It was enough to make me utterly miserable, though I tried not to show it. Instead, I kept my face blank as I scrolled through my emails, looking at the pictures of my two best friends in their bikinis laughing and playing on the beach.
Then a new email popped up. I didn’t recognize the email address and I was about to swipe it off to Spam-land, but the first line of print caught my eye.
“This is what you get for being selfish!” it read.
A cold fist squeezed my stomach as I opened the email. It had a video embedded in it. Making sure the sound was turned all the way down, I clicked the little arrow in the middle to play it.
What I saw made my blood turn to ice in my veins.
Oh my God! Oh, no—OH NO!
I jumped up from the table suddenly, gripping my phone to my side.
“Anastasia?” My mother looked up anxiously. “Are you all right, sweetheart?” she asked.
Marcus and Jake looked up too and I saw suspicion in my stepfather’s eyes and concern in Jake’s.
“Sorry, I…I don’t feel so good all of a sudden,” I blurted. “I think I’d better go.”
“Well, if you don’t—” my mom began, but I was already leaving the table and bolting up the stairs to my room. This was bad—this was really, really bad and I had no idea what to do.
THIRTY-SIX
About forty-five minutes later, there was a discrete tapping at my windowpane. When I saw Jake’s face behind the glass, I pushed up the window and beckoned him inside.
“Hurry up!” I begged him. “And come see this—it’s really bad!”
“If it’s the same thing I got on my phone, I can imagine,” he said grimly, climbing in.
We sat, side-by-side on my bed, and I showed him the video—this time with sound, though I had it turned way down.
It was me on my hands and knees, completely naked with Jake naked behind me. The room was dark but the moonlight created a brilliant pool of light around us—it reminded me that I had felt like the two of us were in the spotlight at center stage or something.
At any rate, it was certainly bright enough that when the picture zoomed in on Jake entering me, it was plainly visible. And then it showed him fucking me—hard. There was no doubt what we were doing together—no doubt we were committing what the Weres considered incest, even though there was no true blood relationship between us.
The camera pulled back a moment and then, a moment later, Jake Shifted into his Wolf. Every detail had been lovingly captured from the expression of pained ecstasy on my face when he filled me so full of himself to the complete transformation from human to fur form. If you hadn’t been there and didn’t know that he had pulled out at the last minute, you would have sworn that he had Shifted inside me—that he had changed to his fur form while he was fucking me. That was certainly how it looked on the video, anyway.
Someone had documented our sins and now they were sending them out over email.
“Yeah, that’s what I got all right,” Jake said shortly, when the clip ended. “It’s clearly the two of us—we can’t pretend it’s not.”
“Ophelia,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach. “She must have been filming us! What are we going to do?”
He shook his head.
“It depends on if she just sent it to us…or to anyone else. It’s damning evidence that we committed incest—and that I raped you in my fur form.”
“But you didn’t!” I protested! “You pulled out before you Shifted! None of it was your fault, Jake and you didn’t rape me!”
“Try telling that to my father,” he said in a low voice. “If he saw this, he’d disown me formally and then probably have me tried, convicted, and executed for breaking both of the Unbreakable Laws.”
“But it’s not your fault!” I cried again. “You didn’t—”
“That’s not how he would see it,” Jake interrupted grimly. “Listen, Ani, I think the two of us had better get out of here. Is there anywhere you can go? Anyone you can hide with?”
I felt my heart sink. He wasn’t talking about running away together—he was just talking about running away.
“I can probably hide out with either Madison or Ashley for a while,” I said uncertainly. “But what about you? Where will you go?”
He shook his head.
“Don’t know. If this gets out, I’ll be a fugitive in the Were community. And this is the kind of thing that follows you—I’ll probably have to leave the country.”
“Without me?” I cried, feeling my stomach twist into a knot. “Please, Jake, if we’re going to go, let’s go together!”
Jake gave me an agonized look.
“Baby, if I’m alone with you too long, I’ll break the Laws for real. I won’t be able to help myself—keep myself from knotting you and breeding you! And if you get pregnant with my baby—”