loves you and she’s not going anywhere. She’s going to stay here for as long as she can so she can be with you.” He shakes his head, his frown deepening.
I let out a breath and press my forehead on the bars. Bri. She’s still here, and she still remembers me. I have no idea how that’s possible, but I hold onto the hope that maybe, just maybe, I’ll see her again.
Chapter 36 – Brianna
I’m in the lab again, and even though I knew this was coming, I still gape when I hear the results.
“You’re definitely a female werewolf,” says the fairy technician from yesterday. “Your ancestors reside in the Montana pack and have since the North American wolf packs were created. Your mother’s maiden name was Drummond, and her line is from the Originals, which makes you a pure half-breed.” The fairy smiles. “And yes, I’m aware that’s an oxymoron.”
“My mother’s maiden name was Drummond and not Olson?” I sway on my feet. It feels as if the earth just moved beneath me. “So I am a female werewolf? There’s truly no doubt?”
Wes crosses his arms from where he stands beside me. “There’s no doubt. Your mother—Bridget Drummond—disappeared twenty-eight years ago. There was an extensive search for her after her car was found over an embankment in Montana, but her body was never recovered. It was believed she was swept away in the river, her body either eaten by predators or caught underwater so far downstream that she couldn’t be located. But now we know none of that is true—because your mother never died in that accident—it appears that she faked her own death.”
I plop down onto the stool behind me. “But why?”
Wes’s lips purse. “From what we can gather, it was because she wanted to be with your father. Given her lineage and what was expected of purebred females at that time, she was slated to marry a wolf of equal standing in the Idaho pack. Arranged marriages were fairly common then, but it seems your mother was having none of that. Instead, she chose to leave her pack and refuse that marriage. It also seems that she already had plans with your father because they were married not even a month after her disappearance.”
He retrieves a piece of paper from the folder he’s holding and hands it to me. My fingers curl around the crisp copy of my parents’ marriage certificate.
It holds my mother’s name, or rather, her alias. Instead of the block print letters reading Bridget Drummond, they read Bridget Olson. She chose a common last name, probably to make it easier to blend into the masses.
“But how did they meet if she normally only hung out with werewolves? My dad said they met at a concert. Is that even true?” My fingers are trembling, so I hand the sheet back to Wes and shove my palms under my thighs.
He slides the copy back into his folder. “Yes. That sounds right. From what we can gather, your parents met at a rock concert in Park City almost twenty-nine years ago. It’s the only location our database found in which both were present in the same location at the same time. The timing adds up too. Your mother’s pseudo-death was eight months after the concert, which means your parents were most likely secretly dating prior to her disappearance.”
“But how could my dad not know the truth about her?”
He shakes his head. “We may never know the answer to that.”
I think about what my father has told me of my mom. According to him, she was orphaned and had a hard life. She didn’t have any brothers or sisters and struggled to find her place in the world. He believes that struggle ultimately led to her suicide, when in reality, it was because she left her pack.
Wes is right. My father probably doesn’t know my mother’s true past.
I work my jaw when a memory slams to the front of my mind. It’s of a summer day when I was eleven or twelve and thought I was home alone, but my dad had returned early from work after another firing. He’d found me in the study, going through a box of his old belongings. That box held numerous Bon Jovi CDs, and my dad had been furious when he’d found me playing with them. He’d yanked the box away and told me they were very special to him and not to touch them again. He’d hidden the box after