Page 6 of Defeated

Back inside the living room, I pick up a box and tape, pretending I don’t hear the soft, almost inaudible creak from the front door. A door I purposely left open to tempt whoever was doing the watching.

Colton told me about a pack in the city hunting a female shifter. He dealt with some, others followed him to Winter Lake, and we dealt with those. But there must have been more waiting. Another reason I wanted to arrive before Colton and Penny.

On the surface, I’m the same calm Chris Winters I’ve been since I met Mack, five years before, and he told me he wanted to build a pack in Winter Lake, Upstate New York. Would I like to join it?

Inside, I’ve been slowly falling apart. For years. Barely holding the ghosts back, I need to release all this pent up rage before I explode. What better way to do it than here in this town outside Jersey City, about four hours away from Winter Lake?

Like always, the flashbacks come with no warning, leaving me no time to prepare myself.

I’ll never forget the devastation on my old packmates’ faces in Iowa when I carried Gracie’s body back to the house, and how I wished I had been the dead one, not her.

“It wasn’t your fault, Chris,” Douglas, the alpha, says when he finds me staring into the middle-distance instead of scrubbing the blood off my hands.

“Who took her out there? Who promised nothing would happen to her?” I ask, with the phantom sensation I still have Gracie’s body in my arms an hour later.

The alpha doesn’t have an answer for me, because there isn’t one.

I finish cleaning Gracie’s dried blood off my hands, and I pack my bag. After Gracie’s funeral, I leave the pack where I was born and believed I would die.

I never look back.

I carry the memory of Gracie’s death with me.

When the wind rattles a window blind, I refocus on the reason I’m here.

To deal with shifters who would chase a terrified girl through the streets, forcing Colton to intervene. Maybe I’ll survive this fight coming. Maybe I won’t.

But maybe I deserve the beating I’m about to give the wolf who smells like maple and wild rose, sneaking into the room behind me.

I turn.

A sleek gray wolf with liquid gold eyes silently snarls at me from the doorway, and I know, with every fiber of my being, that this wolf is not the enemy I expected to face down.

We stare at each other, the snarling wolf and I.

I put down the book I picked up from the bookcase. It thumps when it hits the bottom of the cardboard box I taped up and left beside the dark wood coffee table.

I don’t look away and I don’t blink. To do either would invite an attack.

“I’m Chris,” I say.

The wolf doesn’t cock its head to show its interest. Or her head. Because despite the aggression in her snarl, the fur bristling with rage, and her back legs poised to spring at me, I think I know exactly what this wolf is here to do.

She’s here to defend Colton’s apartment from a suspected intruder.

Me.

“I assume you’re the female shifter Colton saved.” I cock my head, scratching my jaw as I think. “Now, what did he say your name was?”

3

ZOE

Asnarl bleeds from my lips.

The shifter with the surprisingly calm voice doesn’t react in any noticeable way. He maintains his thoughtful expression as he studies me.

My hind legs bunch as I prepare to tear out his throat.

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