Page 26 of Fated to the Wolf Billionaire

She shook her head ruefully. “Most of the books aren’t in English, for one. But the ones that are don’t exactly have lists of different species. Leigh is only reading books with dragons on the covers, and Oli found one mention of merfolk, which sounded promising but didn’t have much information.”

“Merfolk, really?” I sat back in the seat. I had never encountered a mer, so, I had no idea if that was even possible. It would definitely be something we couldn’t scent on her, though, as water was a natural scent dampener. “Well, don’t stress. It’s not the end of the world to not know. We will figure it out eventually.”

Fiona bit her lip and looked away, clearly not agreeing with my assessment. I slid a finger under her chin, steering her gaze back to my own.

“I don’t care. You know that, right? I mean, I care aboutyou, but it doesn’t matter to me even a little that you’re not a wolf. You’re mine, and that’s enough.”

Her shoulders relaxed, her eyes searching my expression for tells. “What if I’m something awful? Some of these creatures sound evil.”

She pointed at a page in the book she was reading to a nasty-looking gnarled draugr, his flesh melting between a rusty, dented Viking helmet and a scraggly beard, eyes glowing a sickly green in the illustration.

The caption underneath read:It wasoft thought greedy warriors, condemned to an eternity of fetid rot, haunted their fellows to remind them to live life well before death gripped them in their clutches.

“You are not a Norse draugr,” I chided.

“But until we know what I am, we can’t know that I’m not.”

I chuckled, pulling her into my chest and running my hand over her back. She melted against me, and the bone-deep satisfaction I felt at the tiny bit of submission from her was almost enough to knock me off my chair.

My wolf rumbled, the low sound meant to soothe. Her happy sigh told me it was working, wolf or no.

“You’re a good person, and that is true regardless of what we find out about your ancestry. Besides, we don’t believe any beings to be inherently good or bad. I mean, some people might say vampires, but even I can admit that not all vampires are terrible.”

“But you’d know if I was a vampire, right?” she asked, face still pressed against my shoulder, fingers gripping my shirt for dear life.

“Absolutely, we’d be able to smell that. You’re not.”

Her stomach rumbled in feeble protest, and I kissed her on top of her head. “Come on. Let me feed you, and you guys can fill us in on what you found and how we can help.”

I wasn’t excited about the idea of hunching over another table for the next four hours like I had the last, but the company would be infinitely better this go-round.

* * *

Once everyone had eatentheir fill, we all spread out around the table of books.

“So far, our list of possibilities includes pixies, merfolk, dragons, and trolls.”

“Do any of them have a power or feature we can test so we can see if it fits?” I asked, looking over the list Brielle had passed me, tidily cited with reference materials that mentioned each species.

Brielle shrugged. “Well, she hasn’t shifted into a dragon or pixie, but she can see magic in a way we can’t, which, for all we know, a dragoncoulddo. Merfolk seems harder to test. Most of what we were able to find indicates that pure merfolk can only leave the ocean for one day per year, before they begin to dry out and pine for the sea. There was no mention of what happens to any half-human children that result from those annual wanderings on land.”

“Trolls are massive and are said to smell swampy. Given that she’s no taller than the rest of us and said her grandmother wasn’t either, that seems unlikely. But you’re her mate. Is there any swamp to her scent?”

“Nope. She smells sweet, floral, andmine.” I dragged in a deep lungful of her scent, making Fiona blush as I illustrated my complete pleasure with her scent for the whole group to see.

“Basically, we’ve got bupkis,” Leigh summed up tidily, biting into another brownie at the end of the table while flipping the page in her book.

“That’s not entirely true. Ruling things out is still helpful. Sometimes the process of elimination is the best method,” I said, squeezing Fiona’s hand.

More than anything, I didn’t want her to worry or be discouraged. It really didn’t matter to me. As long as she had enough magic in her blood to be mine, the rest was just details. But I could see why she would care, and if she wanted to know, I wanted to help her find out.

“Yeah, but what happens when we run out of books we can read and we’re still no closer to an answer?” The despair was written plain on her face, and I hated it. Mywolfhated it. Despair wasn’t how we convinced her to stay with us, where she was safe and loved and part of the pack.

“Gael and I both speak and read several languages. I’ll start in on the books in French. Dirge can take Romanian. We can ask Gael to tackle Spanish. I’m sure some of the maidens who speak other languages would be happy to help in their free time if we asked.”

Olivia dropped a book, the sharp sound of it slamming against the table stopping me in my tracks, and making us all turn in her direction. Her eyes were wide with excitement. “Wh-what if we don’t need to read them?”

“Uh, do you know another way to extract information from paper that we don’t know about?” Elodie asked, a joking gleam in her eyes even though her shoulders were sloped with exhaustion.

---