The final year of high school is always a tough one. I had to get to the end of it. I needed to get good enough grades so that I’d get into the course of my choice at a good university. I needed to Rudyard Kipling this shit, keeping my head as everyone else lost theirs, because I’d already seen friends drop out from stress, a teen pregnancy and just from an overwhelming sense of uselessness.
But not me.
If we did that American year book thing, as Jimmy York’s daughter, at the start of the year I would’ve been voted ‘girl most likely to get addicted to meth’. But I wasn’t. Mum had finally left Dad two years ago and that meant my exposure to illicit drugs went down to 0%, or thereabouts. She was doing well, I was doing well, ready to move on with my life and make a success of it.
Then she met and married Adam.
He was a good man, a widower, the last of the Murphy pack, his brothers and his mate dying in a house fire many years ago. People always assumed he would stay single until he died, but at some point, his visits to Mum’s shop every morning turned into a date, then a lot of dates and now…
“Oh my god, bitch!”
I was shoved into the lockers by a blur of black and white, the perpetrator revealing herself with a clown like grin. Heavy black eyeliner? Check. Pale complexion enhanced by industrial strength white foundation? Check? Wild mop of died back hair? Check again. It was Finn. I shoved my best friend off me and then made a show of dusting myself down.
“You’re going home to the Murphy brothers’ house tonight.” She jumped up and down like some kind of scary demon child you see in those old slasher films. “OMG, they’re so fucking hot.”
And they were. Really, really fucking hot. One of the three alpha packs in town, but not the ruling one, though. Adam wasn’t really one for pushing himself forward unless he needed to, and with these boys for sons, he didn’t have time to. The Murphy’s were the bad boys of Gainsborough. Not a crackhead like Dad and his mates, they came to school, sometimes, created hell, all of the time, and were the source of most of the fun in this shithole town.
And as of today, they were also my new stepbrothers.
“Charlie, how the fuck are you going to keep it in your pants, living down the hall from all of that hotness?”
Finn’s question was one no doubt many people had asked, though not to my face, because me? I was one of the three omegas of Gainsborough. No one had expected it and my designation reveal was partly what got Mum’s arse into gear and away from Dad.
She couldn’t do it for herself. He’d beaten her down over the years, starting with getting her pregnant with me when they were still both at school and ending with us slinking out of the house like feral cats one night after he’d passed out in his room. Mum told me later that Dad had started getting ‘ideas’ about how to exploit my new designation, sure it was a way he could wring greater and greater concessions from the ruling pack, the Hendersons.
“Hey, Charlie.”
Brent Henderson appeared in the hallways as if summoned by my thoughts, and wouldn’t that of been nice. But where he was, his brothers were and the five of them came sauntering over with an unconscious swagger. That’s what comes from running this town for the last hundred years or so.
“Hey Brent,” Finn said, wiggling her fingers. “Hey Lindsay. Hey Greg.”
She was polite and friendly towards each guy and Lindsay turned and smiled back, asking her how her day was, but I knew what was happening and I hated it. Finn was gorgeous, far prettier than me and I’d been the invisible one back before I’d revealed. But because of some weird quirk of nature, I was alpha crack and here they were.
“Hey.” Brent’s voice was completely different now, low and husky, just for me. He moved in closer, boxing me in and when that wasn’t enough, his brothers closed off all other exits. It wasn’t a deliberate thing or a coercive thing, just what alphas did. They didn’t want me thinking, talking to anyone else, just them, their wolves pressing them hard to take a mate and for some reason they seemed to think that might be me.
“We were going to the pizza place for a feed after school.” I turned to see that Greg had edged closer, staring down at me. “We thought you and Finn might want to come.”
He remembered my friend’s name. Ten points for Gryffindor.
I opened my mouth, ready to come up with a response when I heard my name barked down the hall.
“Charlie!”
Everyone turned and I mean everyone left in the damn hall. The corridor was chaos because the final bell had just gone, but I swear, every damn person in the hallway stopped right then.
Including the Hendersons.
Brent pushed himself away from the lockers, instantly stiffening and that just made him happy.
Alpha packs are born in groups of four or five to their omega mothers, and while each one throbbed with barely contained power, none wielded it with such contempt as Lock.
Lachlan Murphy really, but Lock it was since he started high school. He grinned, a slow, shit eating thing designed to put a bug up the arse’s of the Hendersons and have all of the male attracted people in the hallway swooning. Because he looked like a fallen angel, with his longish dirty blond hair and grey blue eyes, ones that danced with mischief.
Trouble is he was the damn devil.
“There’s our girl.” His voice was a feline purr that felt like it rubbed all over my skin. “Come on, Charlie girl. Time to go home.”
Adam had meant well. I told myself that over and over all night, but it didn’t mean that shit was going to end well for me.