Page 1 of Betrayed Knocked-Up Mate

Chapter 1 - Camila

Spring in Minnesota has sharp teeth.

Even now, in early March, frost traces delicate patterns across the garage windows, transforming my brother's cluttered workspace into something almost ethereal in the pale morning light.

I've spent the last three months trying to capture that particular quality of northern light—how it seems to hold secrets in its shadows and turns everyday moments into accidental masterpieces. It's different from anything I've photographed before: the harsh sunlight of African savannas, the diffused glow of Southeast Asian temples, the golden hour in South American rainforests. Here, the light feels older somehow. More deliberate. Like it's trying to tell a story, if only I can figure out how to frame it properly.

I haven’t yet figured it out, obviously.

The garage itself is a study in organized chaos, much like my brother. Tools hang in careful order on pegboards, but the workbench below them is strewn with half-finished projects. A partially dismantled motorcycle engine sits in one corner, surrounded by precisely labeled parts. The air smells like motor oil and coffee and that indefinable scent that meanspack, something I'm still getting used to after years of living among humans. My camera equipment is spread across every other available surface, a jumble of lenses and filters that probably cost more than Rafael and Thalia's new house. I’ve been collecting for a long, long time.

"You're doing it again," Rafael says, not looking up from the pile of camera equipment he's sorting. His hands move with the same precise care, whether he's handling weapons or my precious lenses, each piece treated like it might explode if touched wrong.

“What?”

"That thing where you space out thinking about composition instead of actually helping."

I toss a lens cap at his head, which he catches without even glancing up. Show-off. "I'm providing artistic direction. Very different."

"Mmhmm." He finally looks at me, dark eyes dancing with amusement. Even after all these years, it still catches me off guard sometimes—how similar we look, despite only being half-siblings. Same near-black eyes, the same unruly dark curls, the same inability to take anything too seriously most of the time. Though his features have that otherworldly edge from his vampiric parent, mine are purely wolf-shifter: sharp, always looking slightly rough around the edges.

"You know, when you said you wanted to organize your gear, I didn't think you meant ‘watch Raf do all the work while I stare artistically into the middle distance.’"

"I contain multitudes." I rescue my favorite wide-angle lens from his pile before he can sort it into the wrong bag.

It's the lens I used to capture those Siberian tigers last year, the ones that got me thatNational Geographicspread. The memory stings unexpectedly—another place I ran to, another dangerous situation I threw myself into just to prove I could. The magazine's editor called it "stunningly intimate" and "revolutionary." To my friends, I called it running away with style.

"Besides," I say, forcing my thoughts back to the present, "you're the one who insisted on helping. I was perfectly happy to do this myself."

"Right, because the last time I left you alone with an organizational project, it went so well."

"That was one time—"

"You color-coded my entire bookshelf while I was sleeping! And even then, I couldn’t make sense of it!”

"It's called having vision, Rafael." I carefully wrap the lens in its protective cloth, remembering how I used to organize my own bookshelf back home by subject and author, how I’d always mess it up within days but try again eventually.

Stop it,I tell myself firmly.Stop measuring everything against then.I don’t like to think of the past. "And you kept it that way for months, so clearly, I was onto something."

He snorts, but I catch the fondness in it. We fall into a comfortable silence, broken only by the soft clicks of camera equipment being sorted and the distant sound of voices from the pack center.

Through the garage's small windows, I can see people moving about their morning routines—a couple of the pack members’ daughters chasing each other through spring puddles, their laughter carrying clearly to my shifter hearing, Zane helping his very pregnant wife navigate the slick sidewalks with that mixture of devotion and terror unique to expectant fathers, Byron arguing with someone on his phone while gesturing expansively with his free hand. A pair of wolves—probably morning patrol—lope past in shifted form, their fur gleaming silver in the early light.

It's so... normal. Domestic. Nothing like the life I've been living for the past five years, chasing increasingly dangerous photo opportunities across the globe. I've photographed war zones and natural disasters, climbed mountains, and descended into caves, always pushing further, harder, faster. Always trying to prove something—to myself, to the world, to the ghost of a rejection I can't seem to outrun.

My camera roll tells the story better than I ever could: temples in Cambodia where the monks let me photograph ancient ceremonies in exchange for basic computer lessons. A pride of lions in Tanzania, the cubs playing while their mothers watched me with ancient, knowing eyes. Mountain gorillas in Rwanda, their expressions so human it hurt to look at them. Polar bears in Norway, their massive forms dwarfed by endless ice. Each shot more dangerous than the last, each risk carefully calculated to be just this side of suicidal.

The latest memory card holds pictures from my last assignment in Vietnam—rice paddies stretching to the horizon like mirrors reflecting the sky, water buffalo moving through morning mist like living shadows. I was planning to head to Indonesia next, chasing rumors of a newly discovered species of clouded leopard.

Then the call came, the call that informed me that Rafael had nearly died. Suddenly, all my carefully-laid plans seemed meaningless.

Something in my chest tightens at the thought. Three months in one place. Three months of pack bonds humming at the edges of my consciousness, of morning runs through forests that smell like home, of learning the rhythms of a life I thought I'd never want. Three months of not running away.

It’s a record for me.

"You're doing it again," Rafael says, softer this time. When I look at him, his expression has shifted to that particular brotherly concern that always makes me want to simultaneously hug him and punch him in the arm. The scar on his neck—still new, still angry-looking—catches the light, a reminder of how close I came to losing him. "Different kind of spacing out, though."

The garage door swings open with a bang that makes us both jump.

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