Her White Wolf

Prologue

Wakanda had held a special place in Cleo Khaled's life for a long time. Being welcomed here, it had changed her life. She had always felt lonely as a child; Cleo was the only child of Wahim and Claire Khaled. Her father, born in Lebanon, immigrated to the United States after finishing his high school studies and completed a veterinary doctorate program at Cornell University in New York. That was where he met Claire Ross. Her father focused on his career and became an incredibly sought-after exotic animal and livestock veterinarian. Zoos wanted him, research labs, people with private animal collections... that wasn't what he wanted. It wasn't until a unique opportunity became possible.

A chance encounter with King T'Chaka would lead to an offer he couldn't refuse. Move to Wakanda, this country almost no one has heard of, and care for the animals, both wild and domestic. They invited him to visit, and he felt a calling once he was there. The problem was, Claire didn't want to go. She didn't want to leave everything she knew. That, among other things, was the end of their marriage. Cleo had wanted to go with her father, but her mother won primary custody. She remained in New York in a quiet, tense apartment with her mother until the accident. Her mother had been killed driving to work in the morning. She remembered looking up into the blue eyes of the police officer who picked her up from school, her young questioning eyes not fully comprehending. Until her father showed up. She knew it was real then. He'd come to get her. To help her say goodbye to her mother and then to join him in Wakanda.

She had always felt lonely. Until Wakanda. The royal family had welcomed her with open arms, grateful to have a friend of the same age for their daughter, Shuri. She spent too much time with adults, and it showed at inopportune times. Cleo didn't do much to calm the rambunctious princess, but Shuri brought Cleo out of her shell. There was more laughter in her life than she'd had in several years. And it was here in Wakanda that Cleo found herself.

She wanted to be... her father. She wanted to be as strong, as smart, and as kind as he was. She followed directly in his footsteps, knowing more about veterinary medicine before she was eighteen before many would know in their lives. She'd learned hands on. Yes, she'd learned the books too but being with the animals had taught her more than school ever could. It would be only a few years before she would have to put those skills to use. Just after her 20th birthday, she found her father on the floor of the home they shared, cold. Heart attack. It was quick, they assured her. That... was supposed to help, but it didn't.

Just after this loss, still reeling from it, Wakanda had come under attack. Then...the universe. In the blink of an eye, half of the universe was just gone. It had buckled Cleo to her knees. It was...suffocatingly quiet. Maddeningly. If it weren't for the calls of the animals in the distance, she would have been convinced she was alone. Her father was gone. Shuri was gone. T'Challa. Okoye had remained, and it was through her that she maintained contact with the world. Hope had been nearly impossible to find, but Cleo had the animals. She could keep them alive, keep them safe. And they could keep her alive.

Then, like a miracle... they were back. Everyone who had vanished. And after the fight was over, once the dust began to settle, life had to begin again somehow. It was hard to get her footing again initially. People had become foreign to her. She'd had very few things to keep her company. Animals, poetry, books, music... she had to fill her time and those things had become more comfortable than other humans. Shuri had reached out to her, though, pulled her slowly back into the fold. She was only now starting to get her smile back.

It wasn't long after the fight of their lives that a new guest arrived, or... awoke. The man who had been dubbed the Winter Soldier. Cleo had of course heard of him; his face has been all over international news... he'd been framed for killing the King. Their King. In fact, he'd been blamed for a lot of things that hadn't been his fault. From what she understood, the evil organization Hydra experimented on him during World War II and had eventually turned him into their weapon. One that he'd had no choice but to become through brainwashing.

But it was more than just brainwashing, that word didn't capture what they had done to him based on what Shuri had shared with her. They completely stripped him of any memory he had ever known. He didn't even remember his name sometimes. Cleo was looking to help him, to reintroduce him to... the wild, essentially. There was so much he didn't know, so much he had left to learn... it had to be lonely, and she knew a thing or two about what loneliness can do to a person.