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No way, I had typed back with a laughing emoji.

It was only later that it struck me as kind of weird that he’d sent that. And then, probably because the algorithm picked up that he and I had been messaging, it started showing me things that he had commented on lately, posts that he had made, even though he’d not featured heavily in my newsfeed before.

Which was how I saw that he’d commented on the funeral announcement for Opal Hardesty-Lowell, and how I found out that she was dead now.

I remember hovering over that announcement, looking at the picture of her, fifteen years older, still pretty, but a little chubbier now. She’d had two kids. She’d borne his children, my Damian’s children, and it was weird that I still thought of him as mine when he was just my high school boyfriend, basically.

If it hadn’t been for all the pack hierarchy business, the nature magic, as Casey had called it, he would have been a blip from my past, nothing more, not this empty hole inside my soul that I could never seem to fill, not this gaping ache that I had built my entire self around, not…

Now, I said to Casey, “I think it’s a good idea to go. For closure. To say goodbye to her.”

“Maybe forgive her?” said Casey. “I mean, maybe she was a victim. Maybe your perfect childhood-sweetheart scent-match dude just jumped her and forced his teeth into her. I really don’t understand why you’re not angry with him.”

“Oh, I’m angry with him,” I said, and something in my voice changed.

Casey looked me over and let out a breath. “Yeah, you have to go back there, all right. You have a lot of unfinished business, Leona.”

She was right.

I did.

I HAD NOT seen Damian, my scent match, the man who was supposed to be my destiny, my mate, my husband, my everything, in a very long time.

If I went back to Riverside, I would definitely see him.

He was the cyning of the pack there, now, after all.

Riverside was my hometown, I guessed, but I actually did not grow up in Riverside.

I grew up in one of the other suburbs of Bangford, Wirmouth. Not Northbrook, not where Vincent lived. Wirmouth was a suburb on the other side. My mother was not a werewolf, but my father was, and it was sort of a tossup as to whether my sisters and I would inherit the shifting gene.

Turns out, only I did.

My shift didn’t happen for the first time until I was around thirteen. It came with my period. My dad was always able to control my shifts, though. It’s a thing that parents can do for their offspring until they grow up and mate, and then you get control of yourself and of your mate and any of your children.

Within a big pack structure, each family group is its own pack, with the male and female wolves alphas over their children, their beta wolves.

Being an omega, like me, like Opal was, it means you’re special. Most wolves are alphas, male and female. Technically speaking you don’t become an alpha until one of two things happens: you mate and start your own pack or your parents die.

Without any alphas over you, you become an alpha, essentially. Sometimes, if parents die when beta wolves are very young, they’ll be claimed by another pack family, like an adoption, but the blood bonds aren’t there. Those alphas can’t force those wolves’ shifts or hold them back or anything.

I only explain this to say that there wasn’t anything to be afraid of. I didn’t shift into a monster who went crazy and ripped people to shreds with my teeth and claws. Even before Riverside, when I felt the shift coming on, my father did, too. He halted it, and he and I drove off together in the car out to a friend’s house, one who owned big fields and a strip of woods. Then the shift came over me for the first time and I ran around for a few hours in wolf form, and then we shifted back.

It wasn’t that big of a deal, really.

Wolves can suppress their shifts, but it becomes more and more difficult the longer it goes on. My father was of the opinion that it wasn’t healthy (opinions vary on this. If I thought it was that bad, I wouldn’t be living in the city). He took us out to vacation in Riverside because he wanted me to have the experience of shifting in the wild and being intermingled with a big pack of wolves. He wanted me to know what it was like to be a wolf.

Then he and my mother got divorced, and he and I moved out to Riverside full-time when I was fifteen. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, that the family split up—wolves in one place and non-wolves in another—but it tended to turn out that way, no matter how many custody agreements were drawn up and how many arrangements were made that I would spend every fourth weekend with my mother.

Back then, I blamed myself for my parents’ break-up. I thought it must be because of the fact that I’d been a wolf, that if I hadn’t shifted, that all the cracks and strains between the two of them never would have appeared. It seemed like they argued a lot about the wolf stuff.

And probably, if I hadn’t scent-matched with the next cyning of the pack, that would have made a difference. It changed my father’s status there. We weren’t part of the pack at all when we arrived. We were tourists. They called us summer wolves in Riverside. People who came out for the summer and then went back to their regular lives in the fall and winter, buttoning away their wolfness into suits and ties and blazers, shoving it into high-heeled shoes. The wolves of Riverside looked down on people like that.

When we first arrived, that first summer, when I was thirteen years old, we were staying in a cabin out on the river. It was actually right across the road from the water, up on stilts in the case of flooding. There was a dock on the other side of the road, though, one that we would use to jump off of and go swimming, one that we would keep our rafts tied to, one that could have been used for boats, if we’d had one.

My sisters were both older than me. They spent most of their time working on their tans. They would lay out on the docks with thick historical romance novels, the kind with women on the front in long flowing dresses that cascade down steps or float in some ethereal breeze. They would lie on their stomachs and then lie on their backs and then float in the river and continue to read, sunglasses covering their eyes, entirely ignoring me.

I was thirteen and still young enough to engage in pretend play, so I would be swimming in the river, chattering away to myself, pretending to be a princess or a mermaid or a river sprite. I wore goggles to see under the river water. I liked to dive down and examine the smooth rocks on the bottom, to chase after the silvery little fish that darted this way and that, to see how long I could hold my breath underwater, something that was hard to do without someone timing me.