Page 1 of Destined Predator
Prologue
The night after the attack, the Double T was too quiet.
Rhett Tucker stepped onto the porch, the screen door whispering shut behind him. The air was cool and sharp, carrying the bite of pine and the faint metallic tang of blood that hadn’t yet washed out of the soil. The fences gleamed silver under the moon, running for miles in both directions, as if the land itself were holding its breath after the chaos of the last twenty-four hours.
Inside, Jack’s laughter carried faintly down the hall, tangled up with Ben’s deeper voice. They were safe. Together. That should’ve been enough to make Rhett’s heart settle.
It didn’t.
He rubbed his jaw where Aldan’s punch had left a bruise. His knuckles were still sore from the return hit. He’d grown up believing that hard work and grit could fix anything—fences, engines, people—but grit hadn’t prepared him forshifters. Coywolves. Whatever the hell Ernesto had been before disappearing into the night.
Rhett leaned against the porch post, staring out toward the tree line. That’s where Casey Akers had gone, back into the dark with his brothers, all teeth, fur and secrets.
Casey had said they’d keep watch. Rhett didn’t doubt it. Even now, he could almost feel eyes on him from the woods, a prickle running down the back of his neck.
Maybe he should’ve told them to stay off his land. Maybe he should’ve thanked them. He didn’t know which would’ve been harder.
He let out a slow breath, steam curling in the cold air. The world he’d known—cattle and weather reports, broken fences and long days—had split wide open. Monsters were real, and one of them had risked his life to save Rhett’s brother.
“You don’t trust us yet,” Casey had said, his voice low and rough, a challenge wrapped in heat.
Rhett scowled, trying to shake it off. Trust didn’t come easy, especially when a man’s pulse still kicked every time he thought of another man’s mouth.
He shoved his hands into his pockets and kept his gaze fixed on the horizon. Whatever storm was brewing out there, rival packs, hunters, things that went bump in the dark, he’d face it head-on. He was a Tucker. He didn’t back down.
But when the coyotes started up in the distance, their howls rising and falling like a warning, the hair on his arms stood on end.
Somewhere beyond the fence line, he knew, Casey Akers was listening too.
Rhett straightened, set his jaw, and went back inside. Tomorrow, there’d be cattle to tend, fences to mend…and maybe, finally, some answers about the man he couldn’t stop thinking about.
Chapter One
Man.
Rhett stared at his reflection in the shaving mirror.
He bobbed down to his right, so his face showed in the corner with the splintered crack. He blinked, then studied his altered image, seeing his strong jaw elongated to exaggerated proportions and, when he ducked lower still, how his hazel eyes fractured and his short dark hair looked long and bushy, like a pelt.
Monster.
No. That wasn’t right. Wasn’t fair.
Beast.
He leaned closer to the mirror until the fogged glass blurred his face. Maybe it wasn’t claws or fangs that made a monster. Maybe it was how a man froze when life demanded he change. Jack hadn’t frozen—he’d leapt. Rhett still felt stuck somewherebetween the man he’d always been and the man he was supposed to become.
He’d seen monsters now—real ones—and the memory lived under his skin like a splinter that wouldn’t work its way free. But the truth that scared him most was simpler. None of those beasts had looked half as lost as he did right now.
He closed his eyes, but it didn’t stop him seeing beasts, the coyote and wolf shifters who’d fought a turf war on Double T land, or the biggest beast of all of them, the one his foreman Ernesto had turned into. A terrifying, giant wolf-demon hybrid out of a nightmare who’d slayed and slaughtered—
Nope, not going there.Tucker bent from the mirror to the sink so he could scoop water onto his face, splashing at any leftover shaving foam then patting with a towel to remove the last traces. He even wiped behind his ears and wriggled the corner of the towel into them, first one, then the other.
Go with cologne?He did have a bottle, and it was a scent he liked, but it’d been a present from his ex-girlfriend, Olivia, and it felt plain wrong to wear it on a date with someone else.
Rhett straightened his shirt—he should have ironed it. “Bathroom steam never works,” he reminded himself, needing to fill the silence. The sound of his voice didn’t work to plug the gap, and he circled back to what had been consuming him since he’d found out…that shifters existed.
He prided himself on being a plain-thinking rancher like his father, one who believed in what he could see and touch, like his land, or his cattle. And now, that includedpeoplewho turned into animals. Whowereanimals. Some were murderous, terrifying monsters, and some were, if not angels, then more on the side of good as they went about their lives. Oh, and his brother had fallen hard and fast for one.
