Filed To Story: In the Shadow of the Past Luna (Lily & James)
“Even if it’s not… even if Andrew really is behind some of this… we will deal with it okay?”
“But you have gone through so much because of my family, and now this…”
Lily put a finger on my lips to silence me. “Seriously, stop. We are in this together. If it is Andrew behind the current threats, we have the tools now to deal with it. And you do not have to feel responsible for you do not have to feel responsible for anything that anyone in your family did… unless you want me to feel responsible for the sh&t my mother and sister pulled off, which is far worse:
“Ok, fair point. But….”
Lily gave me a look, and I could not help but smile at her.
“Let’s talk to Andrew and then go from there, okay?”
she suggested.
I nodded and then leaned down to kiss her. Just after our lips met, we heard coughing behind us, reminding us that Dr. Hyder, Brady, and Charlotte were still in the room.
Lily blushed and turned around to face them. She wrapped my arms around her so that I was hugging her from behind. Despite the seriousness of the situation, I loved how well we fit together, and I loved that she was willing to be affectionate even around them.
“Sorry… we got distracted for a moment,”
she told them.
“What is going on?”
Dr. Hyder asked.
Lily took a deep breath.
“When we put our hands on Evelyn’s head, we were able to communicate with her wolf and go through some of Evelyn’s memories,”
Lily explained.
“She has been working with Andrew?”
Brady asked.
“No. At least not intentionally. We didn’t see anything concrete. It’s just… some of the conversations that they have had indicate that Andrew knows things..
Dr. Hyder signaled for us to all sit down again. “The guards have located Andrew. They will bring him here in 15 minutes. Why don’t you explain what you saw.”
Slowly, Lily and I began to explain the memories that we went through and what Evelyn’s wolf told us.
For her 19th birthday, Evelyn’s girlfriends took her on a two-week skiing trip to Canada. That is when she met Andrew, completely by chance.
Andrew had walked into the ski lodge that they were staying at and saw Evelyn sitting in the large communal dining room with her friends. He immediately approached her, and his eyes were filled with wonder.
“It is you. The chosen one,”
he said to her.
Evelyn did not understand what Andrew meant by those words, nor did she necessarily care. She tried to go back to her coffee and to her conversations with her friends.
Andrew, however, would not let her go. For the next three days, he followed Evelyn almost everywhere she went. He repeatedly told her how beautiful she was. He also told her that he believed that the Moon
Goddess wanted them to be together. She tried telling Andrew that she had a boyfriend back home, but
Andrew refused to give up.
At first, Evelyn was a little creeped out by Andrew. Although he was a good-looking male and seemed to be a nice guy, he was coming on really strong. Even so, Evelyn appreciated the feeling of being pursued and desired. She also appreciated that she and Andrew had a shared interest in history and philosophy, which she knew because Andrew regularly initiated conversations with her about the g ods and goddesses
*use of prophecies throughout time.
It ultimately took about a week, but Andrew eventually wore Evelyn down. By week two, the two were in
Evelyn felt guilty for cheating on Brady, but she continued the relationship with Andrew anyway. They would meet at least once a month -sometimes twice- in various places between Black Moon and
Andrew’s pack in Canada. They would also regularly text one another throughout the week.
As Evelyn’s 20th birthday approached, Andrew started to muse more and more about how amazing life.
would be when Evelyn marked him. Lily took special note of the fact that -in all the memories that
Evelyn’s wolf, Edy, showed us- Andrew seemed far more interested in receiving Evelyn’s mark than he was in marking her himself.
Andrew had been really angry when Evelyn chose to spend her birthday at Black Moon, and they had multiple fights about her plans. During the last fight, he told her that he was only letting her get away with staying in Black Moon for her birthday because of how “special”
she was.
After the rejection and after Evelyn made her way to Andrew’s pack in Canada, Andrew pushed her to go through the marking process with him right away. Evelyn was still feeling confused and heartbroken, but he did not seem bothered by her conflicted feelings. Evelyn interpreted Andrew’s urgency as a fervent desire to be with her and she felt honored by it. Sadly, in watching the memory reels back, Lily and I doubted that was the real reason.
In any event, Evelyn finally agreed to the marking and to accept Andrew as her chosen mate.
Despite his excitement leading up to and even during the marking, once it was done, Andrew began acting confused and disappointed with it. Evelyn also noticed that Andrew strangely spent hours looking out the window, studying the sky.
The day after Evelyn and Andrew marked each other, Alex and Edy went on a run together for the first time. (Almost all of their dates had occurred in human territory, so they were unable to run together before.)
Edy’s wolf was and is a fairly majestic-looking brown and white wolf, but Andrew was visibly disappointed when he saw her. Edy heard Andrew mumble something about a missing symbol or mark, but she could not figure out what he was looking for, and Alex would not tell her.
Andrew’s wolf, Alex, reached out to Edy that night. Alex apologized for Andrew’s strange behavior the last couple of days. Alex explained that it was his (Alex’s) fault, because he made a really big mistake and showed Andrew a couple of things that he never should have showed him. Alex refused to give Edy any details, but Edy told us that even today Alex seems to harbor a tremendous amount of regret and shame about whatever it was.
Thankfully for Evelyn, whatever it was that had disappointed Andrew, he seemed to get over it. Years. passed and they settled into a routine. Theirs was not the world’s happiest relationship, but it worked well enough for them.
Most importantly to Evelyn, Andrew readily accepted Sammy as his son even though a DNA test showed that he was Brady’s. He also pushed Evelyn to give Sammy a sibling as soon as they could.
Unfortunately, on that front, they had no success until recently.
Everything started to change for them around October or November. Andrew suddenly began receiving phone calls about “pack business”
that were “super confidential”
and seemed to consume him. This
Those feelings worsened when her parents informed Evelyn that Brady had been seen getting close to a she-wolf that he brought into the pack. (That she-wolf was, of course, Lily.) Evelyn immediately became jealous and irate, and she secretly hired a couple of wolves to go to Black Moon and keep tabs on what was happening between Brady and Lily. Those wolves were Hunter and Kyle.
Then, when James called Andrew that fateful day asking for a favor, it led Evelyn to find out that Brady had taken Lily to Hawaii. This was a trip that Hunter and Kyle had neglected to inform Evelyn of
Evelyn was incensed. She began throwing things in her kitchen, breaking every plate, dish, and other item that she could find.
Andrew came home from work and was understandably angry at Evelyn for losing her cool over the situation with Brady. He accused Evelyn of still loving Brady and of regretting being with him. Evelyn adamantly denied both of those things, but in her rage, she vented to Andrew about how ridiculous it was that Brady had started dating a she-wolf who looked just like her.
Evelyn was too worked up to pay attention to Andrew’s reaction to this venting, but in the memories, Lily and I could see it clear as day. There was an immediate change in Andrew. He stopped trying to calm
Evelyn down, and he asked her to tell him everything that she had heard about this other she-wolf. In addition, he stopped seeming upset by Evelyn’s obvious jealousy about Brady’s new relationship.
A couple of days after that, Evelyn received the first of many text messages from an unknown phone number. The texter identified himself as “Big Daddy”
and said he thought they had some common enemies.
Of course, it was ultimately “Big Daddy”
who offered Evelyn big money to secure Lily, who suggested the drug that Hunter and Kyle put in Lily’s chocolate, and who told Evelyn what to do and where to hide on the day of the attack on Black Moon.
(James POV)
We decided to adjust our seating arrangements before Andrew was brought in.
Charlotte and Lily were now sitting in the back corner of the office, where they could not be seen right.
away. I sat in the guest chair closest to them. This would allow me to partially block them from Andrew’s view, and it would also keep Lily fairly close to me in case I began to lose my temper.
Dr. Hyder sat in the guest chair on the other side of the room, leaving Brady to sit behind the alpha desk. Dr. Hyder insisted that he was not ceding control to Brady, but rather acknowledging that there were benefits to having a large desk separating Brady and Andrew. In other words, Dr. Hyder wanted to make sure we interrogated Andrew before Brady killed him.
The center guest chair in front of the alpha desk was, of course, reserved for Andrew.
When Andrew finally arrived, he walked in as though he did not have a care in the world. He gave a passing glance at Brady, and then greeted me with a bro-hug.
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