Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR

W ren had escaped her sister's well-meaning lecture on being careful by changing into her running clothes and slipping out the front door while Raven was taking a shower. She knew she'd get yet another speech about taking her safety seriously when she returned but it was worth it. She loved to run because she could let her mind wander and work through the problems of the day. Typically, by the time she was sweaty and panting, she'd either worked out whatever problem was troubling her and knew what her next step would be or she'd realized it wasn't as big of an issue as she'd originally thought and let it go. There was nothing better than a run to clear her mind, she only wished she could still do it in her wolf form like she used to.

But that wasn't allowed anymore.

Alpha Kemp had rules about when they were allowed to shift and when they weren't. The penalties for defying his rules were stiff and brutal. The punishment she'd seen meted out to several of her packmates was the only reason Wren didn't ignore the decree as the controlling, authoritarian move that it was.

Nobody should have been able to tell a shifter when and where they could let their animal side free, not even a Pack Alpha, but Kemp was on a power trip and there wasn't anyone left willing to risk his wrath by calling him on it.

For the most part, anyone who could leave Shadow Pines had done so over the past few years. It had started so slowly that at first even Wren hadn't noticed it. She'd been deep in her grief and anger those first few years and she'd had a lot on her plate since both of her parents had decided to numb their grief in alcohol and pills respectively, rather than face the world and continue being parents to their two remaining daughters. By the time Wren realized what was happening, Alpha Kemp had become a full-on dictator who expected to be praised and worshiped. Anyone who refused to fall in line suffered or found a way to escape.

That was how Shadow Pines had become a literal shadow of its former self and how the once mighty pack had fallen to its lowest numbers since the Dust Bowl days.

Raven had asked her once why they didn't just pack up and leave, start over somewhere new like the others did, but she hadn't liked Wren's answer.

She couldn't leave. Not until she knew the truth of what had happened to Lark. Not until she made the Kemps pay for whatever they'd done to her sister. Raven had reminded her of the old adage about digging two graves when setting out for revenge, but Wren had only laughed and said two was the perfect number, one for Alpha Kemp and one for his son.

Raven hadn't asked again.

Their parents would never leave either and Raven had to know that. Lark was buried here. Their mother still visited her grave weekly. There was no way they would pack up and move away when they couldn't take their beloved eldest daughter with them.

So they'd all stayed and Wren had used the sharp decrease in the population to get closer to Alpha Kemp and his secrets. She'd finally gotten into his office and she might have found a way into his desk if Raven hadn't interrupted her. Now she would have to wait and try again, hoping that she would get another chance to find the key to that locked drawer and whatever lay inside.

Wren ran past the office on her usual route and contemplated stopping and going back inside. She dismissed the idea as quickly as it came to her and kept running right past. Going inside now would mean turning the lights back on and that would draw unwanted attention. If she'd been caught in the Alpha's office earlier, she might have been able to lie her way out of it with a reasonable explanation about her job but now? When she was in her running clothes and it was well after dark? No, if she was spotted now and the Alpha got wind of it he'd know she'd been snooping and she'd lose any chance she might have to discover the truth.

It was best to wait. After all, it had been over six years now. What was another day or two?

Besides, she'd created a whole other situation that demanded her immediate attention after she'd sent the photos of that letter to Gia.

Her cousin had been blowing up her phone with a thousand questions that Wren couldn't answer, and the only reason Raven hadn't noticed was because it was on silent. While she was changing for her run, Wren had called Gia back, but her cousin had already worked herself into such a state she wasn't certain Gia had heard a single word she said.

The truth was, she didn't know any more than Gia did. In fact, she knew far less about the Crescent Pack than her cousin when it all came down to it. So really, Gia would have to fill in some of the gaps for her and not the other way around.

The best she'd been able to glean from that letter she found was that the Crescent Pack was being controlled by someone named Leo DeLuca and he was attempting something that no other Alpha had ever tried as far as Wren knew. He wanted to bring the packs together. He wanted to create a system of communication between them. He was calling it "the Alliance" and he'd been working on it for a while it seemed like. The letter had said it was a second attempt to get in contact with the Shadow Pines Alpha which meant that the first message had gone unanswered and that part, at least, had been no surprise to Wren.

There was no way Alpha Kemp wanted outsiders poking around in his pack, his town or his business. He'd never allowed newcomers into the pack. If you hadn't been born or mated into the Shadow Pines Pack, then the town and its people were closed off to you. In fact, they were closed off from pretty much the entirety of the outside world since they made their home deep in the forest, at least thirty miles from the nearest town. They were on their own and that was exactly how Alpha Kemp liked it because there was nobody to interfere or question his leadership.

Wren assumed that second letter would be ignored just as the first had but that hadn't mattered to Gia. The only thing that had mattered to her cousin was that the letter said Leo DeLuca was alive and leading the Crescent Pack and, more importantly, that it had been signed by Barrett Tremblay. Wren might not know much about the pack her cousin had fled as a child, but she knew that name because it was never far from Gia's lips.

Tremblay had been the name of the Pack Enforcer who had saved Gia. He had carried her out of the melee and raced her home after she'd witnessed the bloody coup that had resulted in the Pack Alpha's death and her own father's murder. He'd helped Gia's mother gather their things and then he'd led the remaining Martin family members out of Crescent Pack territory to safety. He'd told them to run and never come back and then he had turned and gone back to the fighting.

Wren had heard the stories of his bravery, his care, and his strength, for as long as Gia had been in Shadow Pines. They'd discussed, as pre-teen girls, if it was possible he could have survived the fighting and if he had, what might have become of him. Wren had always been absolutely certain that he was dead along with anyone else who had been loyal to the DeLuca family during the coup, but Gia had held out hope.

She had never given up and that letter had been all the confirmation she needed. She'd told Wren she was going home. She'd said she was going to find the man who had saved her all those years ago, the man she had idolized and swore was her fated mate, and she was going to get her happily ever after. Then she had promptly hung up on Wren because her mother had walked in the door and she hadn't heard from her cousin again.

Wren thought she should probably stop by their house when she finished her run. After all, it was her fault that Gia was so worked up. Her aunt would be distraught at the idea of Gia returning to the Crescent Pack in Louisiana. She'd lost her own fated mate in the bayou with their old pack and she had brought her daughters here, where her sister and only extended family was, to give them a better life. Wren might think that the Shadow Pines pack had not proven to be quite what any of them had hoped for but it was still better than dying in a swamp. No doubt, mother and daughter were having that exact argument and Wren felt it was her duty to go play peacekeeper and talk Gia off the ledge of doing something unreasonable.

After all, she didn't want to lose any more family members either and there was no way of knowing what Gia would be walking into if she returned to Noir, Louisiana.

Gia was a pretty rational person when it came to everything except her old pack and the man she'd had a crush on all her life. She might be headstrong but she wasn't reckless. She would listen to reason so Wren made a mental note to drop by her cousin's home and make sure she took a day or two to really think through what that letter meant before doing anything rash.

With that decided, her mind began to wander as her breathing evened out and her body grew accustomed to the thump of her sneakers against the pavement. This was her favorite part of running. The high that came when she reached her peak performance and didn't have room in her head to think about anything but the next step in front of her or the feel of air flowing into her lungs.

She was deep in the zone, completely ignoring the darkness and the dangers that might be lurking in them, when her feet faltered. She nearly fell as a sharp pain sliced through her chest and she gasped. Her arms pinwheeled and she managed to keep herself from face-planting onto the sidewalk but before she could figure out what was happening her wolf snapped to attention and pushed at her skin.

Wren jerked her head around, scenting the air, looking for the danger her wolf must have sensed, but when she did that sharp pain tore at her again and realization finally dawned on her. It was a scent on the air that had roused her wolf but not because she sensed a threat. It was the scent of their mate and the pain in her chest was the spark of the mating bond flaring to life, the beginning strings of a connection forming to pull the two of them together.

She understood it even as she marveled that it was really happening to her.

She'd been born a wolf shifter. She knew all about fate and mating bonds. She'd grown up on the stories of the mated pairs who had been brought together by a force stronger than even a wolf could fight. Fate decided long before they came of age who would be called to stitch their souls together and make them whole.

Mating bonds were a normal occurrence for her kind but still, Wren was shocked to think that she had a mate and that he was here, in Shadow Pines, after all this time.

The moment a wolf came into adulthood, they were able to scent their mate. Many found their perfect other half among the pack the same day they turned eighteen and for those that didn't, fate had a way of conspiring to bring them to the exact place they needed to be in order to find one another. When Wren had turned eighteen, then twenty, then twenty-two and the pack had dwindled in numbers all around her, she'd all but given up hope that fate had seen fit to gift her with a mate of her own.

She'd decided that she had a bigger mission in this life. She was meant to avenge her sister. That was what she had focused on instead of going in search of her elusive mate.

And yet now, after all these years, his scent was here, in her hometown, and though her human side was wary, her wolf insisted she find the source of that scent.

Wren sniffed at the air again, breathing in a lungful of that powerful, masculine scent, and then she turned down a street that wasn't normally on her route and followed it. The burning she'd been feeling in her legs earlier in her run faded to a distant memory. The plans she'd been making had gone right out the window. There was only the driving need to follow the scent, find her mate, and complete the bond.

She cut through an alleyway as the scent grew stronger, focusing only on the magnetic pull that tugged inside her chest now, towards someone and something she had never expected for herself. She didn't even realize she was running full speed until she rounded a corner and collided with something that felt like a brick wall but was warm and moving.

She stumbled again but this time there were big hands there to grab her by the shoulders. The scent of her mate surrounded her and she closed her eyes to soak it in, to relish the feeling of heat that washed through her from the simple contact of his rough fingers on her skin. When they stopped shuffling from the collision, her back was against the cool brick wall and she opened her eyes to look up at the mate that fate had chosen for her.

The feeling of hope that had begun to fill her popped like a balloon stabbed with a knife as soon as she recognized the face looming over her.

It wasn't a stranger. It wasn't someone new to town or just passing through. It was someone she knew and had hoped to never, ever see again.

"Logan?" She felt his name rip from her lips in a broken curse and he blinked his beautiful hazel eyes at her as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing.

He was even more handsome now than he'd been at nineteen. His dark brown hair was longer and fell over his forehead with sun kissed highlights that she remembered from long ago summers. He'd grown into his features, no longer the lanky teen but a thick, muscular man. His jaw was dusted in dark stubble that emphasized a full mouth that she should never have noticed just like she shouldn't have remembered the way his dark lashes were enviably long and thick, framing his gold-flecked eyes perfectly. He was all rough, square angles offset by the softness of his full mouth and those mesmerizing eyes that she would know anywhere.

"Lark?"

It was the sound of her sister's name that broke the spell and sent pain shooting through Wren and shattering everything inside of her. Because of course he was looking at her like that because he thought she was Lark. He had loved Lark. He had loved her and lost her, just like Wren had. But she shook that thought away because no, that wasn't right. That was the bond, the mating heat, trying to make her soften for this man who she hated. He hadn't lost Lark. He had killed her or he knew who had and yet he was gripping her shoulders so tightly she knew there would be bruises tomorrow, all because he thought she was his dead teenage girlfriend.

Wren shoved him as hard as she could and he stumbled back, likely more out of surprise than her actual ability to overpower him, "Don't touch me."

He blinked again, slowly, as if he was fighting through the fog of the mating heat too. He looked her up and down, slowly, from top to bottom, and Wren fought a shiver of awareness. He met her gaze again and this time she saw the same look of horror that must have been displayed on her own face.

"Wait… Wren?" He looked as lost as she felt. "No. It can't be?"

The words sliced through her, as sharp as a blade, even though they were the same ones running through her head. Wren told herself the pain was only because of the bond. It was already there, burning through her veins, burrowing under her skin, forming despite her hatred for this man. It made her long for his touch even as her stomach twisted and she felt sick.

She'd always thought that if she came face to face with Logan Kemp again that she would shift and let her wolf rip him apart, shred him to pieces the way he deserved. But now her wolf was lunging for the surface and it was taking everything in her power to hold the animal at bay because she didn't want to rip him apart at all. Her animal side only wanted to sink her fangs into his skin, to claim him and to be bonded to him forever. All because fate had decided something she never would have chosen for herself.

Logan Kemp was their mate and she, apparently, was his.