the entire reason she was at Werewolf Academy had something to do with me. I just wasn’t sure why.
“Next, I would like to tell you about a group project that I’m going to assign you today,” Aiden continued. “We’re going to be researching curses and prophecies. I’m going to assign you with a curse, and a partner. You’ll research the curse or prophecy together and then do a presentation about it. So, I’m going to read off your partners and the curse or prophecy that you’ve been assigned.”
He began to call out pairs of names.
Iris and Vince were partnered, which was relieving to me. The last thing I would have wanted was to be partners with either of them.
“Raven Gallagher… and Lydia Bowers. The two of you will cover the Triangle prophecy.”
“Why the hell would you pair me with Sarah?” I asked him through mind-speak, glaring at him from across the room.
“Easy,” he replied, glancing in my direction. “This group project will force you to interact with one another. Once you’ve talked to her some more, maybe you’ll be able to get to the bottom of this whole thing and figure out why she’s here.”
I found myself sulking. I didn’t want to have to interact with her. I just wanted to pretend that she wasn’t here and hope that the problem would go away entirely on its own.
But nope. My mate was going to force me to talk to her.
And we had to research the Triangle together. Of all the curses and prophecies for him to assign us, it was one that directly involved me… one that Sarah knew directly involved me.
This was going to be interesting, to say the least.
Sarah… I mean “Lydia” … and I met in the library for the first time the following afternoon.
“I found these books before you got here.” She laid a stack on the table between us. “This prophecy doesn’t seem to be that popular or that well-known, so it seems like there aren’t a lot of books on it. These are it.”
A realization dawned on me then. “Why didn’t we find these books in the library last year when we were actually trying to find information on them?” I thought to Aiden through mind-speak.
“Because I had the library order these books specifically for this assignment,” Aiden explained. “Considering the Triangle prophecy is so close to coming to fruition, I also thought it was really important for the other students to learn about it. That’s the entire reason I decided to give you two this assignment.”
“Gotcha,” I thought back to him, as Sarah said, “So, I’m thinking that I can go through these two books, and you can go through those two.”
“Okay,” I agreed. Ultimately, I knew that we needed to focus on the project. We needed to actually get it done in order to get a passing grade. Of all of my mates, Aiden was probably the toughest when it came to grading. We had to make sure that we knew our shit about this prophecy, which shouldn’t have been too hard for me. The prophecy haunted my life every single day of my life, after all.
But what I really wanted to do was just ask Sarah a million questions. Why was she at Werewolf Academy? Why was she going by the name of my biological mother?
Of course, I knew that she wouldn’t have been honest about any of the answers. The first, and only, time I had called her out as being Sarah, she had pretended that she wasn’t, which, of course, brought up another important question.
Why was she acting like she didn’t know me?
“So, what made you switch into this class last minute?” I asked her, trying to make small talk, as I flipped through the first book’s table of contents.
“I’ve always been really interested in paranormal history,” she said with a shrug.
Maybe because you were such a big part of it; you were, after all, a Princess’s lady’s maid, I thought to myself.
“So, I hear that our professor is your mate,” Sarah said, her eyes flitting over to meet mine.
I nodded. “Yeah, he’s one of them.”
“One of them?” Her eyes grew really wide. “You have more than one mate?”
“Oh. I’m mated to all of the Darken.” I just assumed that everyone at Werewolf Academy already knew that. It had always been such a common topic of discussion that I wondered how she hadn’t heard about it.
“Wow, really?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“The Darken are known to be as ruthless as they come.”
I