Page 13 of Trick Me
Tentacles—because apparently someone decided this bathroom needed tentacles—curl around the base of the sink and up the sides of the stalls. They’re carved from what might be obsidian or maybe something else entirely.
The chandelier overhead shouldn’t exist. It’s made from what appear to be water droplets, each one catching and throwing light in ways that create rippling shadows across every surface.
“Thirty-two years,” I inform the swordfish mounted on the far wall, wringing out my jacket. “I’ve survived without a mate this far. Would another decade kill them? Suddenly the pack needs their Alpha paired off.”
Nine months. That’s how long my father has been dead. And it’s been fucking bliss being out from under his shadow, his constant criticism, his iron-fisted control over every aspect of pack life. The bastard clung to life through pure spite, too mean to die even when his organs started shutting down oneby one. The pack celebrated for three days straight when he finally stopped breathing. Bonfires and drinking and dancing because the tyrant was finally gone.
I didn’t celebrate. I stood over his grave in the rain, waiting to feel something. Relief, satisfaction, maybe even grief. Instead, I felt nothing. Just the weight of becoming everything he said I could never be, inheriting a pack held together by fear rather than loyalty.
Now the elders want me mated. Want the bloodline secured. Want little Alpha babies running around to ensure the pack’s future. As if I don’t have enough problems trying to rebuild what my father destroyed, trying to earn trust instead of demanding obedience through violence.
Movement catches my eye. The swordfish’s tail fin twitches.
I freeze, watching. The fin goes still. My imagination, obviously. Too much fae magic in the air making me see things that aren’t there. I turn back to the sink, running more water over my jacket.
The swordfish gasps.
Not a small movement, not a trick of the light. A full-body shudder that sends cracks spreading through the mounting plaque like lightning through glass. The wood splinters, screws ripping free from the wall with sounds like tiny gunshots. The preserved fish—the very dead, very stuffed fish—tears free from its mountand hits the marble floor with a wet slap that echoes off every surface.
For a moment, I just stare at it. Then, with the kind of calm that comes from having seen too much weird shit to be properly surprised anymore, I walk over and crouch beside the supposedly deceased fish.
It’s flopping. Not just twitching, but full-on thrashing, tail slapping against the marble hard enough to crack the tiles. Gills desperately trying to pull in water that isn’t there. The glass eye is rolling wildly in its socket before fixing on me with an expression I can only describe as pissed off. The fish’s mouth opens and closes, and I swear I can hear it trying to scream.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” I tell it conversationally, maintaining eye contact because looking away from a resurrected swordfish feels like admitting defeat.
The fish’s response is to thrash harder, its sword scraping against the marble.
“Whatever magic runs this house, I want no part of it. You hearing me, fish? This is your problem now.”
The temperature drops so fast that my next breath comes out as fog. Frost spreads across the mirrors in fractals that look almost like writing in a language I don’t recognize. The chandelier overhead dims, its water droplets freezing solid with tiny cracking sounds.
That’s when Mikael walks through the wall.
My heart doesn’t just skip; it stops entirely, a full second of absolute stillness before slamming back to life hard enough that I’m surprised my ribs don’t crack.
“Fuck no.” The word comes out strangled, barely recognizable as human speech. “No, no, no. Not possible. Not fucking possible. You’re dead.”
Mikael stands there in the battle gear he died in, and the detail is horrifying in its perfection. Black vest torn open at the chest, revealing not just the wounds that killed him but also the damage beneath—broken ribs visible through ghostly flesh, one lung collapsed, the strange angle of his shoulder where it had been dislocated in the fight. Three claw marks run from his throat to his stomach, so deep that, in life, you could see his spine through the gore.
The memory hits with the force of a sledgehammer to the chest…
Rain turning the battlefield into a swamp of mud and blood. The warehouse district, abandoned since the last surge, now crawling with Bruck pack members who’d taken a local pack’s children. Forty-three of them, all under sixteen, stolen from their beds while we’d been dealing with a territory dispute up north.
Twenty of us against twice that many. Not good odds, but the ferals that make up the Bruck pack are usually disorganized, fighting each other as much as theirenemies. These ones were different. Coordinated. Led by Cain and his younger brother, Tobias. Their father rules the wild pack, but he’s too old now and lets his sons make the calls.
Mikael on my left, and his twin, Magnus, on my right. The plan was simple. Hold the bridge while our strike team extracted the children.
The first wave hit like a tsunami of teeth and claws. Bodies everywhere, the screaming of children mixing with howls of rage and pain. I was fighting three at once when I heard Mikael’s roar cut short. Turned to see him separated from the line, surrounded by six ferals who’d clearly targeted him specifically.
“Ash!” His voice, desperate. “Ash, help!”
But if I left the line, if I abandoned the bridge, the ferals would flood through. The strike team would be trapped. More would die.
“Hold the line!” I roared, even as I watched them tear into him. Even as he screamed my name with his last breath. Even as Magnus begged me to save his brother, tears mixing with rain and blood on his face.
All the children were saved. Seven warriors lost. Mikael died calling for me, and I let him, because that’s what Alphas do. We make the hard choices. We sacrifice the few for the many.
We live with the ghosts.
