Page 3 of Promise & Artem

“Huh, what?” Jessi asked.

“I just…never thought about it.”

“Of course not, because no one ever talks about hyenas unless I come to town. I can call Ally, she’s one of the main owners. I’m sure she’d let you stay in one of their cabins for a while so you can explore. Plus, being in the mountains, there’s no telling what other shifter groups are around, not just the hyenas and wolves, but maybe bears or big cats.”

“That would be really awesome. Would you have her call me?”

“You bet.”

Jett finished filling the tank and handed the card and receipt to her. “Good luck,” he said.

“Thanks. See you guys later.”

Promise walked into the shop to say hi to her dad, with thoughts of the Pennsylvania campground on her mind.

Artem Connelly danced around the ring, sweat rolling down his upper body. His beast rolled under his skin, and he was so damn tempted to shift that he wanted to bellow.

He couldn’t shift, though. The last time he’d shifted, he had trouble getting back to his human form. A terrifying six hours later, he’d finally been able to return to human, but since then he’d tried not to shift.

He’d just turned twenty-four.

He had one more year, give or take, to find his truemate, or one day after he turned twenty-five, he’d shift into his minotaur form and be stuck that way forever. It was the curse of being a minotaur and it hung around his neck like a noose. The curse meant without his truemate by his side, one day he’d shift and that would be it. No returning to human. So he fought shifting as much as he could, because he was worried he wouldn’t be able to come back to himself.

Not shifting and getting older made his beast nuts and the aggression was hard to manage, so he followed in his father’s footsteps and joined an underground shifter fighting group.

His vision blurred as a bear’s meaty fist narrowly missed his cheek. Dodging to the side and bringing his focus back to the fight, he decided he’d fucked around long enough and ended thefight by attacking the bear with the full weight of his aggression. The male was bigger than Artem, but a few well-placed punches to the face and the male went down in a groaning heap.

The crowd cheered. Mostly human, they apparently liked paying to watch and bet on shifters beating each other all to hell.

Nero Hilliard, owner and former alpha wolf, had been ousted by his pack for fighting his pack members for money. Alphas were meant to lead, and the fact that he’d been harming his people by fighting them and been subjected to a coup that stripped him of his rank and authority would have hurt him gravely. Not to mention the fact that his former pack had a lot of balls to oust him in the first place, because it was not an easy task to take a male in that position and force him out. People died during coups. Since he'd been removed from power, he’d been running the underground fights for a decade, moving into an area under the radar of any government agencies who disliked unofficial shifter fighting groups.

Nero strode out into the middle of the ring and lifted Artem’s hand in the air. “Winner, Artem the Bull! Our next fight is in ten minutes, folks. Be sure to place your bets, it’ll be a wild one!”

He dropped Artem’s hand and said, “You got distracted out there.”

“Sorry.”

“Well, how would it look if my best fighter got felled by an out-of-shape bear like Roy? Come on, the male reeks of alcohol and he’s got a beer belly the size of a keg.”

“I won’t let it happen again.” Artem unwound the tape from his hands and flexed his fingers.

“See that you don’t.”

It would be a lot easier to ensure the distractions didn’t get the better of him if he could find his damn truemate. Without her, he was a ticking time bomb. He either seemed tobe distracted or an out-of-control maniac when it came to the fights.

Walking through the crowd, he made his way to the locker room and tossed his used tape. He washed his hands and dried them at the row of sinks, then went to his locker to get the supplies to tape up his hands again.

His phone buzzed and he was surprised to see a text from his sister Isolde. Unlike him, Isolde took after their mother and was a snowy owl shifter. But that was the way of minotaur shifters. The males took after their father and the females after their mother. There were no female minotaurs.

Hell, he and his dad were the only ones in North America as far as they knew.

And there was the tiny detail that his parents didn’t know he was spending his nights fighting shifters for money. Not only had his father told him that illegal fighting rings were built by deranged males who would do anything to win and rarely cared if the fighters were hurt or killed so they should be avoided at all cost, but if he was caught by the authorities, he’d be imprisoned and face a long and lonely life behind bars.

It wasn’t about the money, though.

It was about letting out the aggression from his minotaur so he didn’t blow up at his family or friends. Living and working at the Freshwater Campground was something he truly loved, and he couldn’t imagine doing anything else. But he also knew he had a finite amount of time left before he hit the point of no return and became a monster forever.

He answered his sister’s text asking if he’d take her to town in the morning so she could pick up an old desk from the online market everyone seemed to love.

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