Raised by wolves, p.1
Raised by Wolves, page 1
Copyright 2021 Rhea Watson
Published by Rhea Watson, Amazon Edition. All rights reserved.
License Notes
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Paperback ISBN: Pending
Cover Art: Amanda @ Smoking Hot Covers
Proofreader: One Love Editing
Content Warning
The Bloodline trilogy is a fated mates reverse harem romance that features steamy content, coarse language, and graphic violence, some of which may not be suitable for all readers. I trust and respect you to know your limits.
A reminder that books 1 and 2 in the trilogy end in cliffhangers. You’ve been warned, pretties.
Contents
1. Ewan
2. Soren
3. Lyssa
4. Lucian
5. Lyssa
6. Lucian
7. Soren
8. Lyssa
9. Ewan
10. Lyssa
11. Lyssa
12. Ewan
13. Lucian
14. Soren
15. Lyssa
16. Lyssa
17. Soren
18. Lyssa
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1
Ewan
“Soren, get off your fucking phone.”
“That’s rich—coming from you.” Slumped on his barstool across the table, the blond wolf shifter kept his eyes on the screen, thumbs flying. “I’m in the middle of a conversation.”
Lucian leaned over to steal a peek, moss-green gaze briefly illuminated by the phone’s max brightness setting.
“He’s texting his mum,” the Brit growled, settling back in his seat with a flick of his eyebrow, followed by a huge chug of stout. I stared at him for a beat, just waiting for the leather-clad wolf to take it back, but when he slapped his mug down and smeared the bubbles from his beard, I closed my eyes and sucked down a deep, calming breath.
Of course Soren was texting his mom.
Of fucking course.
Sat in a pub at the crest of the southern wastes in our newly combined territory, a franchised location that had branched off from the wildly successful Farrow’s Pub in Soren’s lake tourism empire, conversations all around us but silence at this hipster barrel-top table, three stubborn alphas tucked away in the corner…
Of course he was talking to his mom instead of us.
Fuck me. I could have gotten so much work done in the two hours our asses had been stuck in these stupid chairs, all hard angles and aesthetically pleasing but grossly underwhelming in terms of comfort. Not like the biggest season of the year for Redwood Grove was about to kick off or anything—the one that would rake in the serious cash. Nope. I was here, not talking and nursing a weak bourbon while Lucian drank the entire pub dry and Soren texted his mom.
Could this night suck any harder?
I cleared my throat, fingers coiled loosely around the glass tumbler, its ice nearly gone, the bourbon too cheap to actually enjoy. “You were the one who planned this—”
“Yeah, because it’s how normal wolves bond.” Dressed in a navy button-up patterned with tiny pineapples, Soren Acker was the preppiest of our surly trio, going so far as to rock a pair of dark khaki shorts like it was still the height of summer and not late September. He swept a hand through his dirty-blond locks, smoothing back that long on the top, shaved on the sides cut. “They go to the bar and drink a lot, share stories, talk, laugh, scope out the females, and then go for a run.” He finally clicked the little button on the top of his phone, then set it on the table, his bottle of Belgian beer downed ages ago and not a refill in sight. “But you two…” The alpha’s pointed glance between Lucian and me had my inner wolf’s hackles rising. “You two antisocial assholes managed to turn this into a night of drinking and staring at the table, so I figured no one would notice if I stared at my phone instead.”
For fuck’s sake. I kept my fucking phone out of sight despite it buzzing away in my fucking pocket all night long—
I bit the insides of my cheeks, consciously trying to soothe my inner wolf. Of this new pack, he and I had the biggest issue with Soren and his wolf, but no surprise there. Close in age with an original territory that was established and self-sufficient without mine, he was direct competition.
A palpable threat.
We were all alphas, sure, but the innate need to seize top spot, claim the pack throne for ourselves, didn’t go away just because as men we had combined three neighboring territories into a massive new one.
And blaming me—plus Lucian, but we had known the English bastard wouldn’t say more than five words total going into this disaster—for the failure of this pathetic attempt at bonding was horseshit.
Just as I was about to snarl something back, Lucian guzzled the rest of his stout. Noisily. Aggressively. All of it in one go, looking more like a Viking tossing back a horn of mead than a modern-day shifter, a lone wolf, a solitary alpha from England who had somehow ended up in our neck of the Canadian wilderness fuck only knew when. According to Soren’s dad, one day the silent, brooding wolf was just there, content to live alone in a log cabin deep in his territory within the western woods, distant and unobtrusive, barely noticed by the rest of us. Sure, he was still an alpha, huge and terrifying to behold, but not a personal threat.
Yet the way he pounded his empty mug down, green eyes flitting between me and Soren, sober and in control, annoyingly calm, quashed what would have been one of many heated exchanges between us.
“Let’s run.”
My inner wolf whined, animosity forgotten at the thought of finally running again, free and unchecked, wild to the bone. I grimaced, fighting the way his excitement reverberated through me, adrenaline suddenly spiked and hands slapped with a giddy tremor. It had been way too long since I unleashed the beast, and my inner wolf, my companion for life, had grown surly and frustrated as the summer dragged on. Unfortunately, my life needed the man right now: logical, cautious, calculated, focused. The wolf had to be caged to survive and thrive this first year as a one-third alpha of a new pack, with a huge new territory and new businesses to manage.
Tonight, the man just wanted whatever the hell this was to be over, so, fuck it—time to run.
Soren tapped his phone screen and squinted into the light. “It’s barely nine o’clock—”
“Good enough,” I growled, then shot back the remainder of this shit whiskey and stood. Seconds later, more chair legs scraped across the plank-wood flooring, the others rising and tossing cash onto the table to pay for our tab. Despite owning this territory, it was still a human’s world; supernatural and shifter communities remained in the shadows, secret and the stuff of folklore, outnumbered but never overpowered, living alongside them but not with them. The best way to really make it was to buy shit: buildings, restaurants, spas, land.
That was exactly what I had done the last ten years.
Still, even real estate titans needed to pay for drinks in pubs that didn’t belong to them. If anything, the Acker property development group that licensed this fucking franchise should have covered our drinks, but here we were, forking out cost plus tip.
Unfortunately, Farrow’s Pub was the only bar that wasn’t a total dive this far south in our new territory. When we had planned these little bonding outings, scheduled right before the business seasons kicked off in our respective industries, we agreed that it ought to be in a neutral space.
Lucian claimed the western woods ages ago. Soren’s family had controlled the lake and its surrounding forests to the east for generations. I had the middle ground, with a luxe village that I had rebuilt with my bare hands and capital in the last five years at the foot of a priceless mountain range that opened us up to skiing and winter tourism.
My original territory brought the Swiss Alps to middle-of-nowhere Canada.
The rich and famous flocked to my upscale spas and luxury hotels and pristine million-dollar chalets.
After assessing the summer’s haul, Soren’s lake industry of boating and cottages and campgrounds paled in comparison.
I was the power player here.
And that really fucked up the dynamics among wolves, especially three alphas.
So, here we were, way down south, just before the land turned barren and scraggly and useless, on the cusp of the no-man’s-land between us and the conniving shifter pack to the south.
And the east.
And the west.
They all wanted what we had.
And with Soren’s pack numbers down to single digits, the original alphas retired and his siblings spread across North America, he needed me to protect his precious lake industry, just as I needed his reputation to maintain the grip I had on all I’d built.
Lucian had land, resource-rich and fertile, and next year we planned to scatter tiny cabins throughout for glamper
So, you know.
He contributed too.
Sort of.
Mostly Lucian brought strength, physical and psychological, a powerful alpha in his own right who, for some unknown reason, bailed on his English pack and decided to live the hermit life here.
We all had vital resources that ensured the security of this new pack, but figuring out how to interact as alphas who lorded over a pack of three definitely had a fucking learning curve.
Hence we were here.
In this pub where our drinks weren’t covered and way too many local high school humans occupied the booths, jailbait females undressing me with their eyes as I stalked for the exit.
Outside, in the crisp night air, gravel crunching underfoot and maples swaying with autumn-dipped canopies all around the parking lot, it was easier to just breathe. For a beat, I reveled in it, let nature wrap her arms around me. Let the breeze ruffle my hair. Let it fill me, consume me, drive me.
Despite dealing in luxury, the core of my business stemmed from the natural world: the mountains skied and shredded each winter, the full pine trees around the village bedazzled with lights as soon as November hit, the ponds with water like sapphires and red berry bushes and lush, green green grass that required less maintenance than one might expect…
Wolves thrived in the natural world. Mother Nature lived in our hearts until we eventually left this world behind, destined for the stars.
But I had pushed this life to the side for years, so focused on building Quinn Enterprises into the megalith it was today.
I didn’t have the time—or the energy—to stop and smell the goddamn roses anymore.
But here, just for a beat, I closed my eyes and let the outdoors in, let the wilds call to my soul.
Until Soren and Lucian’s heavy footfalls crashed across the parking lot. Without a word, I fell in line beside them, my polished oxfords taking a dusty beating as we crossed the gravel to the main road. Not a car in sight, the handful of locals in this nothing town in bed an hour ago, Farrow’s Pub the only form of quality nightlife until you hit Redwood Grove.
Then you were in my den of sin, and I had plenty to offer those who craved some after-hours fun.
We crossed the two-lane country road in silence, carrying on to an open grassy field across from the pub. Bypassed the pathetic playground, the rusty slides and broken swings a little too reminiscent of my childhood, then into the forest beyond. As one, we clawed our way through more maples, dogwoods and hawthorns, alders and birches, eventually abandoning the well-walked trails for the wilderness. What would have taken humans forty minutes to cover took us ten, deep in the darkness, in the soaring trees and tangled landscape.
At a small clearing, Lucian was the first to stop, moonlight slanting through the broken canopy. As soon as he wrenched his old leather jacket off, followed swiftly by that bargain-store white cotton tee, the rest of us followed. Off came my freshly ironed charcoal dress shirt, the tailored black slacks, the silk boxers that cost more than Lucian’s entire outfit. I wrapped my Cartier in my shirt, then tucked it all in the awaiting branches of a leaning old red alder.
Hardly the first time I had seen my fellow alphas in the nude; clothes never survived the shift. While we all shared a shifter’s sculpted physique, muscly and toned, defined and built for physical dominance, it was when our wolves came out to play that I noted the most obvious differences.
We shared some traits, sure, all three of us enormous black wolves by chance, reminiscent of Alaskan timber wolves. Soren, unsurprisingly, was the fluffiest, his fur pristine, his eyes like glittering copper in the night. He moved with this annoying bounciness that had made my inner wolf want to fight him when they first met, just a little too exuberant and happy-go-lucky for either of our tastes. He still carried himself like a wolf who had wanted for nothing: never faced starvation, never stared down the bleak promise of a long, dismal winter. Carefree, sweet, extroverted, he hadn’t changed since his alpha parents handed him the deed to Redwood Lake and all its properties, then sailed into blissful retirement last year.
Not even the stress of a summer season with two new alphas nosing into his affairs had dampened his high—pampered—spirits.
Super fucking irritating, honestly.
To my right, Lucian’s enormous form blotted out the moonlight. Biggest of the bunch, he came with an abundance of scarring from tip to tail. Up his front legs. Around his neck, puncture wounds lingering with every shift. A chunk missing from his upper lip. Battle-hardened, his black fur was coarse, peppered with dark grey and a little patchy in some areas—like a rival had ripped it out.
When I had initially locked eyes with his wolf’s golden gaze years back, I thought the scars might be from a fated mate. After all, as far as I knew, only your fated mate could well and truly scar a shifter.
But none of us had been lucky enough to ever find the females chosen by Lady Fate, so that theory went down like a lead anchor. Some other fucked up shit must have happened to him, and he sure as hell wasn’t ever going to talk about it.
Where Soren was like an eager pup despite being older than me by two years, Lucian was slow and steady, his wolf form cautious with every step, quick to pause and sniff, ears always up and on high alert.
My wolf and I…
We were somber. Quiet. Distant. Aloof. Calculating and focused. Work smart, not hard. Utilize the fewest moves to behead the queen.
My head of glossy black hair mirrored my wolf’s fur, thick and pure obsidian. In my eyes, I had always been midnight, while Soren was the dawn. Lucian…
Lucian in his wolf form was a haggard sunset after a hellish day.
Like many shifters, our inner beasts reflected the human side we showed the world—but somehow we three got along better as wolves than men. As soon as the shift was over, air steamy from the heat of transformation, we greeted each other cordially, reacquainting ourselves with each other’s wolves through sniffs and licks and low growls, tails wagging just enough to suggest the beginnings of a true pack bond.
Fucking finally.
Unprompted, we took off together. Bonded packs could communicate in shifted form; not with words, per se, but through images and scents, emotions and feelings rippling through the shared connection. Tonight, I vaguely sensed Soren’s exhilaration as he tore through the forest, that heated excitement undercut by Lucian’s caution. He brought up the rear of the group like he needed to see us at all times—or maybe to stand guard from an ambush. Either way, I maintained my usual position in the middle, tempering Soren’s puppy energy and Lucian’s stormy mood for something in between.
Almost.
Given it had been way, way too long since I let the inner beast free to stretch his legs, a bubbly pleasure rumbled in my chest, paws hitting the ground hard and true, lungs filled with damp forest air. We all pushed ourselves, almost as if our inner wolves sensed they had ground to recover after such a forced outing at the pub. Together, we headed northeast, cutting through dense patches and over ravines without breaking our strides, sending little critters skittering along branches and bigger game fleeing into the shadows.
Wolf shifters bonded best through running. It was tradition by now in our collective history, something we all knew would forge friendships and dampen strife. Tonight was no different. Through the faint pack bond, the awkwardness lifted, floating through the canopy and into a moonlit sky.
Sometime later, we detected the first whiff of the wolf pack that had moved into our new territory. Lucian had already mapped their movements last month; based on the piss and other scent markings, they had come from the south and now occupied a substantial stretch of our southeastern domain, even branching into vicious Hawthorne territory further eastward. He estimated they were headed north and taking the long way around, maybe swing up through Hawthorne lands into the northern territories for the springtime thaw. For now, as winter crept closer, they had hunkered down here, basking in our territory’s fertility and its abundance of wildlife.
