Page 33 of Her Convict Wolf

I spend a lot of time cooking. The kitchen is high-spec and it’s a dream to cook in. Maxim buys me some extra utensils, as well as the long list of ingredients I give him. All day long, I try out new recipes, and at lunchtime and in the evening, I feed him. He’s always full of compliments and helpful suggestions.

While I’m cooking up a storm in the kitchen, he runs his business remotely, at the little wooden dining table, his huge frame hunched over his laptop, right by my side. Then in the afternoons, when the sun has lost its fierce heat, we tend the garden together.

One beautiful day after another.

I love what we’re building together. Every day I fall more and more deeply for him. I feel like we’ve always been together. I even forget that there was this long period when we weren’t in each other’s lives.

We’re in a perfect bubble.

Except for that one thing that keeps nagging at me: his brother. Rotting in jail.

Maxim doesn’t talk about him a lot, except to say that he’s a real good guy, and the charges against him were bullshit. But I know he must be weighing heavily on his mind.

And I can’t stop thinking that it’s my fault. Maxim gave up his chance to help his brother in favor of saving me.

“You can leave me here by myself for a while, you know?” I tell him one morning. He’s just come back from a run in the forest, and his eyes have that wild, intense look they always get when he’s just shifted back from his wolf form.

“What?”

“If you need to go and help your brother. I’ll be okay here.”

“No!” he almost shouts. Still naked, he strides across the cabin, snatches me up in his arms and plants me down on the kitchen counter. “You’re mine, Emory.” He presses his forehead to mine. “A wolf does not leave its mate.Ever.You hear me?”

“I hear you,” I say, startled by his fierceness.

“There was a reason why things unfolded the way they did that day.”

That day. All those things that could’ve stopped us from meeting. He could’ve been in a different chain gang. Another restaurant could’ve agreed to supply lunch. I could’ve refused to deliver it. All those little happenings that conspired to enable that unlikely meeting to happen. It gives me shivers to think about it.

How easily he could’ve slipped through my fingers.

He strokes my hair. “I’m working on helping my brother,” he tells me. “But leaving you here, unprotected, is not the answer.”

* * *

That evening,a seed of an idea plants itself in my head, and I do something I haven’t done for a long time—I Google my father’s case.

And when I click on the first result that appears, my stomach plummets:

Head of Manzonicrime family set to walk free as witnesses alter testimony en masse

Says the news headline.

“Motherfucker,” I whisper. He’s done it. He’s got to them all.

The trial is set to continue on Monday morning, on what is expected to be the final day of the hearing. It’s believed that, unless any new evidence is uncovered at the eleventh hour, Manzoni is likely to be found not guilty of the many, many crimes with which he has been charged. Legal experts describe this as the worst travesty of justice that has ever occurred in this country.

I swallow hard to stop myself from throwing up.

Previously, my father was looking at life without parole.

The FBI read out a list of charges to me while they were convincing me to testify against him. I was in tears before they’d gotten a quarter of the way through.

I’ve long since emotionally detached from the reality that it’smyfather, my own flesh and blood, who’s been doing these despicable things. I just feel so, so awful for his victims.

Now, every single one of them has been intimidated—or worse—into not testifying against him.

Except for one.

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