“Your biological mother was a teenage drug addict, and your father was likely mixed up in the same stuff. Who’s to say you haven’t gone down the same road and used all this Facility malarkey as a cover?”

Stephanie set her jaw and levelled her gaze with the woman interviewing her.

“My mother made bad choices, yes, and I wouldn’t be here without her or the man she was with at the time. But that doesn’t have anything to do with me,” she replied. “Laura and Matthew Armstrong are my parents – they always have been. To say that these people I’ve never met have more influence over how I’ve lived my life than them would be the worst insult anyone could ever throw at us. It’s ridiculous and untrue.”

Susanne Bridgewater, the TV personality with the flat-pressed auburn hair and excessive makeup pursed her lips into a forcedly polite smile and nodded, as if pitying Stephanie for her belief. Stephanie fought the urge to curl her lip at her.

“So you never got involved with the things your mother did?” She pressed.

With only a moment’s hesitation, Stephanie nodded.

“That’s what I said.”

“I see,” The woman surmised. “But we actually got into contact with your foster parents. Linda and Herbert Shaw, right?”

Stephanie gritted her teeth, trying to contain her latent and obvious lack of surprise that those two had saw fit to capitalize on the situation and get back at her for making them look like fools. She had expected no less, but had clearly hoped that they wouldn’t. It opened up a whole new line of questioning that she, quite frankly, did not want to deal with publicly. Or in private, really.

“They testified that you were – and I quote – ‘out of control’. They said you got into trouble at school, that you hung out with the wrong kinds of people,” she said, mock surprise raising her eyebrows into her hairline. “Oh, and it looks as if they thought you were into underage drinking and drug use. You didn’t come home for – and again, a direct quote – ‘days at a time’.” Susanne rested the cards with her notes on them in her lap, leaning forward as if to intimidate Stephanie with her sharp feminine cunning.

Stephanie thought that she might like to see how confident this woman was if her words weren’t her only weapon – if all of America didn’t tolerate her awful personality. She suspected this would go completely differently if they weren’t in a controlled environment live in front of a hundred people.

Nevertheless, Stephanie hadn’t betted on Linda and Herbert, the cowards they were, coming forward with this blatant slander. They hadn’t been in her cards as people who would single her out like that. There were many more that had more reason to come after her than them.

It was becoming a frighteningly recurrant theme, but Stephanie hadn’t exactly told anyone about her foster parents. Sure, she’d talked about Eric Bradley and everything that had happened after, but embarrassment had kept her from mentioning the fact that she’d gotten stuck with those two as guardians along with everything else. It was stupid, but she hated the thought that she’d allowed them to treat her the way they had.

Stephanie was determined not to be looked at like a victim, and with all that was going on, it was becoming increasingly hard to strive for that. It made her sick to her stomach that the wording in that interrogation laid out to her by Susanna Bridgewater was ambiguous enough to be technically true, innocently damning.

The media wanted Stephanie to defame other people, if only to spark a backlash of hatred from those who thought that she was an attention-seeking brat. She wouldn’t give them that satisfaction.

“I wouldn’t say it was as serious as you’re suggesting, Susie,” Stephanie replied, injecting as much faux-sincerity into her voice as was possible. “But yes, I did get a little lost immediately after Breckenridge. My family – my life was ripped from me and I was dumped with foster parents and expected to just get on with it. How could I?” She asked. “It wasn’t good judgment on my part, but what teen in my position would be thinking rationally? I got it together in the end, and I haven’t done anything like it since.”

Susanne hummed with false sympathy and shrugged.

“If you say so, I suppose,” she said. “But then, how did you get it together? You ran away from the people who were willing to take you in, to house you, to give you a chance at a new life. The police were never able to catch you. So, why did you leave?”

A small, disbelieving smile passed over Stephanie’s face as she locked eyes with Susanna. There was no doubt in the young werewolf’s mind what the woman was doing. She had something up her sleeve and she was just drawing this out to make a liar out of Stephanie.

And yet, there was nothing she could do but dig herself a deeper hole and plough right on ahead until the other woman yanked the rug out from underneath her.

“I – well, to be honest with you, the Shaws were not my family. They were human; I couldn’t be myself   while I stayed with them. I didn’t know what had happened to my parents or Liam or Alexei. I needed to find them, or try at least,” she confessed, pulling the safe truth out of the real story. “So I left.”

Susanna grins then, a brilliant white smile that knocks the breath out of Stephanie even as she tries to keep her face neutral, plastered with forced regret. She fights the urge to glance off-stage to see Laura standing there, biting her finger nails and trying to anticipate Susanna’s every move. Knowing she’s there, though, is a comfort she never thought it would be again.

“Oh, really?” the interviewer asks and then turns to the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have someone to introduce to the stage with us. Here to tell us his side of the story of what happened in Woodstock, Vermont is Eric Bradley!”

The name sends panic down Stephanie’s spine, and this time her eyes visibly widen and she turns to look at her mother’s equally horrified face. It wasn’t public knowledge that he had threatened to kill her next time he as much as saw her, but Laura knew. Stephanie was caught somewhere she knew she didn’t want to be, but was powerless to stop it as a familiar figure strode onto the stage.

He telegraphed lazy arrogance in every step, easy confidence and languid danger. If Stephanie didn’t know any better, she’d assume he was an Alpha. But she did know better, so she knew it was the farthest from the truth anyone could possibly get.

She also knew that she was screwed to hell and back the moment he set foot onto the televised floor.

The heady tang of tobacco permeated the air as he took the seat opposite her, throwing his trademark devil-may-care grin toward her, Susanne between them and the audience. Stephanie couldn’t help but flinch, pressing herself into the arm of the sofa as well as she could without outwardly showing it. Her heart was in her throat and she thought she was going to be sick.

There was still that edge in his eyes, the swagger that belied how dangerous he really was. Dark edges and leather jackets. Logically, she thinks he won’t kill her here, on stage – but there was still a part of her that hurts to see him, to know what he was going to say.

Her knee jerk reaction, springing from those months with him so long ago, was to accuse him of being an idiot for still smoking. Somehow, she reckoned it won’t be passed off with amusement as it once would have been.

“Welcome to the show, Eric,” Susanne practically simpered. “How are you?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” he said, innocuously enough, but hidden beneath those words Stephanie was sure she detected the slightest threat as he glanced between the two girls. “And you?”

Stephanie fought the urge to roll her eyes or leave the stage – or both. They were just dragging it out and she didn’t appreciate it. As it was she was just trying not to look, or feel, like a deer in headlights.

“Alright, Eric,” Susanne started, shifting in her seat and getting comfortable for a long line of questioning. “Let’s start with how you two met.”

Eric grinned again, to himself this time, as if sharing a private joke. “We met at school – I got her in trouble for a food fight.”

Stunned laughter pealed from the audience, and Stephanie looked down and away from the punishing, piercing gaze Eric had directed at her. She was trying not to worry at the skin of her hands too much, but the red, raw quality of them told her she had not succeeded.

Susanne allowed the laughter to die down before she carried on.

“What were your first impressions of Stephanie?”

Stephanie could feel the crowd waiting to hang on his every word. They had been sold the very first moment he walked onto the scene. She hated them all just a little bit for that.

“She was… uptight, closed off and had a hell of a lot of anger in her,” he replied.

“Okay, so what happened after that first day?”

“I liked her. I liked her spirit, and I wanted to know her. I wanted her to notice me.”

“And why is that?”

Eric shrugged, Stephanie caught the movement when she finally had the strength to lift her eyes and relax in her chair, fighting the scowl that threatened her features.

“She was – interesting? I guess. Just young and so strong. She stood out - and I find people generally boring.”

Stephanie couldn’t believe she had to listen to this. No doubt the plan of attack was building her up just to tear her back down. It would make it all so very dramatic. There would be much more of an impact this way.

“Would you agree with what the Shaws said about her, then? On how Stephanie was acting at the time?”

Eric’s eyes darkened as he listened to Susanne’s question, a muscle in his jaw jumped and Stephanie noted that his left hand clenched momentarily.

“I wouldn’t agree with a thing those lowlifes said,” he growled.

It was obviously not what Susanne was expecting. She lost her composure for a moment, eyebrows creased in confusion.

“I – um, what do you mean?”

“I mean,” he said. “I wouldn’t listen to a word they said after what they did. The self-serving, abusive assholes.”

Stephanie blushed, and she was sure that her facial expression probably mirrored Susanne Bridgewater’s at that point. They were both looking at Eric with distinct shock. When Stephanie accidentally caught his eye, she felt herself reaching out to him and silently asking what the hell he thought he was doing. He didn’t return her gaze with even the smallest of smiles or nods or any gestures really. He pointedly ignored her and turned back to Susanne.

“Sure, in some way you could say what they said was true. But I’m not really the person to ask since I’m the one who got her into trouble at school,” he declared. “Then again, I was also the ‘shady crowd’ providing the drugs and the alcohol. Oh and when she didn’t come home for days at a time? I think that was me, too. I let her crash at mine because those ‘foster parents’ of hers were jackasses who never should have been allowed to have her.”

Susanne looked stricken, a little pale beneath the fake tan and caked on makeup. Stephanie fought a smile. The woman was losing credibility fast. But she wasn’t paid for nothing.

“Okay,” she said, collecting herself. “Why did you become friends?”

“I guess I was teaching her how to be on her own out there in the real world,” he replied easily. “How to lie and cheat to get where she wanted to. I didn’t want her to leave, but she couldn’t stay with those sickos forever.”

“And, uh, what was your home life like at the time?”

Susanne was grasping for straws, that much was clear. Yet, Stephanie had the awful feeling that if she muddled around enough, she would soon strike upon gold.

“I was in foster care myself, but my parents were real people who cared, and it made all the difference.”

Susanne exhaled in relief and Stephanie stiffened.

“What happened to your real parents?”

“I only ever knew my mom,” he said. “She was killed by a werewolf.”

“Did Stephanie tell you she was a werewolf?”

“No.”

“When did you find out?”

Eric rolled his shoulders and sat back.

“At the very end.”

“How did you find out, and what did you do when you did?”

Eric told the story. He talked about how he was torn up about his mother, that it was the anniversary of her death that night. That he got drunk and overbearing. How, amidst all that, he got a glimpse of Stephanie’s irritation in the form of flashing yellow eyes. How hurt he’d been, how angry and twisted up about it he was. Stephanie felt every word like a kick to the solar plexus.

“She tried to convince me that she wasn’t like the thing that killed my mom, but I wouldn’t listen,” he said. “I threatened to kill her. I promised to give her a head start but I wanted to make her feel my pain right then.

“This filthy monster, this murderer had walked right into my life without me even realizing it. She’d stolen my trust and then thrown it back in my face. But I just didn’t have it in me to kill her.”

Stephanie closed her eyes. There was no coming back from that. She felt drained. Murmurs in the audience made their way to her ears. Each a standalone condemnation in and of itself. There was horror. There was disgust. There was hate. And Eric still didn’t even have the grace to look her in the eye.

“Thank you, Eric, for that,” Susanne crooned. “It must have been difficult, and I appreciate your honesty.”

She looked out at the audience.

“I think that you can draw the obvious conclusions from that, and I don’t think I need to make my opinion of this mess any more clear -”

“Hold on a second, Susie,” Eric said. “I can call you Susie, right?”

Irritation darkened her eyes and coloured her cheeks, however briefly.

“After I’d gotten sober and had a few weeks to get over myself, I felt physically sick for what I had done,” he said. “Who could look at her and see a killer? I realized that I couldn’t just judge an entire population based on the actions of one murderer.

“There are always exceptions to the rule, don’t you think, Susie?” He asked. “I regretted scaring her away because I suddenly realized that as much as I had been teaching her, she’d been teaching me too.”

Eric leaned forward before she could say a thing and locked eyes with Stephanie. Stephanie’s heart damn near stopped, and she couldn’t look away, not even long enough to blink.

“She taught me how to be open and honest and trusting, how to be strong, how to pick myself up and move on,” he said. “Looking back, even now, I realized that she was the brightest, most beautiful girl in the world: someone with a quick wit and a terrible temper, someone who wasn’t afraid to call me out on my bullshit and ignore what other people said about her.

“She knew how to live even though she had nothing and life was out to get her, to adapt when she had to even though it sucked at the time. She acknowledged the bad in life and saw the terrible side of things, and still managed to be so pure.”

Susanne was beet red with rage and speechless with shock. Stephanie herself wasn’t sure she was breathing. This couldn’t possibly have been real.

“I regret sending her away, and I knew I would regret it every day for the rest of my life because I didn’t have the chance to make it right again.”

He finally broke eye contact with her and looked at a flustered Susanne, giving her his full-wattage grin.

“People like you are trying to discredit her by making her out to be a liar, but I can tell you that I don’t think she’s lying about the Facility,” he insisted. “But why would you listen to me?” He asked and then shrugged. “Well, I taught her how to lie and she’s still as transparent to me as the day we met.”

He finally turned that smile back to Stephanie, a more demure, sincere version of what he had thrown at Susanne.

“I loved Stephanie Armstrong, and I lost her to my own, human hatred. I think people are making a big mistake by doing what we always do: judging, criticizing, generalizing and acting on fear.

“It’s happened so many times now and this will end like every other time – in bloodshed. It’s time to stop that cycle.”

At her stricken expression, he grinned wider and winked. Stephanie was frozen on the spot, unable to think or process what had just happened there.

“Hey, Armstrong, how was that for honest?”