Page 58 of The Awakened Wolf

And then the woman looked between us. Her shining eyes went as dead as a mechanical shark, and her soft jawline hardened into a ridge of steel. “Phelan.”

Kiana and I whirled in unison to face our father, who had come around the table and looked to be in the first stage of food poisoning. He nodded curtly. “Moira.”

What the—?

Kiana’s eyes found mine, and for a moment, we were as united as we’d been the day before our first split. Nothing else mattered but the fact that some very important information had clearly been kept from both of us, though it was only Leto’s guess at that point what it might have been.

“Shit.” Evan dashed over to Jayla’s chair and swung it around. “I don’t know what the fluff is happening here, but you have to see it.”

Jayla’s cry of protest cut off with a throaty grunt. Her eyes had shot right past our family drama and landed on her heart’s desire. Moira’s sunglasses clattered onto the floor as Cody Chism stumbled back against the door. But his boss didn’t notice; she was too busy shoving between me and Kiana like a couple of saloon doors.

Moira marched right up to Father, and without missing a beat, slapped him so hard across his bearded face that his head snapped to one side. “You’re lucky I’ve had twenty-seven year to work on channeling my aggression into art.”

Kiana and Sebastian moved on swift Alpha-trained feet, but Father held up a hand to stop them. He rubbed his cheek with a bitter laugh. “Art? Is that what you call it?”

Moira’s second slap left him with scratch marks that left me scenting the air, trying to figure out if she’d actually been one of us all along. But underneath all that angry sweat and expensive perfume, she smelled distinctly human.

“The first one was for Dinah, but that one was just for fun,” Moira sneered. “Frankly, I’d be offended if you did like my work, Phelan.”

“Father, do you know this female?!” Kiana demanded.

He lifted his eyes toward the ceiling as if in prayer. “She was a very dear friend of your mother’s.” He paused. “Before we met.”

Kiana looked at me, this time with accusation, as if maybe she’d been the only one out of this loop, but I shook my head, hoping my eyes conveyed the depth of my own confoundment. Damian had seen to it that we were told almost nothing about our mother’s past, and the only thing I knew that I was certain Kiana didn’t was that our mother had been going to film school when—Oh. Well. Maybe this did make sense.

“Sisters,” Moira hissed, and when she turned to face me and Kiana, her skin had turned a deep shape of purple. “Your mother and I were sisters. So, this woman—” Moira looked pointedly at Kiana, “—is your aunt.”

Our jaws unhinged as one. Father squeezed his eyes shut. And suddenly, Mateo’s garbled dying words echoed clearly in my head. Not “More… die… animals” but “Moira… Dinah… Animalis.” He knew. Of course he knew. Which meant there was a good chance Max had actually known too. Which meant there was a good chance this was the reason he had taken Father’s side in the debate over whether to respond to the misrepresentations of our kind on the show. Which meant—I swallowed the bile rising in my throat—there was a really strong chance this was the reason Damian hadn’t used his powers to sway Father and Max, even though he personally agreed with the other Alphas. Or… maybe it was the reason he had swayed the others to disagree with them?

“H-how?” Kiana sputtered. “You’re human.”

My knees buckled. Sebestian was there in a heartbeat, holding me up, and I found myself clinging to his bare waist, which drew a look of disgust from Moira that felt incredibly hypocritical considering this was how Cody and Kiernan played half their damn scenes. My father was a liar, but so was my aunt. I’d watched her deny our existence live on TV, but I could see now the kernels of truth scattered throughout the fiction. She didn’t use our language, but the villain was a woman-hating Alphahole, and Cody’s character was basically a Beta, and Kiernan’s character was—

“An orphan,” I blurted. “Our mother was an orphan. And your mother took her in.”

Moira gave me an appraising look, and this time her eyes lingered on the T-shirt I’d thrown on this morning, the same one with all the 80s’ movie title fonts that I’d been wearing when Father confessed my mother had loved human stories. He had just failed to mention she’d been raised on them. Or that she wanted to tell her own.

“You’ve watched,” Moira said.

“I have.” I hugged Sebastian as I said it, a silent thank you for the television in the Tower Room where we were meant to spend our honeymoon.

Moira tugged her scarf loose and shook out her hair. “Kiana or Elyse?”

“I’m Elyse. She’s Kiana.” I paused. “The Alpha.”

“So I’ve heard.” She arched an eyebrow at Kiana. “However did you swing that?”

“Hard work, sharp teeth.” Kiana flashed her fangs. “How did your mother wind up with our mother?”

Moira glared at Father. “You really haven’t told them any of it, have you?”

“There were… extenuating circumstances,” Kiana said. “Tell us now.”

Moira drew a deep breath. “My mother was a firefighter in Boston. She had just gone back to work after my own birth when your mother was left outside her station. No note. No clues. So Mom thought, why not? She brought her home and named her Dinah, and we grew up practically as twins.” Moira’s eyes darted between our mirrored faces. “And everything was perfect until—”

“Puberty,” Kiana whispered.

“Indeed.” Moira smiled tightly. “That’s when I turned into what all of my future employers would describe as a raging bitch, and your mother turned into a wolf.” Moira looked down at the floor. “She was so afraid. And so lonely. I let her bite me so we could be the same, but that gift wasn’t for her.” She lifted her eyes to meet mine, and I shivered in spite of the heat roiling off my mate. “I started telling her stories. Telling her this was actually perfectly normal. Kids all over the country turning into animals and then getting whisked away to werewolf college.” She laughed. “Stupid, really.”

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