Zoe Bright pulled on her safety goggles over her green eyes and loaded a rectangular piece of oak wood into the lathe. Her long, black hair swung in a ponytail down her back. She turned on the machine and slowly pressed her sharp cutter against the swiftly turning wood, pursing her red lips in concentration. Soon she had the rectangles smoothed into a cylinder that would began her intricately beveled table leg.
When she had first come to the Bright Institute for Shifters to study woodworking, she had not expected to enjoy it so much. Her brother Corey Bright, the founder of the Institute, thought she was lying about her interest. But the fact was, she really liked working with wood. Building real things with her own two hands gave her a sense of accomplishment she had never known before.
If only she had come here under different circumstances, maybe she could really use the skills she’d learned over the last six months. Maybe she could have a real life that she could be proud of for once. But Zoe still wasn’t free from her past, and she didn’t know if she ever would be.
Part of her knew that she should have come clean with her brother six months ago when she had first arrived in Fate Mountain. But every time she tried to talk to him about it, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him the truth. Corey was ten years older than her, and in some ways, he was more like a parent than a brother. He’d been taking care of her since she was a child.
Unlike Corey, who was a computer genius and a billionaire, Zoe had always been labeled a troublemaker. From her earliest memory she had been the wild child and the one who always had to be lectured and watched. After their mother had died before the war, Zoe had left the country to find a life of her own. All along, Corey had been sending her money and hadn’t asked what she was doing with it.
He was a good brother. He had never let her go hungry. In fact, he had allowed her to live a life of leisure since she had become an adult. She’d never actually had to have a job or had any kind of responsibility. When she first left the country seven years ago, she had spent the first couple of years traveling to music festivals and dancing.
But that form of stimulation had only excited her for so long. Soon, she needed greater thrills and that’s when she met her ex-boyfriend, the and notorious Russian mob boss who was the leader of an international crime syndicate. He had taken her and immediately shown her the kind of life that Zoe had always believed she deserved. Corey’s money had afforded her the luxury of never having to work, but it didn’t afford her the real luxuries of life. That, Dima had given her.
But it didn’t come without a price. Not long after she had become involved with Dimitri Ivanov, he started to ask her to use her shifter skills to do jobs for him. At first, they were small, innocuous jobs that she could tell herself had no victims. But soon the jobs escalated in risk and she was complicit in Dimitri’s criminal underworld. She was deeply involved by the time he asked her to begin stealing and smuggling jewels across international borders.
The thrill of danger and the luxury Dimitri provided could not make up for the fact that Zoe was doing something incredibly wrong. She couldn’t justify her actions and asked Dima to allow her to leave. He did kick her out of his bed, but he would not allow her out of the crime family until she did one last job. It was the most dangerous job yet, smuggling a million dollars’ worth of diamonds from Saudi Arabia into France.
She’d made a judgement call in the airport when it became evident that security was onto her. She’d been forced to drop the diamonds into a garbage can on the concourse. She had been able to get past airport security, but she wasn’t able to get free of Dima. He insisted she pay him back every penny of the value of the diamonds she’d lost.
For the last eight months, Zoe had been giving Dimitri every cent that her brother Corey sent her. Every job she did for Dima she had to do for free. And she still owed the man eight hundred thousand dollars. Soon, she would not owe him anything anymore, and she’d be free. At least, that was the plan. Part of her knew that Dimitri would never let her go after what she had seen.
But Zoe couldn’t give up hope, not now when she had come to Fate Mountain to be with her brother and his new wife Willow. They had welcomed her into the Institute and into their home in the way only a loving family could. It reminded Zoe so much of what she had been missing all these years since her mother died.