Alpha Betrayed: A Dark Shifter

Juliet

The morning starts off with a weird buzz in the air and a knot of anxiety twitching in my stomach.

I tell myself it’s excitement—I’m excited about this new beginning, not scared to death that I won’t be able to pull it off—but my nervous system isn’t buying it. All through breakfast, my heart races, and my leg bobs nervously beneath the table. I’m so distracted by my inner spazz attack I don’t even give Ford shit when he tugs my ponytail and says, “Thank God, not too short.”

I just roll my eyes and keep shoveling oatmeal with dried cranberries into my mouth, even though I’m not the slightest bit hungry.

But Natalie is right. I’m a runt who can’t afford to miss a meal, not if I want to be close to my fighting weight in two weeks.

Two weeks…

I have two weeks to make friends, win allies, gain twenty pounds of muscle, and figure out how to sleep without screaming out in the night and going catatonic when someone shows up to comfort me.

“Piece of f*****g cake,” I mutter over the rim of my coffee.

Natalie casts me a commiserating glance from the stove, where she’s whipping up pancakes for a second course. “Not feeling so great after the rough night?”

“I’m fine,” I say. “Just…ready to get started. The part right before the hard part is always harder than the hard part.” I sigh. “If that makes any sense. My brain is still half asleep.”

“It makes sense,” Ford says, watching me over his own mug. “It’ll be easier once we know exactly what we’re in for—meet the people, get the lay of the land. Right now, there are too many unknowns.”

“Well, they’ll be known soon,” Natalie says in an upbeat voice. “We’re only about a ninety-minute drive away from campus. We could have gone in last night, but I felt like we needed one more night on the road to get our affairs in order.” She holds up her spatula. “Which reminds me! I found something in my suitcase you can wear for your first day, Juliet. It will look perfect with your new hair and your jeans.” She motions Ford up from his chair and says, “Come take over flipping, Ford, while I grab that from my room.”

Ford rises. “Yes ma’am, happy to serve.” He takes over as Natalie hurries away, still bubbling with very mom-like “first day of school energy.”

“Not that I would know,” I say aloud.

“Know what?” Ford asks.

I shake my head. “I was just thinking that Natalie was like a mom on the first day of school. But I wouldn’t really know since my mom was never there for any of my first days.” I drag a hand down my face. “But I didn’t mean to say anything out loud. I have to get my f*****g act together or everyone at Lost Moon is going to think I’m crazy.”

“That’s okay,” he says, grinning at me as he flips the two cakes currently on the griddle. “You’re hot so the crazy is okay. Some people even like the crazy ones more.”

I hold his gaze with a deadpan stare, but he keeps grinning.

“Seriously, you’ll be fine,” he says, sounding like he actually believes it. “You just need more coffee. Drink up and I’ll start another pot.”

“Oh, yes,” Natalie says, breezing back into the room holding something pale blue and fuzzy. “I could use an extra cup this morning, too.” She holds up a short-sleeved spring sweater, a fluffy thing with puffy arms and a high collar that looks like it should be worn by a Victorian ghost. “Isn’t it sweet? I think it will be perfect on you. And you can keep it. My torso is a little too long, so it’s never been the best fit for me.”

She’s so excited and so generous—that sweater is clearly a designer original of some kind—that I can’t bring myself to tell her that it isn’t my style.

Besides, I’m not sure I know what my style is anymore. Only that it isn’t sweet little flowered dresses perfect for being murdered in or anything pink. I’m too dark on the inside to wear pink. It would be false advertising.

“Thanks so much, Natalie,” I say, forcing a smile. “It’s beautiful.”

Ford sighs and says in a high-pitched Southern accent, “Now you have me all stressed out. I don’t have anything fancy enough to make a big splash on the first day of school. What if the other kids make fun of me?”

“Why the accent?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I don’t know. It felt right. But seriously, I’m glad men have fewer choices. I don’t have the brain space for fashion.”

“Yes, best to keep it simple for the multitasking-challenged half of the species,” Natalie says. “Men really are so bad at doing more than one thing at once.”

“Agreed,” I say, grinning.

“No fair.” Ford slides the pancakes onto a plate and reaches for the batter. “You can’t gang up on me. And besides, I just talked and cooked pancakes at the same time. That’s two things at once.”

Natalie chuckles. “It’s cute that you think that’s multitasking.”

“Adorable,” I second.

“I hate you both,” he says, making me laugh.

I’m doing more of that with every passing day. If I keep it up, hopefully some of that positive energy will bleed into my subconscious and banish my nightmares.

Or I can just tell my new roommate that I almost drowned as a child or something. A little childhood trauma goes a long way when it comes to explaining things like night terrors. And in a school full of misfits and pack rejects, I’m sure I won’t be the only one with some darkness in her past.

The thought makes me feel better and by the time I’ve finished my pancakes and another cup of coffee, my anxiety has faded to a dull background hum. I dress in the jeans and my new blue sweater and let Natalie put a little light makeup on me. When she’s done, the woman looking back at me in the mirror is…lovely.

“Wow,” I say, shocked to find my eyes tearing up a little bit. “I look so normal.”

She rests a gentle hand on my back. “You’re not normal, you’re beautiful. But don’t cry. That eyeliner is a work of art I’m not certain I can recreate.”

The joke eases the emotion of the moment and I nod. “Right.” I turn from side to side, taking in the smooth fall of my blond hair around my shoulders and the faint shimmer on my cheekbones from the highlighter she used. “If you ever stop being a spy you could do makeovers for a living.”

“Thanks,” Natalie says. “But no more spy talk once we leave the safe house. Only a couple people on campus are aware of my double life and I’d like to keep it that way. If I blow my cover, I won’t be very useful on the intelligence gathering front.”

I mime locking my lips and tossing the key. “Your secret is safe with me.”

“Me, too,” Ford says, appearing in the door to the bathroom. His eyes widen when he sees me, but he doesn’t comment on my transformation. “You should come look at this Natalie. Hopefully it’s nothing, but there’s a black SUV with tinted windows driving up the road. I was messing around with the binoculars and spotted it making the turn. Maybe it’s headed to another cottage, but I don’t remember seeing many on our way up.”

Natalie instantly snaps into crisis management mode. “Show me. Juliet, get your weapon and make sure the security system is armed.”

“Got it,” I say, launching into motion. I grab my weapon, tucking it into the back of my jeans as I hurry to obey Natalie’s orders. I’m comforted by the beep of the alarm and the voice saying, “armed” as bulletproof glass slides quietly into place over the windows, but still…

Why is this happening?

My tracking device signal should still be blocked. How did our enemies find us?

Maybe it isn’t one of the bad guys. Maybe it’s just someone looking for Natalie. Or another spy in need of the safe house, who heard we were leaving this morning.

I do my best to put a hopeful spin on things, but when I join Natalie and Ford on the porch, the energy is tense.

“Any idea who it is?” I ask.

Natalie shakes her head before peering through the binoculars again. “No, but that’s the same kind of bulletproof SUV your father has in his fleet. All his top men drive them as well as the chauffeurs for the family.”

“F**k,” Ford mutters, mirroring my thoughts exactly.

“Then why are we sitting here, waiting for it?” I ask as my pulse skyrockets. “We should get the hell out of here. Now.”

“My people are watching Hammer,” Natalie says. “They would have told me if he had a force in the area. And it’s a common model for celebrities and people with concerns about personal safety. This could be a movie star on his way to his mansion. There are several higher on the mountain.”

“But what if it’s not?” I insist. “I still say we should bail. Why risk it?”

Natalie moves the binoculars from her eyes. “Inside the cottage, we’re defended by bulletproof doors and windows, and I have my atomizer and my hands free. Out on the road, we’re much more vulnerable. Especially if they have backup on the way.” She pulls her cell from the back pocket of her pants. “And we’re close enough to have backup of our own here in twenty minutes or less if necessary. I’ll put a call in and tell air defense to get the helicopter ready.”

I thread my fingers together into a single fist, fighting the urge to scream as Natalie moves inside to place her call. “I don’t like this,” I hiss at Ford. “This feels wrong. If we’d stayed put on the way here, we’d be dead by now.”

“Agreed,” he says. “But Natalie has more experience with this kind of thing than we do.”

“And you trust her?” I ask. “This much? Enough to bet your life on it?”

He exhales, dragging a hand through his close-cropped brown hair. “I don’t know. But I don’t know how we’d run or to where, either. We can’t steal her car and we’d be vulnerable on foot.”

I suck in a breath, about to say we’ll be more vulnerable sitting here like fish in a bowl, when Natalie reappears in the door, beaming, “All clear,” she says. “It’s the president of the school in her new SUV! She decided to come up and welcome you to the university personally on her way out of town. I’m so pleased.” She lowers her voice, “This is an honor, especially for as yet unaccepted students, so put on your shiny, friendly faces and help me get the tea things ready. She likes Earl Grey with honey and skim milk.”

Ford shudders. “Skim milk.”

Natalie laughs. “I know, but not everyone appreciates a creamy tea.” She claps her hands. “Come on. No time to waste. She’ll be here in a few minutes.”

I hesitate on the porch, my stomach still churning.

Ford turns back in the doorway. “Come on. It’s okay. You know how to charm people in power. Especially academics.”

I shake my head. “I don’t.”

“You were a star student seven times in school. The principal was obsessed with you. If I had a dollar for every time she said she wished I could be more like my stepsister, I could buy several pizzas.”

“That was the old me,” I say. “And something still feels wrong. Why surprise us? Why not tell Natalie in advance that she was driving up so we could be ready for her? For all she knew, we could have left early and already be gone.”

He shrugs, clearly not sharing my concern. “I don’t know, Jules. Maybe that’s just not her style. But she’s on her way here now, so we should pull it together. We want her to like us and want to help us.”

I nod and swallow past the tightness in my throat. “Okay, I’ll be there in a second.”

“I’ll get the tea stuff. Just bring yourself when you’re ready,” he says, continuing to be the kind, patient man he’s been since we careened back into each other’s orbit.

It makes me even more determined not to tell him that it was him in my dream last night. That he was stalking me through a haunted forest, growling and wild, shouting that he was going to rip me apart and burn the pieces.

That’s not Ford. That’s just my freaked-out brain trying to keep me away from anything it perceives as dangerous, which apparently includes people who want to get close to me for good reasons as well as bad ones. Any kind of closeness feels like a threat, a knife aimed at the places where I’m already torn and bleeding.

So, when I step into the living room to see an eerily familiar looking woman seated on the couch, balancing a cup of tea on her knee, my first response is to lash out. To scream and throw things and demand to know what the f**k is going on.

Instead, I clench my jaw and curl my hands into fists at my sides and ask Natalie, “Did you know?”

Ford, seated beside the woman, arches a brow, silently asking what’s going on, but I can’t answer that question.

Not right now, not when my head is about to explode.

Natalie, on her way in from the kitchen with a small container of honey and a spoon, blinks in what seems like genuine confusion. “Know what, darling?” She shoots a pointed look my way over the blond woman’s head, a clear plea to sit down and play nice, but I can’t.

I can’t sit and pretend I don’t recognize this woman’s face from the pictures squirreled away in my childhood memory box. Can’t pretend I don’t see my grandmother reflected in her high cheekbones or realize that the eyes studying me like a specimen under glass are the exact shape and color as my own.

“Sit down, Juliet,” the woman says, a hint of my grandmother’s French accent in her words, as well. “We have much to discuss and not much time.”

“Sure, no problem,” I say, my voice rising as I stay exactly where I am, standing in an open door and ready to run, if needed. “We can just skip over the whole, you’re my mother but you abandoned me to be raised by my psychotic father and let me think you were dead for twenty-three years part and move on to more important things. No problem.”

Ford lets out a shocked sound and turns to look at the woman next to him, but she doesn’t look back.

Her cool gaze is still fixed on me.

She sighs. “I was afraid you’d react this way. That’s why I wanted our first meeting to take place off school grounds. You can’t afford to lose control at Lost Moon. There’s too much at stake and no one can know of our connection.”

“Our connection?” I say, seething inside, the anger building in my b***d quickly getting too hot to handle. “We don’t have a connection. You’re a daughter-abandoning a*****e and can get f****d for all I care.”

Her nostrils flare. “I see you have your father’s mouth.”

“I don’t have a father, he sold me into slavery,” I practically snarl. “And I don’t have a mother, either. And if you think I’m going to that school now that I know you’re the one in charge, you’re f*****g crazy.”

I spin and dash out onto the porch, jumping the railing. I land in the grass in a crouched position, but I’m up and running again a beat later, sprinting down the mountain away from the cottage as Ford calls my name.

But I can’t stop. I have to keep running or the emotions swelling inside me will pull me under and smother me alive.

I head into the woods and cut to the left, having no idea where I’m going, only that I have to get as far away from here as possible.

I don’t belong at Lost Moon.

I’m not sure I belong anywhere, but I’d rather die than beg my deadbeat mother for protection.

The thought is barely through my head when I hear a deep snarling sound from up ahead. I skid to a stop just as a massive red wolf with fangs as long as my hand leaps into the small clearing ahead, his burning gaze fixed on me.

Need more Juliet and Ford?