Page 3 of Royal Protector

I was a natural explorer and wanderer, and staying stuck in a Rougarou village in the Bayou wasn’t my nature. So I had left at age eighteen, and ten years later, I was on my way back to join them once again.

I’m not lying to myself. There’s nothing noble or self-sacrificing about what I’m doing. I’m only doing it for Jack. He’d gotten me out of enough scrapes in our childhood that I owed him ten times over.

But there was nothing truly waiting for me in New Orleans. I had no Mate. I had no family. The only thing I cared about was the next rush of adrenaline, the next adventure. So instead, I was volunteering to become another cog in Pack politics.

I could deal with witchcraft, magical attacks, and silver bullets, but this? This was something I might not survive.

ISABELLA

Hugo, my trainer, is a beast, and not just because he’s a werewolf. He’s been training me since I was six and had the same body he had then—six foot five, with arms and legs comparable to sycamore trunks. I’ve seen him make grown men cry within seconds.

And currently, that beast of a man is on the floor, cursing my name in breathless Spanish. How he can sound both annoyed and proud simultaneously is beyond me.

“That’s another one for me,” I grin down at him, wiping my damp hands on my clingy gym shorts before holding one out to help him up from the floor.

“Well done,princesa,” he says, standing and wincing as he rolls his shoulder. “You must have a good trainer to be able to bring me down so quickly.”

“I have an excellent trainer,” I say with a deadpan face, poking him in the ribs. “Just one who is too old and feeble to beat me anymore.”

He feigns an angry growl and lunges for me, but I drop to the floor mat, tucking in my limbs and rolling out of the way. He spins back into a fighting stance and is about to attack again when a throat clears, stopping our fight instantly.

“I’ll take it from here,” says Martina, my advisor, as she steps into the gym.

Hugo straightens, going from trainer mode to obedient soldier in an instant. Even so, I see his left leg is slightly crooked in a limp. He’ll probably have a few hours of discomfort before his werewolf genetics kick in and heal him back to normal.

He nods, dismissing him, and he leaves the room, hopefully to ice some of those bruises I gave him during today’s session.

“How was your training?” Martina takes a black hairband from her pocket and pulls her silky gray hair back into a tight bun, not a single strand out of place.

“Very good,” I say, bouncing in a low squat to relieve the ache in my thigh muscles. “I beat Hugo again. Twice.”

“I see,” she says in a neutral tone, and I sigh inwardly. Would it kill Martina to give me any praise at all on my improvements? “Then let’s begin.” She crouches into a low defensive stance. She is several inches shorter than my five-six but much more lethal. I have yet to beat her in all of my twenty-two years, even though she is more than twice my age.

We spar for a few moments, casually ducking and weaving, testing each other, but neither of us landing any particularly strong blows. When she aims a high kick toward my chest, I bend back far enough that her ankle just sweeps past my skin.

When I swing a left punch at her jaw, she grabs my fist and sidesteps away, squeezing until I have to yank my hand away. We are almost equally matched, and if my training continues to improve, there’s always a chance that I may soon beat her. I look forward to that day.

Suddenly, Martina freezes, her eyes widening in horror at something behind me. I spin around to look at what has terrified her—and she sweeps her leg into my unprotected knees, sending me sprawling to the mat and knocking the wind right out of me.

“You . . . you cheated!” I cough out, gasping for sweet oxygen. I hate this feeling where my body knows what it needs, but my lungs just don’t want to work. “You’ve never done that before.”

“Just because I haven’t doesn’t mean I won’t ever.” She rechecks her hair for loose strands.

She doesn’t offer a hand to help me up, so I scramble to my feet once my lungs start working in a normal rhythm again. The back of my knees throb; I will feel her bruising touch there for days.

“But that’s not fair,” I stammer, shocked that my rules-obsessed advisor would pull such an underhanded move.

She raises a sharp gray eyebrow and then begins her cool-down stretching routine. I join her on the mat, and for a moment, the only sounds are the rustle of our workout clothes and the slowing of our breathing.

Once I have stretched my muscles to both mine and her satisfaction, Martina gestures to a bench on the other side of the room. This gym, located in the mansion I’ve lived in with Martina since I was six, is for my use alone. No one will overhear us, but she still speaks in a low tone.

“There has been some trouble between one of the vampire families and a werewolf pack in America,” she says. “Some vampires attacked a pack outside of New Orleans.”

I frown at this surprising revelation. “Rougarous?” While all werewolves have a common ancestor, we tend to identify ourselves based on what the local human legends call us. Rougarous are from the Cajun legends of the American south. Here in Spain, we call ourselves Gitzotsos.

Luckily, human legends usually get facts about us wrong because Gitzotsos are supposed to wear chains wrapped around their bodies as they stalk through the wilderness. Unless those chains are necklaces from Tiffany’s in New York, you won’t see them anywhere on me.

“Yes,” she nods. “The Rougarou pack. The Alpha was killed, and the village nearly destroyed.”

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