𝐀𝐒𝐇𝐄𝐒 ⸻ 𝖻𝗅𝖺𝖼𝗄𝗐𝖺𝗍𝖾𝗋

→ chapter one.

Leah Clearwater was a freak of nature. Especially because she was a werewolf. The fact was inescapable, unavoidable. The sky was blue, Bella Swan wanted to be a vampire, and Leah was a freak. 

Being councilman Harry Clearwater's only daughter and being the oldest, she was expected to dress and behave with decorum at every occasion. As if that wasn't stressful enough, the stupid werewolf genes had been activated in her, turning her into history's first and only female werewolf.

Before she Phased, she had your typical white picket fence childhood with two loving parents, a high-achiever education, and a loving, healthy childhood friend-turned-fiancé, Sam Uley. Two weeks after he proposed, he vanished and her entire world had collapsed on itself. Too bad she'd been unaware that his disappearance was the hallmark of the end of her normal, human life as she knew it. When he turned back up, he wasn't the same Sam she'd fallen in love with...and her second cousin, Emily, wasn't the best friend she'd always been.

At twenty-one, it felt like the world had decided to spit in the face of her happiness. She'd caught them fucking in the downstairs bathroom at her twenty-first birthday party, and no one seemed concerned. No one tittered about it. Instead, the whispers and side-eyes were all for Leah's inability to let it go. How was she supposed to do that when the love of her life and her all-but-sister had broken her trust so thoroughly, there was no way she'd ever forgive them? Her pain and grief hadn't mattered though. All that was the new, fated couple of Sam Uley and Emily Young.

Like Leah and Sam had never happened and had never mattered.

The anger wedged itself under her skin as the days turned months and the months stretched long and thin. She had to watch her cousin and ex-fiancé flaunt their love in front of her. Everyone expected her to let it go but she couldn't, even after Emily wound up in the hospital after a bear attack. Her baby brother, Seth, had seen her cry and held her when the weight of it crushed her some nights.

After that, everything went downhill. Her temper got worse and worse. She'd fly off at the smallest slight, and it became commonplace for the neighbors to show up on the doorstep to ask if everything was alright during her and her father, Harry's, long rows. The rage had frightened her. It wasn't her but it was like she was unable to control herself from lashing out. Maybe it was all the hurt from Sam and Emily's betrayal and the callousness of those around her.

The day it all came to head was forever burned in her psyche.

It had been another fight, something inconsequential that had set her off. She'd been going back-and-forth with Harry. The anger had been hotter than usual, a little voice in her head insisting she needed to hurt her dad as much as he'd hurt her with his passiveness and his whole tribal elder song-and-dance when all she'd wanted was comfort and support.

The screaming match had been going on for hours and hours, the longest fight they'd ever had, and when Harry had demanded she quit acting like an ungrateful, spoiled bitch and just accept that Taha Aki had different plans for her, she lost it. She had screamed that Taha Aki had fucked up her entire life and that she would never forgive Sam or Emily and that she wanted her dad but he was prioritizing everyone except his own daughter. She'd turned and began to fled but Harry had caught her wrist, pulling her back.

And then suddenly the world had exploded as she twisted to see Harry's pale, wide-eyed face, a still of shock and horror, as he fell backwards, releasing her. Everything had turned black, her head pounding, her ears ringing when she regained consciousness.

She had looked at Sue and pain lanced through her as her mother screamed through frantic tears. Telling her to leave, to go to Sam Uley's, and she had ran when Sue had shielded Harry from Leah. More pain had splintered through Leah at the idea her mother thought she was capable of hurting either of them.