The Billionaire Lycan's Forbidden Mate

Mile Markers

The rain didn't just fall in the Pacific Northwest; it smeared. It turned the world outside the Greyhound window into a blur of deep pine greens and heavy, charcoal greys.

Seraphina leaned her forehead against the glass. The cold seeped into her skin, a sharp contrast to the stale, overheated air of the bus.

She reached into her bag and pulled out a granola bar. She didn’t eat it. Instead, she carefully broke off a small square, about the size of a postage stamp, and chewed it slowly. She followed it with a single, measured sip from a plastic bottle of water.

She was rationing. It wasn't that she was starving, but the habit had settled into her bones over the last few years. It was a way of keeping control when everything else felt like it was sliding away.

The bus was mostly empty, which was the only reason she’d managed to snag the window seat. Across the aisle, an elderly man had surrendered entirely to sleep. His head lolled to the side, his mouth hanging open, a thin trail of saliva glistening at the corner of his lip. Every few minutes, he let out a wet, rattling snore that made Sera blink.

Further back, a college student was hunched over a tablet. The screen was a spiderweb of cracks, but a bright, loud video was playing. The sound leaked out—some frantic gaming commentary—but Sera tuned it out. She turned her gaze back to the trees. They were tall and jagged, leaning over the highway like they were trying to reclaim the road.

As the miles ticked by, the rhythm of the tires on the pavement started to loosen something in her mind. The memories didn't come back as stories; they came as fragments.

She saw a canvas. It was a painting of a sunflower, but the yellow was too bright, almost neon, and the petals were smudged and uneven. Her mother, Margot, had been a terrible painter. She had absolutely no eye for perspective or color theory, but she had loved every second of it.

Margot used to laugh—a loud, booming sound that could fill a house and drown out a vacuum cleaner—whenever she accidentally splashed paint on the carpet or her own forehead.

Sera could almost hear that laugh now. It felt like a ghost pressing against her ears.

Then the memory shifted. The laughter stopped. The colors faded.

She remembered the silence that followed the accident. It wasn't a peaceful silence. It was a heavy, suffocating kind of quiet. It was the sound of a house that had forgotten how to be a home.

She remembered standing in the hallway, listening to the clock tick in the kitchen, realizing that the loud, messy energy of her mother was just... gone. The silence had been a physical weight, pressing down on her shoulders until she felt like she might snap.

She remembered her father in the weeks after. He had become a shadow of himself. He would sit in his armchair for hours, staring at a television that wasn't even turned on.

Sera had learned to cook not because she liked it, but because her father simply forgot to eat. She remembered the first time she’d found him in the kitchen at three in the morning, staring at a box of Margot't favourite cereal like he didn't know what it was for.

She had stepped in. She started making pasta, then stews, then roast chicken. She learned how to season food so it tasted like something, hoping that if the flavor was strong enough, it would wake him up.

Then came the university years.

Sera closed her eyes and could still smell the old grease of the diner where she’d worked the early shift, and the scent of ozone and floor wax from the library where she’d worked the night shift. She remembered the feeling of her eyelids drooping during a lecture, her brain feeling like wet wool.

She had never told anyone it was hard. Not her professors, not the few friends she’d made. Whenever someone asked how she was managing the double workload, she just shrugged and said she was fine.

Calling it "hard" felt dangerous. If she admitted it was hard, she would have to admit that she was struggling. And if she admitted she was struggling, she might actually want help. Wanting help felt like a weakness she couldn't afford. It was easier to just be the girl who had it all under control, the girl who didn't sleep, the girl who never complained.

She opened her eyes and pulled her phone from her pocket. The signal was spotty, flickering between one bar and nothing, but she managed to load a browser tab.

'Vreth City.'

She scrolled through a Wikipedia entry. The text was dry, the kind of corporate writing that stripped all the soul out of a place. It described the city as a "mid-size economic hub with a strong private sector presence."

Sera scrolled down to the image gallery. There was a photograph of the skyline. One building dominated everything else. It was a skyscraper made of black glass that seemed to swallow the light around it. It looked less like a building and more like a jagged shard of obsidian thrust into the earth.

The caption read: 【Obsidian Crest Tower, headquarters of Obsidian Crest Holdings.】

Sera stared at the black tower. It looked cold and imposing. It looked like the kind of place where people in expensive suits made decisions that ruined other people's lives without even blinking.

She closed the tab.

She wasn't looking for a career. She didn't want a cubicle or a corporate ladder. She just needed a place to land and rest her head. She had a small amount of money saved up, but not enough to be reckless. Her goal was simple: find a room she could afford for two weeks.

Just fourteen days to breathe, to sleep without the guilt of a ticking clock, and to figure out what the hell she was supposed to do with the rest of her life.

The bus began to slow as it hit a long, winding curve that hugged the coastline. To the left, the grey Pacific Ocean crashed against black rocks, sending plumes of white spray high into the air.

The driver took the curve a bit too fast. The bus lurched violently to the right, tires screeching slightly against the wet asphalt.

Sera’s body jolted. Her hand shot out, gripping the plastic armrest to keep herself from sliding across the seat.

But as her fingers clamped down, something happened.

It wasn't fear, neither was it the adrenaline of the near-miss.

It was a spark.

For a split second, a strange sensation washed over her. It felt like a hum in her blood, a vibration that started in her fingertips and raced up her arm to the base of her skull. It was a feeling of recognition. It was as if a string had been tied to her heart and someone, somewhere in the distance, had just yanked it tight.

She felt a pull. Not a physical pull, but a magnetic one. It was the feeling of a missing puzzle piece finally sliding into place. The city she hadn't even reached yet felt like it was calling her name, drawing her forward through the rain and the grey.

Sera let go of the armrest. Her heart was hammering against her ribs, not from the jolt of the bus, but from that weird, electric hum. She looked out the window, searching the horizon for the skyline of Vreth City. She couldn't see it yet, but for the first time in years, she felt like she wasn't just drifting. She was being pulled.

She shook her head, trying to clear the feeling. "Low blood sugar," she told herself. "Too much caffeine, not enough sleep. You're just tired, Sera."

She leaned back and closed her eyes, trying to find that numbness again. The numbness was safe, it didn't make her feel like she was vibrating out of her own skin.

Ten minutes later, her phone buzzed in her lap.

The vibration startled her. She looked down. The screen showed an 'Unknown Number'.

Sera hesitated. She didn't usually answer unknown calls, but something about the timing felt wrong. Or right. She couldn't tell. She swiped the screen and pressed the phone to her ear.

"Hello?" she said.

At first, there was only static. It sounded like a radio tuned to a dead frequency, or the sound of wind whipping across a microphone. Then, the static shifted.

A voice came through.

It was a woman's voice, but it sounded distant. It sounded like someone speaking from the bottom of a deep well, or like a voice heard through a thick layer of water. It was a whisper, barely audible over the hum of the bus engine.

The woman said a single word.

"Seraphina."

Sera froze. Her breath hitched in her throat.

It was her name. But it didn't sound like her name. When her mother said it, it was bright and hurried. When her father said it, it was heavy and tired.

This voice... it sounded 'older'. Not old as in aged, but old as in ancient. It sounded like the voice had been carved out of stone and wind. There was a weight to the way the syllables landed, a resonance that made the phone feel warm against her cheek.

Then, the line dropped.

Sera pulled the phone away and stared at the screen. 'Call Ended.'

She stared at the device for a long time, the silence of the bus suddenly feeling very loud again. The old man was still snoring. The student was still watching his cracked tablet. Everything was normal.

"Bad signal," she whispered to herself. "Just a bad signal on the coast."

She tried to convince herself that it was a wrong number, a glitch in the network, a trick of the wind. She tried to tell herself that it was nothing.

But as she looked back out at the grey rain and the looming coast, she knew she didn't believe her own lie. Something had reached out to her. Something had whispered her name from the dark, and for the first time in her life, Seraphina Calloway felt like she was no longer the one in control of her life.