"Trailer Park girl.”

I ignore the taunting voice and the loud raucous laughter coming from the battered red truck crawling beside me on the deserted highway. Ahead of me, still obscured by the trees surrounding the road, there’s a dirt lane leading off the highway. That’s where I’m headed.

Beside me, the Jensen boys, local troublemakers, and eager bullies are leering and laughing. They can taunt all they want, but they won’t dare follow me once I step off the highway and into pack territory.

The dirt lane ahead, the trailer park at the end of the lane, and all the forest beyond is pack territory and belongs to the Falling River pack, my pack.

Not that Franky, Scotty, and Drew Jensen know about the pack, but there’s a wordless understanding. People from their town don’t come to our side of the highway.

“Where’re you going all alone, trailer park girl,” one of the boys sing-songs.

“Hey! You deaf, trailer girl?” It’s Drew, the meanest, ugliest one. “We’re talking to you.”

Just a few more steps, I tell myself, keeping my gaze ahead like the truck isn’t there at all. Most days, I walk all the way to school and back. River Bend, the tiny town closest to the trailer park, and River Bend High, are only a three-mile walk. Most days, there’s no trouble stopping me from enjoying my solitary walk. It’s just bad luck that the bullies noticed me walking alone on my last day of school.

“Look at me when I’m talking t—”

The roar of another engine interrupts the next taunt. A huge truck emerges from the direction of the trailer park and stops right on the road, almost blocking Jensen’s truck. Unlike their rusty old truck, this one is shiny and new, with huge tires almost as high as my chest.

With the engine still running, the passenger door opens, and Hugo steps out. Out here, wearing jeans and a plain black t-shirt, he looks no different from a human, a tall and imposing human with an air of menace and darkness around him that casts everything in shadow.

He moves like a beast of prey, fists clenched and huge muscles flexing like he just needs an excuse to strike hard. A scar runs down the side of his face, from his temple to his chin, deep and red and malevolent, just like him. Unable to stop a sudden shiver, I freeze as his dark eyes flow over me, then focus on the truck with the three boys.

Their fear is palpable. Next to him, they’re like lost puppies compared to a feral wolf. Glass squeaks as one of them rolls up the window. Their engine protests the sudden infusion of gas with a loud roar, and soon they’re gone in a squeal of tires. I don’t blame them. There’s something about Hugo. With him, you’re always aware that he would tear you to pieces and enjoy every minute of it.

Hugo turns to look at me, and I fight the urge to shrink under his gaze. His eyes are full of distaste spiced with the intense dislike he seems to have for me. He despises weakness, and even if I wasn’t weak enough to let ordinary humans bully me, I’m still just a female, unable to defend the pack and beneath the notice of an alpha like him.

“Boss?” Luke, the guy driving the truck, belongs to Hugo’s inner circle. Built like a boulder, he barely looks at me as he waits for Hugo’s next move.

Hugo gives me one more glare, making me flinch inside. He spits in my direction, then climbs back into the truck. The door slams with a thud, and Luke drives away, leaving me standing alone, my insides knotted with fear.

I half-run the rest of the way to my trailer. There are few people outside their trailers, but no one talks to me. Almost as if Hugo’s dislike for me has spread to the rest of the pack. They fear him, too, as I do.

It’s perfectly normal to fear your alpha, I tell myself. If the pack doesn't fear him, how can he lead?

And yet, there’s a part of me that knows there must be another way.

***

The trailer is empty when I open the door, just like every day of the last eight months. Mom isn’t on the couch reading a book or scribbling poetry in her notebook. She isn’t in the kitchen making lunch or dinner. She just isn't…anymore. That’s the hardest part to accept, that she was, and was so vibrant, alive, beautiful, and now, she just isn’t. She’s not in some far-off place that I can reach if I’m determined enough, like a hero in a Greek myth. She’s just gone. Forever out of reach.

I close the door behind me and toss my backpack on the couch, dropping beside it with a sigh. Everything is still the way it was when Mom was alive. Her knitted blanket with all the mismatched colors is neatly folded at the end of the couch, and all her books are lying around with her bookmarks still in place.

Eight months.

And I still can’t bring myself to say goodbye.

With my dad, ten years ago. I was just a kid. I missed him, but I had my mom comfort me. Now, I have no one.

Reaching for my backpack, I retrieve a notebook and let it fall open, revealing the folded sheet I’d stowed inside earlier. It’s a printed email from Clear Ridge College, the only college I’d sent an application to at the beginning of the year. Maybe if Mom had still been alive, I'd have applied to more colleges, but with her gone, I'd been too afraid. With her gone, I’d started telling myself that our dream was her dream, that maybe I agreed with Hugo that my place as a female in the Falling River pack was to remain quiet and do as I was told.

And now…

I open the sheet and smooth it with shaking hands, my eyes catching on to the words that had left me unable to function through my last day of high school.

We’re pleased to inform you…

You have been awarded a full scholarship…

Tuition and expenses…

We look forward…

My breath catches, and my heart thuds hard against my chest.

If Hugo finds out about this.

If Hugo finds out about this, I’ll be as good as dead.

The rest of the pack will take his side too. It’s bad enough my mother insisted that I attend the local high school with humans instead of being homeschooled with the rest of the pack. It’s bad enough that I insisted on graduating. But this? College?

“Mom,” I whisper. “I wish you were here to defend me.”

Just then, I hear a bang on the door, and my heart leaps out of my chest.