Page 1 of Broken Chains

Peyton

Chapter 1

I’m destined to live a mundane and boring existence. Nothing exciting will ever happen in my life. I train regularly and prepare for every possible scenario, but nothing ever happens to me.

I get up. I go to work. Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, but it’s the same people, mostly the same food, the same everything every day. I come home. I still live with my parents and one of my sisters. It’s kind of pathetic. If I’m not working the dinner shift, I’m training with Ruby and Shelby, but even that’s gotten to be monotonous.

I don’t know how to pull myself out of this rut. I’m not daring like Lizzy, or adventurous like Clara. I’m not even bold, like Ruby, or loving and caring like Shelby. Maddie is the true definition of a survivor, and Thomas is the baby of the family and golden boy, the only son and current Alpha of our wolf shifter pack. I’m the middle child, the easily forgotten one.

Is it really too much to ask for something exciting to happen to me for once?

I plopped down on my bed after a long day at work, staring at the ceiling. It wasn’t long before I heard my bedroom door creak open. I didn't even open my eyes as the weight of the bed shifted. Shelby had been sneaking into my room and crawling into my bed since we were young kids.

"Rough day?" I asked.

"Yeah, those kids are great, but they're exhausting," she said.

Shelby had started working with the local youth center while she continued online classes towards a degree in education. She hadn't always wanted to be a teacher, but I think she was feeling stagnant in life, a lot like me lately, and searching for a career, or at least something to do with her life.

"Any good stories to share?"

"No, but it was kind of tough. Ben's little brothers were in my group today. I hadn't seen them in a while. Troy looks so much like him at that age, and Will has his personality, and smile," she pouted.

Ben was Shelby's best friend in the entire world, but the second they'd graduated he’d taken off and joined the military. She wrote to him every week for years and at first, he had replied to her letters, but one day they just stopped coming. She knew from his parents that he was still alive, and I knew she still wrote to him every week, but she had finally stopped sending them. I hated Ben for how much he'd hurt her. There had never been anything romantic between them that I was aware of, but they had been inseparable for years and closer than any two people I'd ever known. I knew she still missed him a lot, like a void that nothing seemed to fill. I hoped this new career path helped ease that some. Then again, Shelby had changed jobs more than most people change their underwear, and that was only a slight exaggeration.

"I'm sorry Ben's an ass. I wish there was something I could do."

"I'm over it," Shelby said.

"You're not."

"I know, but it helps to pretend," she confessed.

These type of late-night chats were normal for us and I wasn't sure what I would do without Shelby. Of all my sisters, I was closest to her.

She never stayed the night, though, and just as she snuck in, she soon snuck back out and I was alone in the dark.

Shelby and I were the only two of our siblings not mated. I wasn't convinced Shelbs would ever take a mate because I think she secretly loved Ben and just wasn't willing to admit it. Of course I wanted to see her happy, but I also liked that I wasn't entirely alone, either.

It wasn't like I required much. I'd always been a homebody, a mama's girl. I loved to cook and spent most of my time in the kitchen. When my friend Kate decided to open a diner and asked if I'd be interested in cooking, I jumped at the opportunity.

I had no formal culinary training, but I was obsessed with Food Network and loved experimenting with new recipes. I had been helping Mom bake for as long as I could remember. Always tied to her shirttail, people would say.

It wasn't that I was necessarily shy, I was just introverted and didn't require a lot of friends or outside stimulus. Having six siblings at home had meant I really didn't need friends. They were my friends and they were enough, until they just weren't around anymore, busy living their own lives.

Oliver

Chapter 2

I waited until the boys were asleep before sneaking out. I was a grown ass man and shouldn't have to sneak out of my own house, but it wasn't worth upsetting the old man. The only reason I stayed was for my brothers. They needed me—I was all they had left in life.

Our mom was human. What she saw in my piece of shit father was beyond my comprehension. When I was eleven, he got drunker than usual one night and confessed to her what he was—a wolf shifter. I remember that night so clearly. She laughed, thinking he was joking, and it had pissed him off. He'd shifted right there in front of her and about scared the life out of her.

My mom was certainly no saint. While my dad drank all the time, I couldn't remember a moment that my mother wasn't high. I rarely touched alcohol and refused to do drugs because of the two of them. I just couldn't. My worst fear in life was ending uplike them. I could even handle being stuck in this shithole for the rest of my life, as long as I didn't end up like them.

My three little brothers had been so young on that fateful night: Brady, only four, Timothy two, and Kenneth barely a year old.

Mom had freaked out seeing Dad in his wolf form. Since she was human and he was a shifter, nobody knew what that would mean for me and my brothers. We could have inherited the shifter gene, or we could have been entirely human. Only time would tell, as I remember him explaining that to her in slurred words. She'd looked right at me and called me an abomination that never should have been born.

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