A Life Meant to Be Read online

  A Life Meant to Be

  Sandra Antoni

  Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  I was a beast stalking my prey. He was cornered, and by the fear I could see in his eyes, he knew it. This was my town. Mine to protect and mine to rule. It was my kingdom. He had no business coming here and causing trouble. No one went against me, and it was too late for him to learn this lesson now. No more second chances.

  He cowered in the corner next to the filthy, metal dumpster and I let him. It’s where he belonged, cowering in this shit hole. The anticipation of what would happen to him had made him wet himself, and I grinned at the sight, knowing that he had once thought himself invincible. However, he didn’t know the meaning of invincibility. That was reserved for me and me alone.

  I approached him with a snarl, foam running between my teeth and down my chin. Let him see me as a rabid beast. It would only help to strike the fear in him even more. I was not one to be messed with, and no one crossed me and got away with it.

  He might not have known exactly what it was that he signed up for, but we had rules that were to be abided by at all costs. He had hurt a human who was under my protection. He would finally know exactly what it had cost him to betray me before he took his last breath.

  No one messed with Dominic Charpelle, not even some low life thug. Certainly not some bastard’s bastard, and that’s all this man was. His pleas of mercy fell on deaf ears as I slowly approached him. In this world, there was no room for fools, and there was no room for indecision. There was also no room for cowards, and this human was one of the worst.

  He thought I wouldn’t find out. He thought I wouldn’t discover the woman he had raped and killed, but I knew everything that happened in my town. My only regret was that I hadn’t gotten to him sooner and protected the woman who was under my care. That thought had my rage pumping even harder through my veins. I was going to enjoy this.

  With a slash of my claws, I dug his heart from his chest and ripped out his throat with my teeth. I didn’t have the time or the desire to show mercy. This was my kingdom, and if he didn’t abide by the rules, there were many willing to take his place. Even other humans.

  This city was mine, and I had enough to worry about without having one of my own men betray me by breaking our most sacred rule. It was my job to protect both the humans and the shifters in this town. It my job to keep the peace.

  The pack, I trusted with my life, but the humans were a necessary addition for the protection of the whole town. However, I didn’t trust them any farther than my wolf teeth could toss them, especially one like Frank. I smiled in satisfaction as I looked down at his mangled body.

  Once Frank was taken care of, I switched to my human form long enough to torch the body. When the police found his charred remains, there would be nothing left of him to tie him to me. This was the life I had been born into. It was the life I lived, and I beckoned it.

  This was my kingdom, and I ruled it with an iron fist. There was no room for sympathy or feelings. Just as my father who led the pack before me had taught me, a leader leads by example, and I was not about to let my pack down or fail to protect the humans who were under my protection.

  The pack looked to me for guidance, support, discipline, and resources, and it was up to me to make sure they were safe. They were my calling and nothing else mattered. Once my father died, or rather, was murdered, it was up to me to lead them. I had done so, following in my father’s legacy, but my ultimate prize had always been settling a score.

  It had been several years now, but I had never given up my quest. The man who had murdered my father would pay, and I would revel in his defeat. I was getting closer to the answers; I was sure of it, but the humans were an obstacle and a distraction. However, it was the one thing that I couldn’t change.

  Humans and shifters had been living together for centuries, and it was up to shifters to make sure that what we were remained a secret from the humans and that peace remained between our two kinds. It was the way the world worked now.

  My abilities to shift between the two worlds gave me an advantage, and I would use that advantage to find my father’s murderer. Human or shifter, I would find him, and I would kill him. There was nothing that I wanted more but to make him pay, and revenge was what kept me going from day to day. It was all I had left.

  Chapter 1

  Cecelia

  “Hey, Cec, can you toss me that pillow? I need more under my head for this selfie. It’s not quite the right angle yet,” Gloria said, from her place on the bed as she made a kissing face and looked up at her phone that she held out over her.

  For some reason, every morning, Gloria got up and showered, put on an hour’s worth of make-up, then spent just as long in her closet changing clothes. Once she was finally dressed, she crawled back halfway under her blankets to do a morning selfie to announce to the world that she was awake. It was way more than I could keep up with or understand, so I just tossed her the pillow she asked for.

  Who was I to get between her and her social media followers? It was all I could do to maintain my low profile and limited college experiences while having her as a roommate. But college was what I had always dreamed about, so roommate aside, I was determined to have this experience.

  I had never been interested in any kind of social media. There was no one alive in this world who I cared to let know where I was, let alone what I ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or when I did my laundry. I had no family, and I purposely had no friends. The possibility that there could be someone out there looking for me made me keep an even lower profile.

  At least I knew what kind of person my roommate was. She was pretty shallow and relied on opinions of others for her self-confidence and self-importance. That made it a whole lot easier to avoid her and her following of friends. Somehow, I always managed to be going in the opposite direction as her and her posse and, little did she know, that was on purpose.

  I had been around her kind before. She had daddy’s money giving her whatever she wanted, while I scraped by on student loans and my part-time job at a local diner. I didn’t resent her. It was just the life we had been handed, and that only helped me to understand her better.

  I had seen the disgust on her face numerous times when I walked through the door smelling like fryer grease from my job at the diner. But I wasn’t here for her, and I didn’t really care what she thought about me.

  In our weird way, we managed to get along, and for that I was grateful. We had a kind of understanding. I kept to myself and didn’t talk much, and that gave her all the time she needed to make her daily calls and gather her group of friends around her without me interrupting. Staying in the shadows was where I preferred to be.

  I was twenty years old and a freshman here. The university was a little over an hour outside of Albuquerque, and it had taken me an extra-long time to get to this point in my life because of money. Well, that and, I’d been hiding from the authorities since I was sixteen.

  The state of Nevada would have offered me scholarships as a foster kid, but I never intended to step foot in that state again. After more foster homes than I cared to remember, I’d fin
ally had enough. That last one had been more than I cared to repeat, and I had finally managed to escape that prison. Never again would someone control my life.

  For two years, I had stayed on the down low, joining the homeless population of a city hundreds of miles from where I grew up. As a “runaway” I couldn’t get a job, or they’d find me and put me back in the system, and I was definitely better off on my own. I was doing a much better job of taking care of myself.

  After my eighteenth birthday, I figured the state would leave me alone and I finally got a job, got my GED, and started saving money. School had always come easily to me, and I realized that I had remembered more than I had forgotten.

  The streets were still my home for that first year after turning eighteen. The silent people who lived in the background of the city all knew me, and I had acquaintances there. They had watched out for me and taught me the rules of survival. For that alone I would be forever grateful to them.

  Mama Bea was one of only two people whom I had ever told about my plans for my future. At first glance, she appeared to be in her mid to late fifties, but I couldn’t be sure. Her weathered face showed the years that she had spent living on the streets and gray was splattered through her hair. I don’t think she even knew exactly how old she was.

  The streets would do that to a person. The way of life made you lose track of time, and the days of the week just didn’t seem to matter anymore. It was all about survival, and what day it was had no bearing on where you could find your next meal.

  The soup kitchens had a regular lunch schedule, and I could always be assured of getting at least one meal a day, but I preferred to avoid so many people at one time. I had learned to watch my own back, and it was difficult when so many people were around. The shadows were where I felt safe.

  Mama Bea had taken me under her wing when I first got to Albuquerque at age sixteen. She had introduced me around, and that alone vetted me with the people there. Mama Bea was the only mama I had ever known, even if it was only in name. She had taught me more about life than any foster parent ever had.

  My parents had abandoned me as an infant, and I had never tried to look for them. If they didn’t want me, I certainly didn’t want them either. It was because they had abandoned me that I had suffered the way I had.

  I was sure that they had their reasons for not wanting me, and I had thought of the numerous possibilities over the years. Maybe my mother had gotten pregnant as a teenager and didn’t have any resources to raise me. A baby would be a big hindrance for a girl trying to get through high school.

  Maybe my mother was career oriented and had gotten pregnant and a child would not fit into her lifelong plans of climbing the corporate ladder. Maybe my parents were poor and didn’t have the ability to raise another person. Or maybe my mother had died in childbirth and was no longer alive.

  Whatever my parents’ reasons were, they were theirs and I would not begrudge them their decision to give me up. They had given me life after all. But they were no longer any concern of mine. They lost that privilege when they abandoned me, and they were not worth another thought.

  I glanced back at Gloria posing on her bed with her phone and rolled my eyes before grabbing my apron and walking out of the dorm room and heading to work. It was almost lunchtime on Saturday, and I knew that the diner would be getting ready for a lunch rush. That was why I liked working on Saturdays.

  I enjoyed working at the diner, especially when there was a rush. It meant more tips and the time went by faster. I had dealt with enough different kinds of people in my lifetime that no one got to me anymore. The rowdy customers didn’t bother me, and neither did the disgruntled ones.

  If there was anything that I had learned in my twenty years that was worth remembering, it was that no one was perfect. Everyone had their secrets, their pasts, their crosses to bear. No one was immune to life, certainly not me, and I had the scars to prove it. All anyone could do was continue to move through it and try to survive, and so far, I had been able to do just that.

  Stepping into the diner, I headed through the kitchen to the back room that employees used for their breaks. There were a few lockers, but I never brought anything with me. I didn’t have a driver’s license, only a state issued I.D. and my student I.D. from the university. Those were both in my back pocket along with my dorm room key.

  The break room was small, only about ten feet by ten feet, but the employees of the past had taken it upon themselves to try and make the room cozier and warmer. It was no longer just an all-white tomb as I assumed it originally had been when the diner first opened.

  There were some posters on the walls of faraway places, along with the usual government required notices about employee rights in the workplace. A potted plant sat in the windowsill of the one window in the room.

  Light blue curtains, aged with time, covered the window, blocking the not so beautiful view of the alley and the large dumpster behind the building. The alley ran the whole length of the numerous joined buildings and ran parallel to Main Street on the front side.

  A long folding table was set up in the middle of the room, and mismatched folding chairs sat around it. They looked like they had been taken from someone’s trash on trash day, and a couple of them didn’t look sturdy enough to hold even my slight weight.

  Someone had brought in some fresh cut flowers, and they sat in a glass of water in the center of the scratched tabletop. It was probably Julia. The flowers were really the only splash of color in the room, but it did seem to make the room brighter.

  Julia was in her mid-thirties and was married with two children. She loved her flower garden and was always talking about the different assortment of flowers that she grew in the garden at her house. They did help to cheer up the room a bit more, and the bright colors added a different element to the dull-looking room.

  On the wall next to the door was our time clock and the rack that held the employee time cards. Grabbing mine, I slipped it into the machine and entered my employee code, then I returned it to the rack and headed back into the kitchen to start my shift.

  “Hey, Mario. Has the lunch rush started yet?” I asked the older Hispanic man standing in front of the enormous stove. He didn’t talk much, but I seemed to be the only one not bothered by that. Every time I saw him, I greeted him in some way.

  Everyone had a story, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t be kind. I knew what it was like to feel like a stranger in a sea of people, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. So, even though Mario had been working at the diner for years and had never said a word to me, I still greeted him with a smile and a hello each day I worked.

  He grunted at me in his usual greeting, turning his head to the side just long enough to make eye contact before turning back to the stove. I grinned even bigger before heading out to the front of the diner to start working.

  It was eight o’clock before the evening rush finally died down. I was supposed to have been off work at five o’clock, but the rush had started early this evening, and I had agreed to stay and help until the rush was over. Unfortunately, that had been three hours later. The tips had been great, but my body was feeling the extra hours.

  By the time I clocked out, my feet hurt and my back ached. My stomach was growling because I hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch that day and now it was past dinnertime. I had intended to buy some lunch for the first time ever at the diner on my break, but I had ended up worked through it instead.

  Now, I was just too exhausted to hang around and eat some dinner, and I still had a two mile walk to get back to campus. All I wanted was to get back to my dorm room. The apple I had waiting would be enough before I passed out in bed tonight. I had a feeling that I was going to sleep well tonight. That thought had me quickly clocking out and heading back out of the break room.

  Waving goodbye to the rest of the staff, I headed towards the front door. Before I could push it open, I felt a hand on my arm and quickly spun to see who it was. There were too many people ar
ound for me to be worried, but I felt my body tense at the touch.

  I was unfamiliar with affection from other people, having been raised in not pleasant homes with not pleasant foster parents. Whoever had their hand on my arm, I desperately wanted them to let go, and a million scenarios ran through my mind as I was instantly filled with alarm and my whole body tensed.

  When I turned, I was surprised to find Mario standing in front of me. I couldn’t read the expression on his face, and I was suddenly just as speechless as he usually was. He shoved a plastic bag into my hands then turned and walked back into the kitchen. He hadn’t said one word.

  Looking down at the bag in my hands, I realized that it was one of our to-go bags with a Styrofoam container inside that was still warm. A smile spread across my face as I turned again and pushed the door open and stepped outside onto the sidewalk. The smile remained on my face as I looked both ways up and down Main Street before beginning my two mile walk back to campus.

  It still amazed me how far a little kindness went, and I was not above showing it. My forgiveness did not come quite as easily, but that was why I never put myself into a position that might require it. And I never trusted anyone.

  I didn’t let people get close, and I had no need for friends. There wasn’t anything about myself that I wanted to share with anyone. Trust was not something that came easily for me, well, actually, it was non-existent, and that was the reason that I was still alive. It had been a hard lesson to learn, but I had definitely learned it well.

  My stomach was arguing with my ribs as the delicious aroma coming from the bag that I was carrying reached my nose. I finally decided to find out what was in the container that Mario had given me.

  I had just made it onto campus, and I stopped at the large fountain just inside the entrance. Sitting down on the short, stone wall surrounding the large pool that the fountain poured into, I opened the bag. My eyes opened in surprise when I opened the container and saw the club sandwich and fries.