I paused, squinting at the board Cian flipped over to show me:If you look in the folder, I’ll go and not bother you further.
With that promise, he slid a folder across the desk.
I’d made the list of Nicest Billionaires on the Planet for my philanthropy and easygoing personality, but I swore, permanent frown lines were being etched into my face as I snatched up the folder.
“What do you possibly think could change my mind on?—”
Both my words and the world stopped the moment my eyes landed on the folder’s contents.
A single photo, blown up to 8 x 10, with a small tab note labeled:The Potential.
And then everything changed.
There she was.
The Potential. The girl from the email. The prophesied queen from across the sea.
It felt like stepping off a cliff and crashing into the Three Gods Lake. I was being pulled under, my life divided into two parts.
Before I laid eyes on this female. And after.
No, Declan wasn’t going to like this.
But I looked at Cian, my chest still tight with the sensation of drowning in the knowledge of this female’s existence.
And then five words fell from my mouth, as if they’d been etched into me thousands of years ago by the serpent gods who supposedly created our kind.
“Call in the Irish Wolves,” I told The Shadow King.
He nodded and exited my office without another word, leaving me with the life-changing picture—and a new future to set in motion.
Faoiltiarn
Sadie
“There you are,Sadie Schaduw. I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Thank goodness that odd smell of yours makes you easy to track.”
Just a few weeks after our autumn arrival in Faoiltiarn, I looked up from my latest whittling project to find Amanda Smucker standing above me. I was sitting on a rock outside the cave I’d found the night before, putting the finishing touches on a figurine of a small finch-like bird nestled in a patch of nearby heather.
Its belly and small beak reminded me of the pine siskin, a finch I loved to carve back home, though it lacked the bright yellow that made siskins easier to spot in the wild. It also had a smaller, cuter beak.
I’d been so engrossed in trying to capture that distinguishing detail that I didn’t hear or smell Amanda approaching until the bird suddenly flew away, and I looked up to find the blonde Wölfennite staring down at me, her yogurt-and-muesli scent filling my nose.
I jumped to my feet, feeling a little caught out... and invaded. “Amanda, what are you doing here?”
“A cave, really?” She cast a disapproving frown at the stone structure behind the rock where I’d been sitting, whittling in the afternoon sun. “Is this truly where you decided to run off to last night when you insisted on abandoning us in that fit of hysterics?”
I fidgeted under her judgmental cornflower-blue gaze… and the memory of what had happened the night before, when I attempted to accompany her and the other Wölfennites to the dungeons below the Scottish kingdom’s castle for our monthly full moon shift.
I’d shoved down every compliant instinct I had in order to leave Canada for this Bridal Exchange. But last eve before the sunset, I’d learned the hard way that there was no escaping my mother’s voice inside my head.
“You are not to ever make the moon change in front of anyone, Sadie girl. Not even me.”
The she-wolf starved kingdom of Faoiltiarn had generously repurposed two of its fields to provide us Wölfennites with a large plot of land we’d named New St. Ailbe. It came with a three-story, 25-room dorm, wooden planter boxes for growing food, a cow barn, an icehouse, and even a chalk diamond to play our beloved baseball during free time. They’d gone out of their way to make our lives in New St. Ailbe match the original one.
But over fifty changing cages to satisfy the modesty-based shifting rules of our new Ordnung had been too much of an ask.
The compromise of using the castle dungeons for a group shift had been fine by everyone, including me—until we arrived at thecastle for an early dinner with the king and future queen a couple of hours before sunset.
