When Varion left me at the gates of the mansion, he’d said it with the same commanding weight:
“Stay inside. Past these walls, it isn’t safe for you yet.”
And then he was gone, off to do whatever ‘Alpha business’ meant, leaving me once again with too many thoughts clawing through my head.
Safe.
He kept using that word, like I was some fragile porcelain doll who’d crack if the world breathed too hard on me. But hadn’t I survived twenty-three years inside the human world? With a drunk for a mother and customers who made me fantasize about murder on a daily basis? I was fragile, sure—but I wasn’t weak.
The mansion walls stretched high, like the outside world couldn’t touch this place. Guards patrolled the gates, broad-shouldered and stone-faced, but they didn’t even glance my way when I
