“H-h-how is that possible?” Chris asks, a tidal wave of emotion flowing from that one word. I ache for my friend, my sister-from-another-mister. The hits just keep on coming for her, like Selene has it out for her. I don’t even know how to comfort her. Dr. Hazel clears her throat. I’ve always liked the Artemis Area pack doctor. Not only did she deliver Jacob and every one of our friends, but she’s down to earth and easy to connect with. If anyone can help make sense of this, hopefully it will be her. “I may have an anwer to that. When did you last have sex with your mate?” she asks. Everyone in the Artemis Area knows about Chris’s situation. None of us really believes in keeping secrets from those we were literally created to protect. They know that Chris met and lost her mate before she even found out that he was her mate. This way, there’s an entire section out there looking for Esteban. Chris takes a beat to answer Dr. Hazel and that’s how I know how hard all of thi

Wednesday… The doorbell rings and I call, “Come on in!” Dev and I are in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on dinner. We all have dinner together at least once per week, typically on Mondays. However, since we all had just gotten home on Sunday evening, we elected to move it to Wednesday. In walk all of my males, Alexander, Jacob, and Rowen. “Mama, Pop, how you guys doing?” Jacob says immediately coming into the room and giving me a kiss on the cheek. Though I think he’s using that as an excuse to steal a carrot from the salad I’m making. “Hello, handsome. How’s life?” I ask, smacking his hand to get him out of the salad bowl. He gives me a cheeky grin as he pops the carrot in his mouth and walks over to Dev to give him a man hug. “Life is just like me,” he says as he hugs Dev. “Cool, calm, and looking good.” All of us groan and I watch Rowen smack his shoulder and Alexander roll his eyes before he gives me a huge hug. He wraps me up in a giant bear hug li

After Dev explained his idea for Tomas, we all made it our mission to make sure that he lost. To who, it didn’t matter, because we were all going to follow through with Dev’s punishment. It made anything that we would have to do if we lost worth it for the next year’s worth of punishments. To try and distract him, we started asking about his mission. We needed the information anyway. “So, how did everything go?” Nathan asks, raising the bet in the pot. I toss in my bet and Tomas folds in disgust. “Man, it was a fucking shit show. The Riding Hoods had rustled up some asanbosom, the closest thing to real-life vampires there are out there. Like a fucking bare-ass monkey with huge ass claws and teeth. They turned them loose on an entire village. Killed everyone: Men, women. All of the damn kids. Even the fucking pets. Drained fucking dry.” Gaels folds as well and Nathan calls it, me taking the pot. “And what the fuck did they hope to do my releasing those things onto h

“Beautiful, how much longer are you gonna be gone? We miss you,” I whine into the FaceTime call with Kayla. “I know, Brandon. I need my Master and my Alpha. Unfortunately, my old boss is out because he had a family emergency. His daughter had to have an emergency appendectomy and she became septic because of it. She’s only 12, so…” Kayla shrugs. “He needs to be at my exit interview because he’s my direct supervisor. I won’t be coming back until at least Tuesday.” Both Zak and I groan, missing our mate almost unbearably. “You could come down?” Kayla suggests. “Just for the weekend?” “I have to go to Arcadia tomorrow morning to see Esteban’s cousin’s alpha. He has to come to Arcadia for his brother’s graduation. He said he’d come a day early and meet with Hakeem and me. That way, we could talk with the cousin in real time through his mindlink. Hopefully, after that I’ll be able to get Esteban and send him home to Chris,” I say. “Soooo, you could come after?” Kayla

I’ve been to the girls’ apartment often. Summer and her crew were some of the best friends that we had. My family and I have lived here with Fati and JoJo all of our lives, since their mom, Meredith, is the main oracle of the Goddess and my parents are demi-gods. And I’ve said before that Jacob, Alexander, and I basically grew up with Summer, Chris, and Jared. The only one that we haven’t grown up with in our little group is Jai. He’s the son of Liam, Sandra, and Bhakti. About every six months, we meet up with all of the original trios from the war. My parents had made amazing friends during that time and they all made every effort to make this meeting happen. In fact, in the 20 years that they've been meeting up, there have only been a handful of times that anyone has missed and that’s usually because they were too far along in a pregnancy or just had a pup. We know Jai from there. We all get along with most of the trio kids. We even call ourselves the legacies, since