Chapter 2

Two

"What. A. Dick. You told him you were dying and that's how he responds?" Tara squawked from my phone's speaker. "I just CAN'T with this douchebag. Ugh, my rage levels are spiking so high right now!"

I immediately regretted telling my roommate about the whole Iain refusing to let me leave thing. But she'd called to check in on me on her way to her boyfriend's place in Liverpool, and the whole story had come out in a huge gush before I remembered why I usually kept stories of how bad things were at work to myself.

"Tara …" I said, as I popped a Sainsburys' Chicken Tikka Masala ready meal into the microwave, sitting on top of the very little counter space in our tiny flat's narrow kitchen.

"No, Milly. Don't Tara me!" she commanded from my phone's speaker. "Give me one reason—just one reason why I shouldn't hunt him down and tear out his throat!"

"It's okay, Tara. It's fine …" I insisted—not because it was, but because Tara sounded violently upset, and I didn't want her to do anything rash .

I didn't have many girlfriends before Tara—those were surprisingly hard to make and keep when you'd spent large swaths of your prime bestie-making years in various medical centers battling leukemia.

By the time I'd finally made it to Scotland for a summer-long business and technology internship at the Royal Scottish Bank, my social skills were so underdeveloped I didn't even begin to hope I'd make any friends there.

But my friendless days were over from the moment I met Canadian Tara Hamilton at the RSB orientation. Tara was a self-professed anti-Canadian.

Rude, bold, and strong—in both body and personality. Plus, she was ultra-fashionable. I swear, if they were casting Sex in the City: Edinburgh, she'd easily get the role of the Canadian glamour girl.

The only thing we had in common other than our internship was being biracial. But we even were at opposite ends of the spectrum on that. While I had a split-up Black mother and White Jewish father, Tara had a black Ghanaian father and a White German-Canadian mother who were still together.

They did cutesy things like wait with each other by their landline phone when Tara was expected to make her weekly scheduled call home. And they all spoke in excited German together when they talked.

I could barely mumble in English. I still have no idea why she picked me, the shy nerd with zero confidence, and the least dazzling of our program mates to befriend, but she did.

And when we both landed jobs in Edinburgh right before the end of our internships—Tara at the Royal Scottish Bank and me at AlgoFortune—we decided to move in together, and we'd been best friends ever since .

However, as much as I treasured my best friend, I had to admit, she had a nasty temper, one that could quickly get out of hand. I'd literally had to pull my bestie out of bar fights on Trivia Pub Quiz nights when she got too heated. And don't even get me started on what she did to the drunken I-Banker bro who slapped her on the butt during the after-work drinks thing she'd invited me to last spring.

I'll just say, he no longer works at the main branch of the Royal Scottish Bank Edinburgh. And avoiding sexual harassment charges wasn't the only reason he put in his notice.

So, while I might feel the same way as Tara, I had no doubt my extremely loyal friend was more than capable of hunting my boss down and setting herself up for some serious assault charges if I didn't act like Iain's behavior wasn't a big deal.

"Tara, it's okay. Seriously," I tell both her and myself. "Four instead of two more weeks working for the boss from hell won't matter in the scheme of things."

"No, it's not okay! It's totally messed up," Tara grumbled. "That asshole's lucky I'm visiting Brian tonight, or I'd find out where he lives, and shove his stupid hiring contract right up his ass."

I let out a sigh of relief, almost, but not quite grateful for her horrible boyfriend.

Just a few weeks after moving to Edinburgh, Tara had met a sketchy English musician at a pub. And though I had yet to meet him, from what I could tell, he was the worst. Like, completely-undeserving-of-my-amazing-best-friend the worst .

He always made Tara visit him in Liverpool, never once deigning to make the journey to Edinburgh to hang out with Tara and her friends. Nearly three years into our relationship and I had yet to meet the guy, let alone see a photo of him. In fact, I wouldn't even call what Tara and he had a relationship. More like a long-distance booty call made worse by Tara's slavish devotion.

As strong and loyal a friend as she could be, Tara was a complete doormat when it came to her boyfriend.

And I had learned early on that my otherwise smart friend would not budge on the topic of Brian. Tara visited him whenever he called, and once there, nothing would bring her back until Brian let her go.

Case in point: I'd called my best friend to tell her I …

1) only had eight months left to live, and

2) could not quit my job without getting sued for the last bit of money I had.

But Tara, rather predictably, threatened to do physical damage to Iain but didn't so much as offer to come back to Edinburgh to commiserate with her dying roommate.

More self-pity washed over me as I pulled my sad microwave dinner out of the small electric oven.

But that wasn't fair.

Tara had mostly been the best friend a meek little assistant like me could ask for in the world. It wasn't her job to comfort me or drop all her plans to help me drown my diagnosis sorrows in several bottles of wine.

"I just wish my Brian thing wasn't tonight. Otherwise, you know, I'd be right there with you, right?" Tara asked, her voice softening.

"I know," I said, pushing down the self-pity. "You're a good friend."

"And you're my best friend ever. I love you, Mils. And I'll do whatever it takes to help you through thi—" Tara suddenly cut off. "Sorry, Milly, Brian just got here. I've got to go. I'll call you at work first thing tomorrow, okay?"

I opened my mouth to tell her I probably wouldn't be at work first thing tomorrow since I had to drive all the way to the Highlands to pick up the thumb drive with Iain's rough code on it.

But she hung up before I could get the words out.

I hated driving in Scotland. Despite having lived there for nearly three years, I just couldn't shake the feeling I was driving on the wrong side of the road every time I got behind the wheel—a wheel that was, from my perspective, located on the passenger side of the car.

And it wasn't like I got many opportunities to drive all that often. The only reason I'd even bothered to get my international license and learn to drive a stick was because Iain had told me an assistant who couldn't drive a car when needed wasn't up to his standards.

My job occasionally called for me to use one of the company cars to pick up and drop off items at different tech outfits located all around the city. And now it called for me to drive into the Highlands to pick up a thumb drive so the software development team could get as much work done as possible on it before the bank holiday weekend.

Funny, I hadn't thought I could feel any worse than I had walking out of the doctor's office. But driving to Iain's childhood village in the earliest hours of the morning to pick up a thumb drive? Wow. My life, what was left of it, was hitting new lows all over the place.

However, my depression began to lift after I negotiated the Vauxhall Astra up a narrow mountain road. As it turned out, Faoltairn, the Highland village where Iain grew up, was a charming postcard of a town with a large mountain on one side and a shimmering loch on the other.

It was still very dark out, but the full moon hung heavy as a spotlight overhead, working in conjunction with the smattering of streetlights to illuminate the collection of darling stone shops on either side of the main street. Even though it was almost June, the small village reminded me of something out of a Christmas card, with its dark green detailing and multiple windows sporting the same red plaid found on Iain's kilts.

The main street soon gave way to a wider graveled road that wound lazily around the eastern side of a glittering loch. Little white stone cottages with thatched roofs dotted the side of the lake closest to me. And on the other side of the loch sat … no, that couldn't be right.

But yes … there, nestled among the tall pines, stood a castle. A small castle to be sure, but it was way more grand than the ruins I occasionally saw on the side of the road when driving around Scotland with Tara in her car (she wasn't nearly as scared as me about the wrong side of the road thing). The castle stood three stories tall and even had a low perimeter wall.

Whoa! I thought, just as the GPS informed me that my destination was ahead on the right.

I pulled the car to a stop in front of yet another cottage. It was slightly larger than the ones I had passed. But other than that, it looked just like all the rest—whitewashed stone walls, thatched roof, and super old.

As I got out of the car, a funny feeling came over me. Like maybe I'd somehow stepped out of my own time into a highland village from the distant past .

To add to the eerie ambiance, something that sounded an awful lot like the far-off howling of wolves punctuated the otherwise silent night.

No, not wolves, I assured myself. It had to be dogs.

I'd read wolves had been hunted to extinction in Scotland back in the 1700s. And while there were a lot of discussions happening across Scotland about possibly reintroducing the European wolf, no decisions had been made yet. I mean, At least, I don't think they had …

Still, those dogs sounded an awful lot like wolves—at least to someone who'd grown up in upstate New York. And they served as the perfect soundtrack to the "ancient Scotland" BBC documentary I'd apparently stumbled into as I walked toward the cottage's dimly lit front door.

The door was unlocked, just as Iain said it would be. And walking through it gave me the feeling of having exited a time machine with the dial set firmly to "the future."

So much for the old-timey vibe I'd sensed during my drive through the village. While Iain's cottage appeared to be a few hundred years old on the outside, it was modern as all get out on the inside.

I tapped the light switch closest to the door, illuminating an open plan living room with stylish, upscale furniture in every direction I looked. A large flat-screen TV hung above the fireplace, and three different video game consoles sat on its mantle along with several framed pictures of Iain with his brother and father. None of him with his mother, though, I noted.

What had she done to get cut out of his life so thoroughly? I wondered about Iain's relationship with the Italian-accented woman whose calls he never returned as I made my way down the narrow hall off the main living area. Only one door stood open, and voila, it turned out to be the one that led into my boss's home office. Inside, I found another standing desk, but this one was made of dark oak without technology to raise it up or down. He'd attached a white sticky note to the desk's right-corner front edge. THUMB DRIVE was written across it in bold, black Sharpie.

I furrowed my brow. The note—written in Iain's distinctive all-caps handwriting—was very clear. But the space above the note was empty.

And even more alarmingly, there was a large cage sitting just under the desk's right edge. It resembled an oversized dog kennel, like the ones they'd set up in the hospital for the therapy dogs when they weren't "on duty" and visiting patients.

There on the cage's metal floor, I could see the thumb drive, its USB port gleaming in the low light. It must have fallen in there from the desk.

But unfortunately, the thumb drive wasn't the only thing in the cage.

A huge, silent wolf stared back at me with silver eyes that seemed to glow in the room's low light, and the thumb drive was lying halfway underneath its front paw.

"Okay, what the hell," I said out loud.

I started to reach for my phone to call Iain, but then I remembered …he was camping. Which meant I was on my own. In his cottage. With … his wolf.

Crap!

I crouched down in front of the cage, a wave of fatigue crashing over me for reasons that had nothing to do with the overproduction of white blood cells currently killing me before I got the chance to live a solid twenty-five years on this Earth.

I tell you, I used to not believe in reincarnation. But now I really had to wonder if I hadn't seriously effed up in a past life. I mean what other executive assistant on Earth had ever found herself in a situation like this?

I stared at the creature, and he stared back at me.

And man, I must have been some kind of brainwashed by my billionaire boss. Dutiful-to-a-fault me actually began to reach out for the thumb drive—before I came to my senses and yanked my hand back at the last moment.

"I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this. I refuse to stick my hand in a cage with a freaking wild animal," I told both the creature and myself. "I mean, what's your dad going to do? Fire me for refusing to retrieve the thumb drive from underneath the paw of his pet wolf? I mean, who keeps a wolf as a pet anyway, then just conveniently forgets to tell his assistant about it? If anything, this thumb drive mess is all his fault. So, nope, nope, I'm out!"

I start to stand up out of my crouch, but then the wolf does the strangest thing.

He whimpers and pushes the thumb drive toward me. Then he bows his head, and gazes up at me in a way that I immediately recognized as the universal canine language for "pet me, pretty please."

Aww! Maybe this big guy wasn't a wolf after all. There was a chance, I'd been so startled that I overreacted, and assumed "wolf" when really, he was just one of those dogs that only looked like a wolf. Like a malamute or a husky.

A really, really huge husky . But just in case, I've gotten this situation all wrong, I insert the tips of two fingers through the cage bars and gingerly patted the maybe-not-a-wolf on top of its huge head .

In response, Mr. Trust Me I'm Not A Wolf affectionately pushed his head into my fingers, as if to say, "See? I don't bite. You should pet me some more!"

I laughed, and with a little maneuvering, I pushed my whole hand in just past my wrist between the thick wires of the cage to carefully give him a full-handed pet.

A noisy metallic clang suddenly rose into the air. It was his tail, I realized. He was wagging it so hard, it created a drumming sound against the cage's back wall.

"Oh, my gosh, you like pets, don't you?" I said with another laugh. "I bet your dad doesn't give you any love at all. Poor thing."

Honestly, the wolf-dog didn't seem scary at all, anymore. But I was here on a mission, I soon remembered.

I stuck my other hand through the cage to retrieve the thumb drive. "Okay, just a few more pets, but then I have to?—"

With lightning speed, the happy wolf-dog dropped all pretense of tameness and launched itself at my other outstretched arm, clamping its sharp teeth down on the fleshy part below my forearm.

It happened so fast, I didn't feel a thing for the first few seconds other than crushing disappointment in the wolf-dog for turning on me.

But my disappointment was soon followed by a much less metaphorical pain. I screamed as I desperately tried to shake the creature's mouth from my arm. But the wolf-dog held on for several more seconds, its silver eyes bright and resolute. And despite the huge adrenaline spike, I simply wasn't strong enough to pull my arm from the wolf- dog's firm bite.

But just as I was beginning to wonder if I would be forced to watch the creature tear off my arm and eat it in front of me like something out of a particularly graphic horror movie, it just let me go. So suddenly, I fell back on my butt.

I cut off screaming to stare at the unblinking animal. I had no idea why it had bit me and then just let me go. But I was done pretending it wasn't a wolf, and I wasn't about to look this unexpected gift-of-freedom horse in the mouth.

Scrambling clumsily to my feet, I clutched my injured arm to my chest and ran like a bat out of hell back to the relative safety of my car.

Without the thumb drive.