I couldn’t force anything.
The odds were in my favor, but that wasn’t a guarantee.
I got out of my car in time for Emmy to hug me, and tried to enjoy the moment.
It might be the last time my best friend considered showing me any affection for a long time.
When she figured out why I’d finally agreed to go to her werewolf mate’s book club, she was going to freak out. I was fairly certain she would make the same call if she had been in my situation, but that wouldn’t stop her from being furious with me for keeping it from her.
And for being a terrible person.
I’d deserve her wrath when it arrived.
On second thought, I’d deserve the wrath ofall fourof my friends who were mated to guys in the pack.
I’d have to come up with a strategy to manage that afterward.
For now, I needed to focus on the plan.
Emmy held my hand as she dragged me through the forest, headed to the clearing where they apparently always held their pack’s book club.
Mentally, I ran through the steps of my plan while I forced myself to participate in Emmy and Finn’s conversation. Luckily, the lovebirds—er, wolves—were too obsessed with each other to notice that I was acting a little off.
I forced my breathing to stay even. I really needed to take my anxiety meds, but they made me fall asleep, so that wasn’t an option at the moment.
You would think the dozen panic attacks I already had about this book club meeting would’ve forced me to work through my nerves.
They hadn’t.
So I just tried to keep breathing.
It felt like I was walking toward my death, but I tried to remind myself that this was my only shot at real survival.
Everyone else was already gathered. I could hear them talking and laughing as we approached. Emmy was always late, and I’d waited for her, so that was to be expected.
Finn probably could’ve helped her be more on time, but I genuinely didn’t think he cared that they were the last to arrive to literally everything.
Emmy had told me multiple times about how mate bonds were created. It was really simple—you just had to look a werewolf guy in the eyes. If fate wanted you to be together, when your eyes met, theirs would turn red. The werewolf would then shift, and he’d be trapped in his wolf form until he decided to bite the woman.
That part of the process was called theMate Hunt.
I needed to skip over that when I enacted my plan. The length of a mate hunt was an uncontrollable variable, so I had to remove it.
From my friends’ stories, I’d put it together that stressing out the hunting wolf was the best way to get them to bite you sooner than they otherwise would’ve.
When I’d carefully pressed for information about what bothered male wolves from my friends, my plan had come together pretty easily.
Ignoring the squeezing pressure in my chest and my shallow breathing, I forced my gaze to move over the werewolves sitting around a fire pit.
Abby and Nico were on the left. They were the first couple to form from our friend group and the Feral Pack. They’d been together more than a year, and were still obsessed with each other.
Jade and Wyatt were next to them. I had a hard time seeing how their relationship worked at first, but it hadn’t taken long to understand. He clearly thought she was brilliant, and she seemed to love talking to him.
Austin and Enzo were in the center of the circle. They were chatting easily with Stella and Graham, who were on their other side. Both couples looked incredibly relaxed, and out of the four of them, not a single one was wearing shoes.
Next to them, there were two men. They were the only two guys I might end up mated to, and Emmy had shown me pictures of them as well as described their personalities.
The one on the right was Ethan. He was staring at me. He had golden hair and skin, and his lips were stretched in a grin. Emmy told me his smiles never met his eyes. Everyone knew he was going through something, but he refused to talk about it.
