Mated To The Werewolf And The Vampire.

Eliana's POV

"Aaaargh ... stop, STOP!"

Even with the scream tearing out of my throat, I was dragged and shoved hard against the iron bookshelf lining the school corridor. My back hit it first, and the impact rattled through my entire spine like something had cracked loose inside me.

I hissed through my teeth, squeezing my eyes shut for a second before forcing them back open. I couldn't afford to zone out right now. Not with Sara Owen standing three feet in front of me looking like she'd been planning this moment since she woke up this morning.

Knowing Sara ... she probably had.

"You both need to make her feel this pain to the core." Sara snapped and let out a devilish smirk.

"Can you just stop?" I screamed out helplessly as the two girls on either side of me tightened their grip on Sara's order, one on each arm, pinning me against the shelf like I was something that needed to be mounted to a wall.

I twisted. Pulled. Yet, it was no use.

This was like the everyday routine for the longest time, as long as I could remember. But today's pain felt different. Like Sara had decided that whatever she usually did wasn't enough anymore and she needed to level up.

That thought alone made my stomach drop.

"Everyone should know the truth," Sara said, her voice low and firm and deliberate ... the kind of voice that didn't need to be loud to be deadly. She had that look on her face too. The one she reserved for moments like this, where she wanted you to understand that what was about to happen wasn't personal.

It was just business.

'My' business. 'My' humiliation.

"The Cross heiress has fallen from grace." She tilted her head slightly, and I hated the way her eyes moved over me ... slowly, like she was reading a label on something expired. "And now she's nothing but a pathetic, homeless peasant who lives out of her car."

Something cold shot through my chest.

Not because it wasn't true. But because I heard my little secret said out loud, in the middle of this corridor, with people already starting to slow their walk to see what was happening ... it hit differently. Like a slap you saw coming and still weren't ready for.

'Don't react. Don't let her see it land.'

I dug my nails into my palm and held her stare. "You don't know what you're talking about."

Sara smiled. That small, dangerous smile that meant she absolutely did know what she was talking about, and we both knew it.

I tried to struggle again. My shoulder screamed in protest from where one of the girls had it locked back, and I bit down on the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste something metallic. Getting physical with them was pointless as they had me completely pinned - but standing still felt impossible when everything in me was screaming to move, to run, to get out of this corridor before anything else happened.

'Come on, Eliana. Think.'

And then I saw it.

Sara reached into her blazer pocket and pulled out a marker pen. Black cap, thick tip. She uncovered it with this calm, unbothered energy, like she had all the time in the world. And she was looking directly at my forehead when she did it.

My stomach turned over completely.

'No. No, no, no...'

I didn't even let myself finish the thought. I threw my weight sideways, twisting my whole body against the grip on my arms, and for a half second I almost got free ... almost - before they yanked me back and the shelf rattled against my shoulder blades again.

"Hold her still," Sara said, not even raising her voice.

I had subconsciously closed my eyes and opened them in between because I genuinely didn't know what she was going to achieve with this act. And that not-knowing was somehow worse than anything else. Because this was Sara. And Sara didn't do small things when she could do something that followed you for the rest of the year. With the way this was going, whatever she wrote on my forehead right now would be photographed and shared before I made it to my next class. I knew that without a single doubt.

The marker tip was inches from my face.

Something in me just snapped, abruptly.

I acted on pure defense instinct with a little touch of survival mood being activated, and before I even made a conscious decision to do it over better still, before I even registered what was happening ... I opened my mouth and bit down on Sara's left hand.

Real Hard.

"Ahhhhhh!"

She yanked back so fast that she stumbled, and the marker hit the floor with a sharp clatter sound that echoed off the corridor walls. Her two girls immediately rushed toward her, fussing, and their grip on me loosened just enough ...

I ran.

I didn't look back. I didn't even think. My feet just moved and I let them, arms pumping, heart slamming against my ribs, and the sound of the marker skittering across the floor tiles still ringing in my ears as I rounded the first corner I could find.

"Get her!"*l

Sara's voice cut through the corridor behind me, sharp and furious, and I felt rather than heard the shift ... the second the sound of footsteps went from scattered to 'purposeful.'

They were coming.

I pushed harder, faster, cutting through the small gaps between students who had no idea what was happening, dodging a group of juniors who barely had time to register that I was there before I was already past them. My lungs were starting to burn big time. Also, my shoulder still ached from the shelf. But none of that mattered right now because if Sara caught me a second time, it wouldn't just be a marker to the forehead.

'Oh no. This is like my worst nightmare.'

I risked a glance back.

Too close. They were too close already, and the corridor was starting to thin out ahead in less people, less cover - and I could feel the gap between us shrinking with every second.

'The whole school could find out my secret because of this.' That thought punched through everything else and sat heavy in my gut even while I was running. Because Sara hadn't just been talking back there. She hadn't been making empty threats to scare me. She'd said it loud and deliberately, with her girls or rather 'accomplice' around ... 'homeless peasant, lives out of her car' - and Sara never wasted words. She said things because she wanted them heard.

Which meant by the time school ended today, everyone would know.

I felt something close to grief move through me, even mid-sprint. That secret was the last thing I had that was still mine. The last wall standing between me and complete, total exposure. And Sara had just taken a sledgehammer to it in the middle of a school corridor with an audience.

'Keep running. Fall apart later.'

I was already saying my last prayer in my head, calculating the distance to the stairwell at the end of the hall, wondering if I could make it before they closed the gap completely ... when I ran directly into someone.

Not someone.

Two people instead.

I hit the space between their shoulders and felt the impact go through me like a collision ... broad, solid, unmovable - and I bounced back slightly before a set of hands caught me from either side, steadying me before I could hit the floor.

For a second, I just stood there with my chest heaving, trying to figure out if I had just escaped one bad situation and ran straight into a worse one.

I forced myself to look up.

Two faces. Both were unfamiliar. Both ... and I couldn't help noticing this even in the middle of everything as it was not what I was expecting at all. I didn't know either of them. At least, I was certain of that. You didn't forget faces like these. And yet, somewhere in the back of my mind, in a place I couldn't quite reach...

...'I've seen you before.'

The thought was there and gone in the same second, too strange and too distracting to hold onto right now.

What I did notice and what actually registered was the way they had already positioned themselves without saying anything, without looking at each other, without what felt like any deliberate coordination at all. One on my left. One on my right. And somehow, without either of them making a big deal out of it, I was covered.

All of a sudden, the footsteps behind me had stopped.

I turned carefully while still catching my breath, and the corridor behind me was empty. Sara and her girls were gone. Just like that. Like they'd evaporated the second these two appeared, and I hadn't even heard them leave.

I didn't know what had happened. I didn't fully understand what had just shifted in the air in the space of about thirty seconds. But something eventually had.

I turned back to the two of them and exhaled slowly, trying to arrange my face into something that didn't look like I had just been running for my life.

"Thank you guys, um..." I straightened up, stepped back slightly to create a little breathing room between us, and offered what I hoped looked like a normal, composed smile. "I should go now."

I moved to leave.

But then, I felt one palm from each of them landing gently but firmly on each of my shoulders at the exact same time.

Drawing me back.

Eliana's POV

With the look on their faces, I was already getting uncomfortable with all of that.

And I mean 'uncomfortable' in the way that made my skin prickle and my brain start sending signals that my legs hadn't quite agreed to act on yet. I didn't know these two. I had never seen them before today even though at the same time, it still felt like I had seen them before now. And yet they were standing here, hands still resting on my shoulders like they had every right to, looking at me like I was something they had been searching for.

That alone should have been enough to make me scream.

"Seriously..." I managed to say, then faked a huff of relief to buy myself a second to think. "...you guys can let me go, please."

The one on my right didn't move.

"I can't let you go," he said.

His voice was calm. Not aggressive, not threatening, rather it was just certain. The kind of certainty that didn't need to raise its volume because it already knew it was right.

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

And before I could even finish deciding how offended I was going to be about that, he added quietly ... like it was the most natural thing in the world to say to a complete stranger in a school corridor:

"You are my mate."

The word landed in the middle of my chest and just ... sat there.

'Mate.'

I touched my chin without thinking, that nervous habit I could never fully kick, and let go almost in the same breath. I looked at him properly for the first time. And that was when I noticed it ... the shift happening right in front of my eyes, so subtle at first that I almost convinced myself I was imagining it.

His eyes changed. The color drained out of them and then flooded back into a deep, burning amber-gold that caught the corridor light in a way that human eyes simply did not. His jaw tightened slightly, and when his lips parted, I saw his teeth. It was not the normal teeth. It was longer and seemed sharper. The kind you only ever saw in the werewolf movies right before something happened that you couldn't take back.

My breath caught in my throat.

'This isn't real. This is not real.'

But it was real. It was happening, right here, right now, and every rational explanation I reached for dissolved the second I touched it because there was no rational explanation for what I was seeing.

Before I could find my voice, the one on my left moved.

I felt it before I saw it ... the lightest press of his second finger against the side of my neck, so deliberate it almost felt clinical. And then a small, sharp sting. I swallowed an invisible gulp, my whole body going rigid as I felt something trail slowly downward along my throat.

'Blood.'

My blood.

He leaned in. Not violently and not even quickly. Just close enough that I felt the warmth of him shift into something cooler, yet at the same time, something that didn't feel entirely human, and he 'inhaled.' Like whatever was running down my neck was the only thing in this corridor worth paying attention to.

'Okay. Okay, these guys are definitely not human.'

That thought arrived completely calm, which probably said something about the state I was in.

And then I saw it happen to the second one too. The same shift - his eyes bleeding from whatever color they'd been before into a striking, almost electric blue. Bright, cold and endless which felt like looking at deep water from above and not being able to see the bottom. His teeth, when I caught a glimpse of them, matched the first ... sharp, precise. And at both sides of his head, just barely visible, the faintest outline of something that curled upward like a horn.

I couldn't look directly at it for long.

Not because I was afraid ... and that was the part that confused me most. I wasn't necessarily afraid. I probably 'should' have been. Every sane, self-preserving instinct I possessed was telling me that this was the moment to scream, to bolt, to do literally anything except stand here between two clearly supernatural beings who were looking at me like I belonged to them.

But there was this feeling. Sitting right underneath all the shock, the confusion and the racing heartbeat which seemed quiet, stubborn and impossible to shake. Like some part of me that I had never had access to before was saying:

'They won't hurt you.'

I didn't know why I believed it.

But, I believed it anyway.

"Your blood is intoxicating," the one on my left said, and his fingers found my chin, turning my face gently but firmly toward him the moment I tried to look away. His eyes held mine and didn't let go. "I can't let you go either, mate."

And at that - at hearing that word a second time, from a second mouth ... I felt my legs make their opinion known. My knees weren't exactly giving out, but they weren't being cooperative either, and I must have swayed slightly because both of them shifted at the same moment, letting me lean against them without making a thing of it.

Like they'd already expected it.

Like they already knew my body better than I did.

'What is happening to me?'

"Let me mark you," the one on my left said, and his hand moved to my hair, drawing it back from my neck slowly, exposing the skin there. Not rough and not urgent either. It was like he had all the time in the world and he had already decided how this was going to go.

"She doesn't need it to be gentle," the one on my right said.

I couldn't even decide which one of them to look at.

And right in that moment ... right in the space between one breath and the next - I felt something. Not pain. Not fear. Something I didn't have a perfect word for yet, moving through me like a current that started at both sides simultaneously and met somewhere in the middle of my chest. Warm, pulling and so deeply, disturbingly 'familiar' that it made my eyes sting.

Both of them went still at the same second.

Like they felt it too.

And then, in the same breath and in the same voice, they said:

"Let the bond choose."

I wish I could tell you I fought it. I wish I could say I came to my senses, found my voice, pushed them back and walked away from whatever this was before it went any further. But the truth was that my body had stopped consulting me somewhere between the corridor and right now, and whatever this pull was ... this thing I had no name for ... it had already made its decision.

They bent toward my neck. Both of them. At the same time.

And they marked me.

The sound I made wasn't a scream. It wasn't painful either.

Rather, it was something in between as it was something that dissolved almost as quickly as it came. Then it was replaced by that same warm, consuming current that moved through me like it was rearranging something on the inside.

I was only human. That was the only thought I had left that made any sense. Only human, standing in a school corridor, between beings that seemed like a werewolf and a vampire, having just been marked by both of them - and the most terrifying part of all of it was not what they were.

It was the fact that some quiet, traitor part of me didn't want them to stop.

Eliana's POV

Just at that moment, I propped up in the car where I laid down, as it just occurred to me that I was sleeping and had a terrible dream which I just woke up from.

Breathing so heavily and looking almost scared.

I pressed my back against the car seat and just stayed there for a second with my hand flat against my chest, waiting for my heart to calm down and remember that it lived in a body, not a racetrack. The morning light was already bleeding through the windscreen in thin pale strips and I blinked against it, trying to pull myself back to reality.

That was when I was reminded of the scary dream that I just had.

I couldn't put myself together because even though it was all a dream, somehow I could feel that there was some real connection. Like it hadn't fully let go of me yet. Like some part of it was still sitting in my chest, watching me from the inside.

"That dream again?" I thought to myself.

It was the same two faces. The same corridor. The same feeling of something being decided about me without my input. I reached up without thinking and touched the sides of my neck at both sides, right where they had dipped their teeth.

"Who are those two guys?" I said quietly, my fingers still resting there.

But I wasn't even feeling any sort of pain or whatsoever. Just skin. Normal, unmarked skin. Which should have been a relief.

Somehow it wasn't.

I dropped my hand and told myself to stop being dramatic. It was a dream. Dreams felt real sometimes and so, that was literally the whole thing about dreams. It didn't mean anything. It definitely didn't mean anything.

I was still working on convincing myself of that when I heard a banging knock on my car's windscreen.

I startled so hard my elbow hit the door handle and I let out a sound that was not my most dignified moment. Before I could even properly react, the person on the other side slid the windscreen open.

"Good morning, Eliana."

It was the school's janitor; Mr. Silas, peering in at me with that same patient and unbothered expression he always had, like finding a teenage girl asleep in a car in the school parking lot was just a completely normal part of his morning routine.

At this point, for him, it probably was.

"Good morning, Mr. Silas." I replied, and then reached for the blanket I'd used to cover myself and started folding it over, mostly just to have something to do with my hands.

"It took you a while to wake up." He said, and then demonstrated slightly in a little gesture toward the school building. "Come on, you got to go. I opened up the locker room. Why don't you wash up before the other students arrive, alright?"

I nodded, already reaching for my bag. "Thank you, I'll..."

And then it hit me.

That was when it occurred to my mind, and so I asked rhetorically. "Wait. What time is it?" Then I looked over to the small digital display on the dashboard and saw the time.

7:24 AM.

"Crap!" I screamed out even before I knew what I did for real.

The word was already in the air before I could pull it back and Mr. Silas just blinked at me, completely unbothered, which I appreciated because I did not have time to be embarrassed right now. I was already moving, digging through my bag, pulling out my shower things with the kind of frantic energy that only came from running severely late.

"Uh, yeah, thank you, Mr. Silas." I said hastily, stuffing everything into a bag so fast that my toothbrush almost went in without its cap.

"You are a lifesaver indeed." I added immediately, and then ran off to the bathroom in my pajamas.

That was my fastest bath as far as I could remember. I think I set some kind of personal record. No time to be proud of it though because I was already calculating in my head ... wash, dress, put my hair together, and be in class before first period.

And don't let anyone see you coming from the direction of the locker room because you need to look like you slept in a bed like a normal person.

You know, for a while that was the usual morning checklist for me.

Before we go further though, I think you need to know me. Because we will be going on this long ride together, and the earlier we get acquainted with how it all started, the better.

'I am Eliana Cross. Once, I was the Cross heiress. But then, Dad vanished some day and Mum slipped into a coma. I had to sell everything to pay for her medical bills. Now I live out of my car and take a shower at the school locker room. My biggest secret is still safe. I guess that by now you must be wondering why I kept it a secret. You know, here at Bentley High School; the country's most elite high school ... money, status, and power reign supreme. Case in point, the high school food chain. I used to be at the top.'

At this point, I was already at the shelves picking my things as I was done with my bath, dressed in my school uniform, hair pulled together just enough to look intentional. The other students were already filtering in around me ... voices, locker doors, the smell of expensive perfume that could even cost more than my weekly food budget.

I kept my head down and moved like I had somewhere to be. Which I did. I always did.

Just then, I had a quick flashback of when I used to be at the top for real.

'Richest family. Cheer captain. A quarterback boyfriend who was always all over me. And even the same Sara that finds every opportunity to harass me now ... the same Sara who showed up in my dream doing exactly that, was once always licking my ass just to be friends with me. Honestly, I have lost that spot and I have accepted and made peace with my fate because it was one of those things and life moves on regardless of one's circumstances. After all, the world doesn't revolve around me. But then, it's a good thing that I haven't lost my top spot in academics, because that was one thing no one could take from me.'

'But now, Sara Owen has my crew, the cheer captain title, and my ex-boyfriend too. I guess your worst nightmares always end up coming true, huh?'

I let the thought pass through and kept it moving. I didn't have the luxury of standing around drowning in the past. That was a rich girl's problem - having enough time and safety to feel sorry for yourself. I had a schedule to keep and appearances to maintain and exactly zero room for self-pity before 8 AM.

I was already back to reality because I wouldn't be lost in the past or any form of illusion forever.

I shut my locker, swung my bag over my shoulder, and started heading toward the corridor.

"Guys!"

A voice cut sharp and loud through the usual locker room noise and I turned automatically like everyone else did. One of the girls ... I didn't even know her name as she was one of those students who existed in the background of school life until they had news to deliver. She was waving both arms like she was flagging down a plane, her face doing something that could only be described as uncontainable.

"An entire entourage of fancy cars just pulled up at the school gate and they are driving in right now!"

The excitement on her face was really out of this world and needed to be studied, for real.

Half the locker room stopped what they were doing. Someone dropped a hairbrush. I watched three separate girls immediately reach for their phones.

She continued regardless. "And with the look of things, I think it's a new transfer student! They must be filthy rich!" She went on to scream out in excitement and then left at that moment.

And just like that ... like she'd pulled a string that was attached to all of them - the rest of the students followed in suite. Footsteps, chatter, the whole wave of them moving toward the corridor to see whatever she'd just described, phones already raised and ready.

I stayed where I was and watched them go.

Then leaned back slightly against the locker behind me and crossed my arms, because I genuinely did not have the energy for this today. New money walking through Bentley High's gates always did this to people ... turned them into a live studio audience, falling over themselves to get a look. I never understood it. I used to be the one they looked at, once upon a time, and even then I never quite got the appeal of making such a spectacle over someone's arrival.

'What idiots would transfer into this hellhole of an elite school in the middle of the session,' I thought to myself instantly.