19. Naomi

Naomi

The thing about me is I'm a planner .

That was my first thought when the new, possibly dangerous, idea of running for the tower popped into my head as Sea tried to lead me away from the carnage of my Amanda-Will-Only-Have-to-Mate-One-Wolf plan.

I'd hatched so many plans after my second oldest sister showed up in our village with her Bride Exchange proposal.

I'd spent the months she'd given us to prepare for our new lives in Scotland plotting to do the opposite of settling into an old-fashioned marriage with one of her tech-hating subjects. Scotland, I'd realized from the start, was the perfect safe place for me to wait out the interminable months until I could move to Ontario to begin my new life as a seeming human pursuing a degree.

But what amount of planning could have prepared me for being kidnapped by two Irish werewolf kings whose eyes had burned with the plans they'd already made for me from the moment we met? Maybe before ?

Questions? I'd had so many of them since Sea and Wild appeared in my life, upending it like two plan-destroying tornadoes.

But there was never enough time to get answers before a new thing popped up.

Sadie being delivered to three random strangers in a glass box…

Amanda going into heat…

An impossible secret kingdom…

A tower that could potentially be a hidden escape hatch in disguise.

My getaway from St. Alibe was the culmination of years of covert studying, online testing, and complicated document acquisitions.

But I only had moments to come up with something once I realized where the tower could possibly lead.

"Don't touch me! I'm not letting you drag me back to that glass prison!" I told Sea before he could drag me too far from the tower. I came to a hard, stubborn stop and crossed my arms over my chest, acting the rebel while I stalled for time to think.

Sea sighed and, unfortunately, placed himself directly between me and the tower.

"I understand you're upset over the Second Reaping and how this all turned out." Sea waved a vague hand toward the part of the perfectly hued field where Amanda and Ronan were going at it like farm animals. "With little time to prepare for any of this, you advocated well for your she-wolf, and it can't be easy seeing that plan blow up in your face. Believe me, this wasn't how I wished our time together would play out."

I bit my tongue to keep from asking the obvious question: How did you think kidnapping a bunch of innocent she-wolves would play out ?

Instead, I nodded along while my brain raced in the background, trying to figure out how to clear this human-sized obstacle standing in front of me. It was all I could do not to let my eyes wander to the tower standing just a few yards behind him.

"That is why you must give my wolves the leeway to properly court yours," Sea said with a reasonable diplomatic tone that did not match the scene of Amanda and Ronan crying out in ecstasy a few meters from where we stood while Wild spoke on the phone to whoever this Dublin person was.

Another possibility clattered into my mind: Grabbing the phone from Wild and calling my sister before he could catch me.

But there were too many likely bad outcomes to that play.

The element of surprise might not be enough. Wild might not only keep the phone. But easily overpower me.

And what would he do in retaliation if my attack failed?

I remembered the way he'd grabbed the knife from me back at the Scottish kingdom castle, then licked my neck while he held it at my throat.

"Are you cold?" Sea asked, mistaking the reason for my full body shiver. "Here, take my cloak."

And that was how I came to find myself making an extremely unplanned run for the tower.

Dad genes, don't fail me now!

"Bragging is against the St. Ailbe Ordnung, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you should know your father was the reigning winner of the Accra Championship Youth Run three years in a row," my Ghanaian father once told me after I won one of the foot races he often challenged me to when no one else could see us breaking the St. Ailbe Ordnung's forbearance against competitive one-on-one sports. "It could have been four, but my parents sent me to Canada for university, and I was happily saved from my dismal lifelong fate before I could go back. Just know, you get your gift of speed from me."

Being "saved" from his "dismal lifelong fate" was the quaint way my father described getting bitten by a werewolf on a Bible club camping trip and eventually converting to W?lfennite after meeting my born-werewolf mother at a fair where she was selling Amish butter.

He thought his W?lfennite origin story was cute. But as I grew older in a community that didn't provide girls' schooling past the eighth grade, I became increasingly horrified that he'd never finished his university education as planned.

All because of some random wolf.

My whirling thoughts crashed. Speaking of random wolves…

In my peripheral distance, I could see Wild drop his phone and immediately give chase, charging toward me like a hunter born.

Crap! Crap! Crap!

I bore down to run through what looked like an old wooden door but slid open with sleek mechanical ease to reveal a dark, empty space just as I reached it.

Oh no!

I jerked to a hard stop to avoid crashing into the other side of the stone tower's wall when I entered…

Nothing.

I ran into the black space beyond the door and found nothing. There was just a slight rising sensation as if I had stepped onto the elevator we rode in the Scottish airport again.

And then suddenly, I was standing inside a circle of stones .

What in the…?

I looked all around and saw that the stones appeared to be sitting on top of a cliff overlooking the sea."

I had no idea where I was, but it smelled…I sniffed the air several times to be sure…and yes, this place smelled like the real world.

The ground scent was where it was supposed to be, underneath my feet, as opposed to somewhere faint above my head. And it no longer smelled like a cave while looking like a fantasy world.

The grey sky overhead threw uneven shadows on the non-uniform green and brown ground beneath my black shoes, and the air felt like the sky looked — not temperate but dank and chilly.

I stepped out onto the non-sea facing side of the circle and discovered, in a shockingly cold way, that the stones had been protecting me from a fierce, gusting wind. It bit into the bare skin on my arms, neck, and face — the polar opposite of the warm, fan-like breezes in the secret kingdom.

No, I hadn't been cold when Sea offered me his royal blue cloak, but the whipping wind made me wonder if I should have taken it.

However, that regret slipped out of my head when I saw the structure in the distance. Just a few kilometers away.

Not another tower, but a two-story brick house. And maybe a few more kilometers beyond that lay a small town on the other side of a mountain.

Civilization!

If the town was filled with unknowing humans, I could find help for me and all the other she-wolves trapped beneath that stone circle. And if they were in league with our kidnappers like those guys who took Sadie, I could hide out until I managed to steal or find a phone or a computer I could use to contact my sister.

Either way, all I had to do was…

Run!

I felt Wild's arrival in the stone circle before I scented him behind me. All the hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I glanced over my shoulder…

… to find him emerging from the standing stones in wolf form. Ash blond and grey fur and his unmistakable electric blue gaze. My stomach dropped at the size of him, as large as his human — just dropped down on all fours, with his teeth fully bared.

Run! My feet launched me forward before my brain could fully process the sight of him.

W?lfennites were naive. He hadn't been wrong about that. But there was one hard fact we'd all been taught.

A shifted wolf was not the same as a human with a werewolf inside of them. Any wolf — even a beloved family member — was likely to tear you apart in lupine form.

The one thing — the most horrible thing — you could ever be in our hidden shifter community was caught somewhere in your human form with a werewolf who'd furred out.

Just in case I wasn't fully aware of how much danger I was in, Wild bared his teeth and snarled. Like the feral beast I'd suspected him of being this entire time.

Again, I had no time to plan.

I sped toward the hill as fast as my feet could carry me. But was it fast enough to get —

The wolf hit me with full force, tackling me from behind before I could finish that thought.