The boys’ locker room was loud from the football team’s celebration they’d beaten Morrison College 3–2. Everyone was hyped, shouting, slapping backs. Axel’s body was there, but his head was somewhere else.

He’d seen her in the stands. Cheering. The whole match felt like a fucking torture.

Why? Because fate or whatever the hell the Moon goddess is had royally screwed him by dumping his fated mate into his life. Why? Why did fate have to be so cruel, basically flipping him off? And... why her of all people? Sure, they’re pretty, even kind, but...

A flash: his parents’ last image slamming the door behind them and leaving him alone in the empty flat with "We’ll be back in an hour." Right. An hour. At first Axel sat at the kitchen table for hours waiting, then a day, then three days. It was a neighbour who noticed the kitchen light burning and no movement in the house who found the eight-year-old Axel, quietly waiting like a good boy, repeating, "I can’t leave, my parents will come back." No. Nobody came.

Fourteen years later he still had no answer for why they’d done it. But the Moon goddess looks like loves to fuck with him. Tossing that grotesque joke in his face and for giving him the thing he feared most: attachment, being important to someone. He’d learned in the orphanage and here at Regins University that people and life itself are brutal. They stomp on you if you’re weak, if you believe in something, if you leave your soft spot open.

So Axel learned to survive among humans while hiding what he really was: a werewolf.