She went into town and met other clan members. Dmitri invited her back to his porch for tea, which he spiked with vodka that made the pair of them giggle as they watched Dmitri’s favorite episodes ofLove Island. She met Viktor, the bear who ran the town’s general store and moonlighted as a blackjack dealer whenever the clan gathered. Nikolai showed her the town’s new rope bridge. Ilya taught her how to drive a snowmobile.
On the third day, Margot arrived.
I watched from the bed and breakfast’s kitchen window as Cal introduced Charlotte to the princess of the Sutton Werewolf Pack. Margot was tall and leanly muscled like all werewolves, but her deep blue eyes always held a smile. Within minutes,she and Charlotte fell into an animated conversation while Cal looked on with a bemused smile on his face.
My bear rumbled with satisfaction. Our mate was being welcomed. Accepted.
But I still didn’t know if she’d stay.
At night, Charlotte came to my bed.
We didn’t talk about the future during those nights. I couldn’t bring myself to ask the question that burned in my chest. Instead, I made love to her slowly, reverently, trying to memorize every sound she made. Every place that made her gasp. The way her breath hitched when I kissed the sensitive spot behind her ear. How her back arched when I sucked her nipples. The broken little cries she made when I brought her to climax with my mouth.
I traced every freckle on her skin. Learned the exact pressure that made her moan. Cataloged the way her eyes went hazy with pleasure when I slid inside her.
If she left, I wanted to remember everything.
The thought kept me awake long after she fell asleep in my arms, her red hair spilling across my chest. I stared at the ceiling, inwardly soothing my beast when it pushed me to wake her and promise her anything—everything—if she’d agree to be ours.
Mine.
But Charlotte had to choose freely. Dmitri’s failed marriage was a cautionary tale, and his wasn’t the only relationship in Bear Cove that had crumbled under the pressure of shifter biology. There were different kinds of compatibility. Just because Charlotte could bear my cubs didn’t mean she’d be content to live her entire life in a town without a single stoplight.
On the afternoon of the third day, my phone buzzed with a text from Everett.
Finally isolated the ingredients in those insomnia pills. You need to see this
I left Charlotte at her laptop in her bedroom and drove to Everett’s house. Skyler met me at the door with a sober expression.
“He’s in his office,” she said. “Beck, whatever is in those pills has really shaken him up.”
My stomach clenched.
I found Everett at his desk, his laptop open and two of Charlotte’s pills on a metal tray next to his elbow. The look on his face made me freeze in the doorway.
“Beck…” he rasped.
“Show me,” I said, crossing the room.
He turned his laptop toward me. Charts and chemical breakdowns filled the screen, the data like a foreign language. But one word jumped out.
Blood.
“Trace amounts,” Everett said. “And whoever synthesized those pills knew what they were doing. The chemical compounds are complex, the blood masked in a way that makes it almost impossible to detect. If I hadn’t been specifically looking for it, I never would have found it.”
My hands clenched into fists. “Vampires?”
He hesitated. “In medicine, we almost never call anything certain. But I’m as convinced as I can be that Rupert Henry is a master vampire. The cellular structure in this blood doesn’t match anything in a human’s veins.” Everett met my gaze. “And there’s something else. These pills are designed to cross the blood-brain barrier. Whatever’s in them is meant to affect Charlotte neurologically.”
“To control her?”
“Or make her destroy herself if her connection to Henry is discovered.”
A tight fist squeezed my heart. “It’s what I feared,” I said.
Everett looked at the pills. “This kind of science doesn’t come easy or cheap. If Henry has known Charlotte since she was fourteen, he’s invested. It doesn’t make sense that he’d send her to Bear Cove just to order her to commit suicide. She’s here for a reason.”
My bear paced, fury building. I soothed the beast, and I spoke more to myself than Everett as I asked, “What could we have that Henry wants?”
