Page 1 of Pack Kasen: Part 2

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KAT

“You need a hand, Kat?” Rachel, my roommate, calls out as I walk out of my room and head toward the staircase.

“I’m good.” Strange to think I’m carrying almost everything I own in a box I can barely see over the top.

Four years of college and it’s finally over.

I’m a graduate.

In two weeks, I’ll be starting my dream junior accountancy job with the best firm in the city. It doesn’t give me long to get myself settled into my big girl apartment before I’m working in an office from nine to five.

I’ve worked so hard to reach this point, and now, it’s finally here.

There won’t be anyone booting the foster kid from home to home anymore.

No more social workers or being looked down on.

So why am I already dreading the end of my two weeks of freedom?

“At least let me get the door for you,” Rachel mutters, yanking it open before I can reach for it. “Miss Independent woman who disappears for a week and reappears just in time to give a graduation speech that gets a standing ovation. Then she carries a box bigger than I am down three flights of stairs.”

“It’s only two flights, and it’s mostly bedding,” I say with a grin.

And plates, books, a heavy ornament and a few more things that a girl my size should not be able to carry so easily.

Rolling her eyes, she holds the door open for me. “Whatever.”

Outside, on a beautiful late spring day, other seniors are busy emptying the wheeled carts they pull from their dorm rooms. Their parents help them pack trucks, cars, and pickups with their belongings. As a foster kid who aged out of the system, I don’t have any help.

Rachel would have given me a hand, but she’s busy packing up her room, and she has a ton more stuff than I do. I can do it on my own.

After my disappearance right before graduation, everyone thought the Gregson Campus killer had gotten me.

I’d stupidly gone hunting under the bleachers, encountering two men who could change into a wolf, when I’d always believed I was the only one who could.

The men had kidnapped me, dragging me to northern Montana, where I was the prisoner of the Wolf King, a man who makes me grind my teeth every time I think of him.

Rachel went to the cops thinking I was dead, and while I’ve never appreciated her loud sex and screaming arguments with her boyfriend, it’s nice to know someone gave a shit when I suddenly disappeared.

I’m not sure if the cops believed me when I told them that, between the murders on campus, hurting from my ex-boyfriend Doug’s death, and stress about graduation, I was too overwhelmed to tell anyone that I had a personal emergency I had to deal with.

The cops gave me a stern look and told me to be better about not worrying my friends.

Luckily, they didn’t search under the bleachers because they would have found the sneakers I’d removed before I’d been kidnapped, and they would have known my disappearance wasn’t as innocent as I’d led them to believe.

They will never know that I spent the last few days locked in a silver cage by a shifter who calls himself the Wolf King.

My mate.

I still don’t know how to feel about that or evenwhatto feel. I've had little time to think between the graduation ceremony and getting ready to move off campus. Just pack, sign the lease for my new apartment, and get ready to move.

Halfway to the parking lot, I spot a tall, sandy-haired man with light green eyes leaning against the back of my car.

Finan.

Cursing under my breath, I slow to a crawl. If I weren’t carrying this massive box, I’d have run for it. But this is my stuff. I can’t just leave it. I’m debating turning around and walking back to my dorm when Finan looks right at me.

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