Chapter Six: My Secret

Chapter Six

Aurora

               Every night and well, practically every day, I had the same routine. Father believed in order and wanted to know where he could find me at any blessed hour of the day. I’ll be honest. I stayed at the academy as much as possible. I was on every team and club at Illyria Prep. I was allowed to play in events at any local schools inside Southern Illyria, but I couldn’t go to anything outside our city. We were the only all wolf school in our part. When we played against humans, we had to tone down our abilities. But most schools were packed with our kind even if they didn’t know it.   

The first and only time a coach called to reason with my father to let me play out of town, he ended up with a severe laceration and was fired. I tried to warn him. I felt terrible about it for days. It wasn’t even as if the other kids looked at me differently. The kids at Illyria Prep lived in the same building as me, and they just knew better than the coach. They understood the Alpha and the system. If you lived out in “normal” Illyrian society, then you would believe that you had an upstanding, hard-working, and devoted “Mayor.” There were packs all over the city, with their own leaders, but my father was Alpha to them all. However, he rarely had any contact with any except his personal pack filled with the highest members of society. Coach was from some suburb and somehow landed a job at Prep. He was outstanding and was well educated.

Principal Olivia called me into her office the next day to let me know it was all sorted out and a mistake like that wouldn’t be made again. She was so kind as I broke down and cried. She kept reassuring me that it wasn’t my fault. She really was a good woman. After hearing how her husband was killed during one of our raids of the North, I’m surprised she stayed here. Everyone outside the upper echelon could come and go as they pleased. Still, even they typically stayed out of the North. No the uppers, unless they had permission from the Alpha, could never move, but as Father put it, “They have everything they could ever want, so why would they want to leave?” I could always think of several reasons, but I kept them to myself.

Unless it were a special occasion, I would come directly home after school. Since all the girls lived in the same building, our parents encouraged us to order in and stay in one of our residents. We were told not to take unnecessary risks that the evil Hawthornes had spies everywhere. We could be taken as collateral, and the goddess only knows what they would do with innocents like us. I call bullshit. We all called it in secret. Nobody was sneaking into the city, and they were certainly not leaving with one of us, yet despite common sense, all of us would shake our heads up and down and agree with my father.

After time with the girls, if we didn’t eat, I would have dinner with my father. We would discuss school, my studies, anything of interest at my friends’ houses, and lately he would ask if any boys talked to me. It wasn’t dinner; it was an interrogation. Luckily I knew all the correct answers. My friends and I were some of the brightest at school. We had preplanned conversations that, if commanded, we could easily share. Secrets were often written down because we were sneaky, and I knew how Alpha Commands worked if my father chose to use one, which he rarely did since I freely gave information. But the last time I was at Mona’s house, he asked me so many questions about her parents Selene and Patrick.

Thankfully they weren’t home. He was always suspicious of them because they were something nobody else in the city, including him were, True Fated Mates. *Internally swooning.* That is the dream of every little wolf girl growing up. Yes, I wanted a prince, but more than anything, I wanted the one man that the gods and goddess and created just for me, my other half, to make me whole. I wanted my Mate to come and find me, rescue me, and take me far away from home. Maybe that’s why I continued to look out my window. Maybe I thought I’d see him in the distance and know he was the one, though I’m not sure it worked quite like that. The only thing Mom ever said in her stories is that you just know when you meet The One. But that could have applied to just the person you love, not a Mate.

I’ve always wanted to ask Selene about it since she was as close as I had to a mother, but we never had time to honestly talk. Like most adults, I think she avoided meaningful time with me because she knew I’d be forced to repeat anything and everything if my father asked. But that didn’t stop Selene from hugging me every chance she had, baking me my favorite treats, or making sure Mona and I were stocked up on romance novels, and R rated movies my father would definitely disapprove of.

Despite having my first shift and heat cycle, I think he was under the impression that I still had the hormones of a six-year-old who found boys icky. I was nearly eighteen and dying for affection from the opposite sex. At first, I thought it was me. I wondered if it was because I wasn’t pretty enough or thin enough. After all, I’m rather thick in my chest and ass. Or maybe it was because I was such a nerd and involved in everything. In the back of my mind, I knew what it was. Still, if I admitted the problem was my father, then it was something I couldn’t change. I desperately wanted the problem to be fixable.

When I was sixteen, I had had enough and decided to take matters into my own hands, and I finally tried flirting with boys at school. The guys I’d gone to school with since kindergarten ignored by attempt and just smiled. They reminded me how we were all best buds, and I was one of the guys. No, that did not make me feel better. Once again, a newbie to the school fell victim. Lance was a new student, his dad was a former military man, and they just moved to town. He was smart, handsome, and didn’t know who I was because nobody had a chance to tell him. When I saw him in the office before first period, I popped in. I told Mrs. Hetherington that I’d be happy to show him around since I was one of the Goodwill Student Ambassadors. She reluctantly said, okay. By the time I finished his tour of the academy, we had a date set for dinner. I spent the day on cloud nine. At first, my friends were excited, then Betty asked the dreaded question, “What will you tell your dad?”

“Maybe he won’t ask. He’ll just assume I’m having dinner with one of you. Actually, after school, I’ll come by one of your houses to eat a bite, so it’s not a lie.” The girls looked worried, but each offered up their home to help me go on my first date. Mona offered up hers and said her parents would be gone. I didn’t see Lance the rest of the day, but he had my number, and we were going to meet at the adorable 1950s style diner a few blocks away from the Tower. I went there enough with the girls by security wouldn’t even go inside, which was perfect. All the girls helped me get ready. This wasn’t an issue for any of them. Each had had boyfriends and dates by sixteen. I was the only one who hadn’t.

We planned to meet inside at six o’clock, but being the girl that I am, I knew to make a man wait and was fashionably late, well only five minutes, but still. I went in and looked around, but there was no Lance. The hostess said she hadn’t seen a guy with the description I gave her. I was smart enough to know not to use names. She went ahead and seated me, and I waited there sipping on a milkshake for thirty minutes. I looked at the door every time I heard the little bell. When I finished, the sweet little redhead waitress brought me a note and said a guy had left it for me. My heart leaped; I knew there was a good reason he wasn’t here.

*Aurora, I’m sorry.*

He didn’t need to give a reason, I knew. It didn’t help that the next day I saw him at school sporting a black eye. He said it was from boxing practice. He got pats on the back and high fives from all the guys requesting to come to watch his next practice. He told them all a time and place. He gave me a nod and a weak smile. That was it.

I went home, ate dinner with dad, and went to my room, and cried. It was my last attempt at flirting or talking with boys. I went back to being a bro, the smart one, the classroom perfectionist.

I took refuge in my room in my book. If my father had been loving, kind, or comforting, he would have read me my favorite stories every night as my mother had. Instead, he looked at the distraught eight-year-old girl who just lost her mother and asked, “Aren’t you old enough to read by yourself?” to which I nodded and went back to my room, alone. For the very first time, I opened my little blue book, Fairytales for Fairy Princesses. Inside were stories I had never heard of and symbols I’d never seen. Even as a small child, I knew this was something I shouldn’t have, it felt forbidden, and above all, it was a secret. My mother left me a secret for us always to share.

I started out just reading the stories. They were about Fairy Princesses and the Fae World, magic portals, princes in disguise, and a whole world that existed outside my own. I believed and read it as history instead of a children’s storybook. I learned so much. I knew magic that I shouldn’t, and that shouldn’t be done by my kind. Wolves could shift, we had heightened senses and reflexes, we could find our Mate and erase human memories, but that was it. Either I was special, or I had grown up being told more lies about my kind and our limits.

It was my secret, and I cherished it, but it was safer to keep my secret than share it with my best friends. Just like it was safer for everyone else for me to further isolate myself from school friends, but mostly guys. That way, when Dad started asking about boys at school, I could honestly say there were none.

Except one. But he was my secret, my fantasy, my shadow.