it easy to see how still and stiff her features have become. Easy to see that her eyes aren’t blinking and conclude they’ll never blink again.
The realization that my mother is dead hits like a sledgehammer to the stomach, and my first instinct is to run.
I want to hold tight to Diana and race out of this room, this apartment, this tower, to run and keep running until we reach another reality where this hasn’t happened.
Or maybe we can time travel, sprint fast enough to slip into the past and save our mom, this woman who is the heart of our family, our touchstone, the voice I hear in my head when I’m trying to be the kindest, highest version of myself.
But at eighteen, I know better.
I can’t run.
There is no escape from the brutal pain and grief that’s already on top of me and my poor baby sister.
Throat tight with misery, I hug Diana close as I whisper, “Oh, Dee, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, baby. But I’m here. I’m never going to leave you, okay? I promise.”
And then, even though I’m dying to go to my mother and touch her face and kiss her forehead and close her poor eyes and howl over her body, I turn and walk back into the living room, holding my shit together for my sister.
I call the emergency medical team and then my father, continuing to stay strong as he lets out a tortured choking sound before promising he’ll be up as fast as he can.
Then I call Bane, who doesn’t answer.
Then I call him again. And again, because I know he only left the tower a few minutes ago. I saw him headed out with Kelley on my way through the Atrium after school.
The fourth time, I leave a simple, brutal message, “Mom’s dead, come home. Now,” letting all the anger building inside of me come spilling out in my voice before I hang up and turn back to Diana, continuing to stroke her fur as she whimpers in my lap.
It’s not Bane’s fault either, of course.
But in that moment, it feels like his fault.
His fault that I’m the one who found her, that I’m the one here aging ten years in ten minutes as I realize I have to be Diana’s primary parent now. I have to take care of her the way Mom would want. Dad’s going to be too grief-stricken—and too busy being Alpha—and Bane has a hard time caring about anyone’s pain but his own.
I know that, even before Bane comes rolling into the apartment two hours later, long after Mom’s body has been wheeled away and my weeping father has left to take care of the paperwork at the morgue.
I emerge from Diana’s bathroom—she’s a little girl again, and I’ve managed to distract her from the nightmare-in-progress with a bubble bath and a tub full of toys—to find Bane leaning heavily on Kelley as he staggers through the front door.
His face is red and puffy, but I’m not sure if it’s tears or whiskey that’s to blame.
“You fucking reek,” I snap, stopping at the end of the hallway and propping my hands on my hips, not about to let him any closer to Dee in his current state. “Where have you been?”
“Take it easy on him, Max,” Kelley says, her eyes bloodshot, too. “When he heard the news, he just…” She gulps a breath. “He snapped, okay? He bought a fifth and just started guzzling it. I got him here as fast as I could.”
“Don’t wanna,” Bane mumbles, his eyelids drooping. “Hate this. I can smell the fuckin’ blood…” He shudders. “Don’t wanna be here.”
“Then leave,” I snap. “You’re not going to be any help like that, anyway. Might as well have gone to the club. No reason to let Mom’s death interfere with having a good time, right?”
“Stop, Maxim,” Kelley says. “He lost his mother.”
“So did I,” I say, lowering my voice. “And so did our baby sister, who’s only four years old and fucking traumatized because she found her mom lying in a puddle of blood. We have to be strong for her right now. We don’t have the luxury of falling apart or getting wasted or running away. After two years of Alpha-training, seems like you would have gotten that memo by now, brother.” Bane drags his eyes wider, meeting my gaze in the increasingly electrified air as I add, “Alphas don’t get drunk and expect other people to take care of them during a crisis; they pull themselves together and take care of their pack and their people. Especially their family.”
Bane’s jaw clenches and suddenly the air beneath my shirt feels hot and the hair at the nape of my neck stirs in a thermo-activated breeze.
I’ve never been on the receiving end of my brother’s pack gift—even when we were children, he knew better than to risk setting a person on fire—but it only takes a second for me to realize what’s happening.
But it doesn’t scare me the way it probably should.
No, I’m not scared…
I’m fucking livid.
I see red—the dark crimson of my mother’s life blood spilled across the floor.
A second later, I’m across the room fisting Bane’s shirt in both hands.
Chapter Two
Maxim
I tug him close, until his face is inches from mine.
“Go ahead,” I seethe. “Burn me alive, brother. But I won�
��t burn alone. If I burn, you burn with me.”
“You’re just jealous you weren’t born first,” he slurs as the heat simmering against my skin flares hotter. “You’re so desperate to be Alpha it’s fucking pathetic. But you’ll never be in charge, baby brother. I’m in charge. Me. Not you.”
“Dad’s in charge, you arrogant piece of shit. And he will be for a very long time.” My eyes narrow on his. “So, if I were you, I’d start making an effort to prove you’ve got what it takes to fill his shoes. I don’t want to be Alpha, I truly fucking don’t, but I’m ready to step up if I have to.”
“Is that a threat?” he whispers, his face still so close to mine that the whiskey on his breath burns my nose.
“No, it’s a promise,” I say, so warm now that the heat waves emerging from my shirt make Bane’s face appear to ripple before my eyes. “I won’t let you drag our people down to your level. You will rise. Or I’ll make damned sure you fall.”
“You couldn’t beat me in the ring. Not even on my worst day,” he growls as sweat begins to drip down my face. “I’ve got three inches and forty pounds on you, baby brother. I will fucking destroy you. I’ll rip you apart piece by—”
“Stop it, both of you,” Kelley cuts in, placing a hand on each of our chests. “Stop! Please. Bane, you’re drunk. You don’t want to hurt Maxim. And, Maxim, you’re grieving. You don’t know what you’re saying. Both of you just need to calm down, okay? Come on, Bane.” She tugs at Bane’s shoulder, then tugs a little harder. “Now! You need to sober up before you do something you’ll regret for the rest of your life.”