Chapter One
Isadora
My eyes lingered over the cardboard boxes covering the floor. A pitiful sigh whistled between my lips, but it wasn’t exactly sadness over everything I had to give away.
Things were just things.
What had a hold over my heart was the knowledge that life as I knew it was gone. A way of life my father fought to preserve, and I was ready to do the exact thing he always warned me not to do.
“Promise you’ll never join them, Dora.”
At the time, I barely understood what he meant bythem, but he was on his deathbed, so he got the promise from me. It was a year later when a call confirmed that my father wasn’t just sick and crazy.
Dad was blond, tall, and had a funny accent. Even after years of living in Brazil, his eyes chased mine to double-check pronunciations in Portuguese, confused with gendered objects. I always smiled and helped him as he helped me with his language, Swedish. He left Sweden twenty-five years ago, promising never to come back. I knew very little about the place where he was born. He told me it was a small village north of Sweden, close to what is known as Lapland. I used to tell everyone at school my dad was Santa’s friend, and he wouldn’t bring them presents if they were mean to me.
Dad used to laugh at that and let me come up with stories about his heritage, but he never corrected me. He never cared to tell real stories until he was dying with cancer in his bed. The doctors had given him just enough to make him comfortable for his last days. That was when he decided to open his mouth about Sweden.
His voice was weak and low. He spoke in Swedish, and I didn’t want to tell him right then that my Swedish wasn’t that great. I obviously misunderstood him.
A pack? Alpha? Omegas? I was probably worse than I thought because he wasn’t making any sense, but I held his hand. I nodded and listened to him. He made me promise to never step foot in his village, and I agreed wholeheartedly. After all, I had no plans to go to Europe.
And I was broke. He didn’t know this part either, but I left my job to care for him, so my savings were dwindling. The last thing I would ever do was grab my tenBrazilian Reaisand go to Europe.
Yet a year later, the phone rang with an offer I couldn’t refuse, and now that was precisely what I was doing. Going to Sweden.
I collapsed right in the middle of the living room, surrounded by the memories of our happy lives. As the tears rolled down my cheeks, I trembled, thinking how much Dad would be disappointed in me. I was leaving our house, our haven, to do exactly what he warned me not to do. I wiped my tears with the back of my hand and reached for the packing tape, sealing away another box that was going to storage.
In the year since Dad died, I got another shitty receptionist job that barely covered the bills. Dad had nothing in his name besides this house, and there was a point when I had to accept I was swimming against the tide.
His old pack tracked me down, and the idea still had me shivering. Dad left them behind, and to my knowledge, they never kept in contact, yet the pack found me. It was Anders on the other side of the ocean who told me there was a big possibility that I was an omega, and with so few omegas in the world, it was important that we knew.
The refusal was on the tip of my tongue. I had no use for this knowledge. Until I received the phone call, I assumed Dad was sick and delirious, and I only half believed the stranger talking to me. None of it was enough to make me hop on a plane and leave everything that made me who I was behind.
“I can pay,” Anders said.
“Excuse me?”
He sighed, his voice low. “There’s nothing here for the young packs. They need hope, and you’re the hope for someone. I’ll pay to get you here.”
I scoffed. “I don’t know how much money can make me get trapped in Sweden.”
Lies. I was barely surviving. I had no social life and no friends—nothing but the mausoleum of this house and the good memories that I was determined to shine over the bad.
“I’ll pay for you to take the omega test. Maybe you don’t belong to any pack.”
“I don’t belong to anyone,” I spat as fast as a bullet.
He chuckled, raising the hairs on my arm and putting tears in the back of my eyes. Deep down, I knew I was in so much shit, I had no other option but to accept the deal.
“You sound like Karl.”
The mention of my dad dug a knife deep into my chest. I winced, begging the memory of my father was enough to make me say no to money. I looked around our home at the empty fridge and the leaking roof. The car I couldn’t keep anymore. If I were dumber and prideful, I’d hang up the call and get another job. But I was too smart to think the hole I found myself in was that easy to crawl out of. I tried for a year before realizing the kind of debt I found myself in was like bringing a bucket to the beach and trying to empty the ocean. Any time I paid something off, the wave came, and I was down to my knees again.
My teeth sank into my bottom lip when Anders’s voice came clear through my phone. “Name your price.”
Security. Hope. A future.
Those words danced through my mind, but all I could vocalize was, “My home.”
