Ethan would be leaving Maine soon, though Finn knew that he didn’t want to. It was like he wasn’t alpha when he was in Maine, even though he was in all the alpha meetings and constantly seemed to be working. It would be completely different when Ethan reunited his whole pack and was in his own territory.
Then he would learn if he really was cut out to do this whole alpha thing.
Finn knew his friend, though. And Ethan was a natural-born leader. If he couldn’t be a good alpha, no one could.
He told his friend this much over lunch, to which Ethan shrugged him off and shook his head. Finn couldn’t stand his modesty sometimes, though he knew that Ethan had been through a lot recently. And he had a lot to live up to–his dad was a legend during his reign.
“I have to tell you something,” Finn said after reassuring Ethan that he was going to be a great alpha. “Mainly because I don’t have anyone else to tell. Without them all laughing at me, of course.”
“Tell me, brother,” Ethan said, leaning back and sipping his diet coke. Finn thought he looked like a little kid in that moment. “I’m all ears.”
“I kind of have this thing with someone in the Moonlight Maine Pack,” he confessed, nerves coming over him. He almost didn’t want to tell Ethan. That would make all of his emotions so much more real.
“Hazel?” Ethan blurted out, sitting straight up and almost slamming his soda on the table. Finn looked at him in surprise, figuring out immediately the feelings that Ethan seemed to have for Lea’s best friend.
“Nope. Not her.” Finn smiled at his friend, trying to hold in his laughter. He knew what it felt like to be laughed at, regarding emotions and flirtations, thanks to his own pack members. He didn’t want to do the same thing to Ethan.
“Oh. Well, she’s cute. In that type of way. If you’re into that.”
“I’m not. Some are, though, I’m sure.” Finn winked at him, to which Ethan almost seemed to shyly look away.
“We’re just gonna drop this and talk about who you actually have a thing with,” Ethan finally said. Finn could see that the alpha didn’t want to talk about it, so he decided to just drop it.
“You know Lea?”
“No way.” Ethan looked stunned. It seemed to be the common reaction whenever anyone heard about them. Tatiana, Lorelei, and Desmond had all had the same reaction–and then began to laugh at him because they thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Ethan, though, didn’t laugh. He just looked a bit confused. “She’s not really your type, is she?”
“No. She’s not. But man, I can’t explain it. It’s crazy the way she makes me feel. I don’t know how I didn’t feel it before, but suddenly, as I began to talk to her more and more, I began to feel this pull towards her. It’s weird because she’s not my type–and I’m sure as hell not hers. She’s beautiful, but she’s too good for me, isn’t she? I know this, which is why I don’t want to pursue anything, but I can’t help it.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it bad.” Finn looked up at Ethan after staring at his empty plate, and he saw the strangest look on his face.
“Yeah, I can’t really explain it. And I don’t really know what to do. I guess I just had to tell someone and get it off my chest. My pack doesn’t understand, they just laugh at the whole situation.”
“Have you ever thought . . .? Never mind . . .”
Finn looked at Ethan, who was deep in thought. Finn was confused, and he wanted to know exactly what Ethan was thinking.
“Have I ever thought what?” he asked, leaning forward slightly and looking at Ethan expectantly.
“Have you ever thought that maybe she’s your mate? You know, your one and only?”
“What?”
Finn stared at his friend in utter shock. Mates, and one true loves, existed in the shifter world. That was a fact. But there were so many people that never met their one true love and lived happily with another. It was hard to determine what made a lover a “one true love,” as shifters bonded quickly and tended to feel emotions such as love and lust very strongly.
Rumor was, if a shifter met their mate–their one true love–they knew it. There was no second guessing the person they were with. Mates were for life. Mates were bonded in ways that were magic and weren’t explained in a cause and effect sort of way. The chemistry was just there–and shifters just tended to accept it. Mates were impossible to shake and were constantly together. Not being around your mate for a long time could be potentially damaging to some, which is why it never truly happened.
But was Lea Finn’s mate? His one true love? He almost didn’t want to think about it, the pressure was too high. He’d never thought he’d find a shifter that he would recognize as his one true mate. It was impossible, wasn’t it?
Maybe it wasn’t.
“Maybe Lea is your mate,” Ethan repeated as Finn looked confused and bewildered–and almost like he was going to throw up. “If you’re so confused as to the way you’re acting around her, it could be a possibility. Or it could just be that you’re horny.”
“Let’s go with the latter,” Finn said, laughing and taking a sip of his water.
He really didn’t want to think about the alternative. Because that thought was just crazy.
Right?
“Do you want to find your one true mate, though?” Ethan asked him, sipping his soda as he stared at him. Finn didn’t want to have this conversation, simply because he didn’t know the answer. He’d never really thought about it before, but now that Ethan brought up the possibility that Lea could be his one true mate, Finn couldn’t get the idea out of his head.
“I honestly don’t know,” he finally said after searching his brain for something to say. He felt like his answer was dumb and not at all truthful, but he wasn’t exactly prepared to go soul digging at one in the afternoon in the middle of a café. “I know that Lea’s too good for me. So, regardless of whether this is just a sex thing, or if it’s something a bit more serious, I’m not worthy. I don’t care about my feelings, I care about hers. And I know me. I’ll destroy her, and it’ll be horrible.”
“I don’t think you give yourself enough credit, man,” Ethan said, laughing a little. “You’re not the monster you set yourself out to be, you know.”
“No. But I’m pretty close.”
Finn didn’t want to go into all the gory details of his past love affairs. He felt like those were such a long time ago, back when he didn’t know what love was. Did he even know what love was now? His mind flashed to the way Lea had looked in the bar at Britta’s party. The white spring dress that she wore had to have left her cold later in the night when she left, the spring Maine air probably making her regret wearing something like that. She looked gorgeous though, and Finn found himself imagining him wrapping her up in his arms to keep her warm that night.
He wished his imagination was actually the real thing. He wished that he was with her right now.
Shit! Finn tried to focus on whatever Ethan was telling him now, but he literally couldn’t concentrate on anything other than Lea’s hair, Lea’s eyes, Lea’s mouth . . . . He had it bad, and he really didn’t know if this was just a sex thing or if there was some magic in the air. He hoped it was just sex. He hoped he could get it out of his system.
He didn’t know if he liked this power that Lea had over him just by existing. She was making him insane.
“Do you want to find your one mate?” Finn asked Ethan, turning the tables on his friend so that he could maybe focus on something else. His daydreaming about Lea seemed to be getting out of hand, even to him.
“Yeah, I think so,” Ethan replied, a hint of a smile on his face.
Finn wished he could be that confident in his quest for love. But he simply couldn’t. He’d been in relationships before, and he hadn’t exactly been the best partner around. Who was he to demand that he find his one mate to spend the rest of his life with? His mate would probably hate him in the end. Had that ever happened in all of shifter history? Probably not, but Finn was su
re that he would be the first.
His thoughts went back to Lea as they got the check and paid for their meal. He hoped and prayed that Ethan wasn’t right about Lea being his mate, mainly because then Lea would be tied to him for all of eternity. And Lea deserved so much more than him; that much he knew.
Chapter 8
Lea seemed to be shaking with excitement as she got out of her car and made her way up the stairs to the gym that night. She was excited for multiple reasons, the main one being that she was finally going to see and hang out with Finn. One-on-one. Just them.
She had been thinking about it all day. Thinking about him all day. More than once, she had to ask a patient or doctor to repeat themselves because she was completely zoning out and thinking about later on when she could see Finn again.
She couldn’t describe how she was feeling. But she almost didn’t care. She hadn’t felt like this in a while if she had even ever felt like this, and she was just going to go with the flow and see where it took her.
Lea began to walk up the steps, catching her reflection in the glass walls and making sure that she looked okay. She had run home after work to change out of her scrubs and wear some cute workout clothes. She had even taken a quick shower to wipe off the grime of the hospital before she slipped on her tight yoga pants that made her butt look much better than it actually did. What could she say? She wanted to impress. And she wanted to look cute and flirty when he saw her again, not a sweaty mess that just came from work.
Suddenly, as if she just walked through an invisible layer of something in the air, Lea felt the little hairs on her arms stand up straight. She felt weird all over, and she stopped walking to try to quickly understand this sudden change she had. She felt tense all over, and as she turned around on the steps to try to discover why she felt so frightened, she realized what was happening. She got a scent. The scent of a rogue.
Rogues had a sort of scent about them. The scent was of a shifter, of course, but it was off in a way. It was how shifters could tell if someone near them was a rogue or not. It was like they were marked for all of eternity because of the crimes they’d committed. Rogues tended to be dangerous shifters that were banned from the society for one reason or another. The majority of these crimes tended to lean more on the murder aspect of crimes, but there were rogues, like Lukas–who was a rogue before he’d saved Hann and was granted the ability to join the Moonlight Maine Pack–who didn’t do anything truly horrible, but yet became rogues because of differing alphas and other scenarios.
For the most part, though, rogues were bad news. And rogues this near to the Moonlight Maine Pack territory, after everything that happened with Kaiser and Gabriel? Well, that wasn’t good news at all.
Lea slowly looked all around her, trying to pinpoint where the scent and pulse of rogue life were coming from. She felt a cold sweat go down her body, her wolf reacting from just the scent of something wrong. This rogue was near . . . . Really near. If only Lea could find it.
Quickly shifting into her wolf form when she could find no one around, and so that the rogue wouldn’t attack her in her weaker human form, Lea sent a mental communication message to Hann, her alpha. She hoped that he would get it and that it made sense, though she felt like a jumbled mess of fear and anxiety when she tried to open the mental link with her alpha, whose mental link was always open for his shifters to talk to him.
Hann, there’s a rogue here at the gym, she quickly sent through the mental brain waves, praying that he would hear through her jumbled thoughts.
Mental communication in a shifter’s pack was something shifters could do within one’s pack, and with other regular shifters that weren’t in the pack, though, it could be a bit more difficult, when they were in their wolf forms. They could also do it in their human forms, but it was a bit harder and required much more concentration on everyone’s part. Wolves couldn’t communicate through speech, obviously, so this magical ability was the only way they could talk to each other when in their wolf form. The great thing about this skill was that wolves could also send messages from far away, which came into great need right then with Lea.
She just hoped that he could hear her. She hoped. She prayed.
And then the rogue stepped out of the shadows from above her on the stairs, standing in front of the closed gym doors. Lea cursed in her head as she saw that he was much bigger than her. He was in his wolf form as well, and Lea could almost smell the blood that he had bathed in over the many years that he had been a rogue. It might’ve just been her head playing tricks on her, but she could swear this was a cold-blooded murderer that had taken many lives, human and shifter alike, in his many years as a rogue.
His fur was dark black, as was his soul. Lea stood tall, not wanting to give this rogue the satisfaction of her fear. She would not cower to a monster like him. Maybe he wasn’t here to fight? Maybe he was doing exactly what Lukas did when he first came to Maine? Maybe he was here to help?
“You shouldn’t have called your alpha, little one,” the wolf in front of her said, and the idea that this rogue wasn’t here for blood instantly left her mind. This wasn’t going to end well.
Lea snarled at him, though she didn’t take any step towards him as she looked up to where he stood above her, the wind ruffling his black fur. Lea’s own fur, a golden brown that would’ve shone in the sun if the sun was out, ruffled in the breeze, too. She got chilly all over as she prayed someone would show up. Two against one would be a much better scenario than the one she currently found herself in.
The fact that there was no one near her surprised the hell out of her. The gym was normally pretty packed, all the time. As more and more shifters from other packs around the world began to set up base in Maine, the gym became a hotspot for working out and socializing with new people. And yet, she didn’t see one shifter in sight. Of course, she’d never been to the gym this late. Maybe people were sleeping? It would be weird, as shifters were pretty nocturnal and if they didn’t have a human job, wolves tended to sleep during the day and socialize at night.
Regardless of why there were no shifters around, Lea hoped that at least one would show up.
Because this wasn’t looking very good for her.
“Why are you here?” she decided to ask, hoping that maybe if she talked with the rogue, he wouldn’t just attack her. She needed to buy some time as she waited for Hann’s reply.
She’d had no reply from Hann yet.
“To bring hell upon your world, little one.” The rogue seemed to laugh, amazed that she didn’t know why he was there. “To make you all feel as you’ve made us feel for a very long time. To bring justice to the evil. The evil being you, of course, little one.”
“I’m sure justice was brought to this world when we banished someone like you from our society,” Lea growled at him, a bit impressed with how calm her voice sounded. It had started out shaky when she first asked him a question, but she was slowly growing some type of confidence and strength within her, though she knew that this rogue could definitely kill her in a heartbeat.
“That’s where you’re wrong.”
“Then what did you do to become a rogue? How are we the evil ones?” Lea just had to keep him talking long enough for some help. Or something. She just needed a little bit of luck on her side right then.
“I killed four shifters and two humans.”
Lea tensed as she looked into the rogue’s eyes. He didn’t look sorry or at all tormented by it. This shifter had killed six people altogether before he even became a rogue when he was still a shifter in the society, and he was the one saying that the society was evil and bad? Lea would’ve laughed if she wasn’t looking in the eyes of a serial killer.
“And why did you do that?”
“They were living their lives wrong. They loved those scum humans more than they loved their own brothers and sisters of the pack. So, I had to show them where they were wrong. It wasn’t my fault things got out of hand. But when you want to live in that way, yo
u have to pay the price, don’t you?”
“I could say the same thing to you.”
If Lea wasn’t freaking out before, she definitely was now. This wasn’t just an angry rogue. This was a rogue that was against human affiliation so much that he had killed shifters that were involved with humans. Which was just plain crazy, but also a scary ideology that was slowly coming out of hiding because of Gabriel’s–the Elder that turned on the whole shifter community and has been plotting his revenge–embrace of the ideas. Gabriel hated humans so much he’d tried to take away Kato’s girlfriend, a human named Thea, because she knew too much about the shifter world.
While centuries and centuries ago, having relations with humans was wrong, now it was much more accepted.
And there wasn’t a more accepting pack than the Moonlight Pack when it came to humans. This rogue seemed to know that.
Before Lea could say anything else or try to stop the rogue from what he was about to do, the rogue lunged for her, flinging himself off of the steps and down to where she stood in the middle of the stairs. Lea threw herself to the side, out of his reach, and fell down a few steps in the process. She quickly jumped up to her four paws, shaking her head as she heard slight ringing because of where she slammed it against the concrete stairs to get away from him.
The rogue was now on the ground, but he quickly turned around and glared at Lea. Lea gulped, her fear now very evident as she realized what was about to happen. She would make sure she didn’t go down without a fight, though. She attempted to bring some strength and confidence to her stature. She wouldn’t let this rogue get off on her fear.
And she would try her damn hardest to defeat him. Because the alternative would be to die, and that wasn’t something she really wanted to do today.
Moonlight Wolves Box Set Page 40