My life was ruined. My character … my professional reputation … everything I’d ever worked for had just been blown to dust with one email.

“You did what?” I could barely get the words past the tightness enveloping my throat.

“Sent it to everyone,” he sneered. “Every friend, every family member, every hospital and medical school associate you invited to our wedding. Your parents, your cousins, your sweet grandma who adores me, your pastor—they all got video footage of you getting fucked in an elevator, Bethany. Followed by a clip of you on your knees masturbating and choking on some loser club rat’s cock.”

Oh, God, I was going to throw up.

My eyes filled with tears. My mind and emotions reeled as I contemplated the horrified reactions of everyone I loved and respected most in life viewing such scandalous, intimate video footage of me with Raul. I was going to have to relocate—to a remote village in Antarctica. My parents would never recover from this. Granny Jean might’ve already gone into cardiac arrest upon opening that email. I needed to call her assisted living facility immediately—send a nurse to check on her.

Amid my sickening panic, self-righteous fury mushroomed within me, eclipsing every other pressing need and emotion assailing me, and I lashed out.

“His name is Raul, and he is not a loser club rat. He’s a manny. He cares for a special-needs child, which is a more meaningful, commendable way to earn a living than any of the bullshit jobs your parents have ever handed to you on a platter. And—adore you? Ha! Granny Jean? She told me you were basic. The worst kind of basic nouveau riche. She’s probably drinking a spiked Metamucil right now, toasting the fact that I finally found a man with enough cock for me to actually choke on.”

“You told me size didn’t matter, that it was all about skill and chemistry,” Gregg balked, his shallow, narcissist brain latching onto my jab about his small penis rather than the one about how he didn’t earn his living.

“It matters when you’re also lacking in the skill and chemistry department!”

“Bethy, what’s all this shouting about?”

Just when I thought things couldn’t get any more crazy or tense, Mike walked out from my bedroom, wearing nothing but boxer briefs and a towel on his head, and talking with a British accent.

“Oh, hey, I’m Mike, Bethany’s cousin.” He held his hand out for Gregg to shake as he came to stand next to me, looking like a model—or an exotic male dancer—with his sculpted, tanned physique on display.

Gregg was so disoriented by Mike’s half-naked arrival on the scene that he shook his hand, his eyes darting between the two of us. “Cousin?”

Mike shrugged. “Yeah, distant cousin—step-cousin, really—through marriage. But still close family.” He flashed me a cheesy smile before squinting one eye and pretending to connect the dots on an invisible family tree in the air with his pointer finger. “You see, I’m Bethany’s mother’s brother’s wife’s stepsister’s kid.” He dropped his hand and grinned at Gregg. “Bethy’s always been the ultimate SCILF to me.”

Dear God.

“SCILF?” Gregg took the bait.

“Uh-huh.” Mike threw his arm around me, pulling me into his rock-solid bare chest. “You know … step-cousin I’d like to fuck.”

This day was not happening.

“So I flew out here early for the wedding.”

Gregg’s face looked to be permanently frozen in a frown of disbelief. “Three months early?”

“Well, yeah. I thought I might be able to sixty-nine some sense into Bethy. Tongue her out of making the biggest mistake of her life. But then I made the mistake of bringing my best friend along with me to go dancing last night. And he got his tongue in her first.”

Of all the …

“Hands off my girl, Mike.” Raul strode out of my bedroom, dressed as he’d been five minutes ago—before he’d flipped out and turned into a wolf.

My stomach fell through the floor at the reminder of the recent episode I’d blocked out while preoccupied with Gregg’s arrival. Mike released me, his arm lifting from around my shoulders as Raul came to stand on my opposite side.

“You know I don’t share.” Raul looked directly at Gregg rather than Mike as he said it.

Gregg’s eyes narrowed, recognizing Raul from the surveillance videos no doubt. “You.”

“Me,” Raul confirmed. That one syllable somehow managed to sound like a promise of murder.

The momentary silence that fell upon my living room was disturbed only by the still-constant buzzing sound of Gregg’s phone going off in his pocket.

“And you’re a babysitter?” Gregg had the idiocy to ask.

When Raul didn’t reply, but continued to stare Gregg down like he was contemplating which of his limbs to tear off first, Mike jumped in.

“Manny. We’re both mannies, actually.”

“I’m a manny as well,” Stephen’s deep voice proclaimed as he, too, emerged from my bedroom, wearing nothing but white grape-smuggler briefs that he filled out so surprisingly well I had to force my shocked eyes to look away from the disturbing size of his package.

I stole a glance at Raul and noted he’d ceased staring Gregg down long enough for his eyes to roll to the ceiling.

Mike coughed and covered his mouth with his hand when Stephen came to stand next to him, muttering, “I still don’t get why I’m dressed like this.”

Gregg’s bloodshot green eyes swept over the three huge men flanking me, and while his ego had always been bigger than his dick, I could tell the moment my ex-fiancé’s pea brain wisely deduced that he was outnumbered and outsized by built, hung “babysitters.”

“I was just leaving,” he announced, his gaze leveled on Raul. “You can keep her.” His smile was ugly as he looked Raul up and down like he was trash. “Shacking up with a hot doctor is a boon for a nobody babysitter, I’m sure. Bet you think you’ve hit pay dirt. Well, don’t get too comfortable here, because she’s under eviction.”

Turns out I’d given Gregg’s pea brain too much credit.

“For what?” I challenged. “You have no cause to evict me.” I was for sure moving out in order to relocate to a tiny cabin in the middle of nowhere, but I’d be damned if I’d admit to Gregg how much he’d just destroyed my life.

“Fornicating in public, indecent exposure, destruction of property—”

“Oh, fine, fine, I’m moving out. The hot water pressure in this building stinks anyway. Goodbye, Gregg. Try not to trip over your wounded ego on the way out.”

He thrust his hand at me, palm up. “I want my ring back first, you cheating whore.”

Mike whistled low, then murmured, “Hold it together, man.”

I knew Mike’s warning was for Raul, because a growling sound was emanating from Raul’s chest, and I could’ve sworn I’d felt the energy shift around me like wind at the words “cheating whore.”

Gregg didn’t know when to shut up and save his own life. He looked from me to Raul. “What the hell was that?”

I patted my stomach. “You’re giving me indigestion.” I turned to Raul and placed a calming hand on his forearm. His skin was hot to the touch. I could feel the anger vibrating off him as his muscles twitched beneath my fingers. “You wouldn’t happen to know where my engagement ring ended up last night, would you?”

He shook his head minutely, his deadened gaze fixed on Gregg. “Uh-uh. Haven’t seen it.” His voice was guttural, raspy, as he prompted, “Have you, Mike?”

“Nope,” Mike readily replied. “Not since last night when I gave it to a homeless woman outside the club.”

Oh, shit.

“You did what?” Gregg erupted, his face turning a brighter shade of blotchy red. “That was a forty-three-thousand-dollar rock.”

Mike hunched one shoulder. “Well, I did apologize to the little old lady for the tackiness factor. Told her I’d give her something nicer the next time we came through town.”

“You owe me fifty grand!” Gregg shouted at me.

Mike laughed. “You just said it was forty-three.”

“I’m tacking on the cost of invitations and wedding deposits I can’t recover.”

Granny Jean had been right. Gregg was hopelessly basic.

“I’ll mail you a check,” I told him. “You need to leave.” I gave him a pointed look, hoping that some self-preservation instinct within him would kick in. “Now.”

He scowled and retrieved his still-buzzing phone from his pant pocket. “Fuck that. I’m calling the police and reporting the ring as stolen. As far as I’m concerned, all four of you are responsible for its loss.”

There was no helping some people.

“Are you out of your mind? It was my ring to lose. You gave it to me.”

“But you cheated on me.”

“And you cheated on me for how many months, Gregg? With how many women?”

“Say, that’s quite a lot of messages you’re racking up there,” Mike broke in with a nod at the phone in Gregg’s hand that was continually going off. “Maybe you should check them,” he suggested with a smile. “Make sure there’s nothing important happening. Oh, that reminds me, Bethy. I think I heard your phone buzzing a few times back in the bedroom as well.”

Mike pulled my phone from thin air—literally—and handed it to me. Gregg did a double take when he witnessed it. I felt a sense of impending dread in my gut, knowing it was time to face the music.

Too afraid to check my emails, I glanced over my many text messages first. After scrolling through countless texts from Kylie from last night pleading for updates and demanding dick pics, I got to more serious ones from her from this morning where she was asking if I was okay, telling me that what had happened with Gregg was for the best and that she’d be over with wine and chocolate when my on-call shift was over. There were confused texts from Jessie and multiple frantic texts from my mom and my dad, saying that they would be by the hospital later to check on me. Stranger still, there were a handful of texts from my associates at the hospital telling me to take the day off, assuring me that my shift would be covered. I even had a text from Granny Jean. It was a single eye-roll emoji with the hashtag #basic.

Not quite the horrified reactions I was anticipating from people who had been forwarded raunchy sex vids of me.

“What … the hell?” Gregg’s voice was a breathless whisper, as if the air had been knocked out of him.

I glanced up to find him shifting anxiously on his feet, his wide eyes focused on his phone screen.

“No, no, no. This can’t be happening. This isn’t real,” he said a bit louder, before yelling, “What the fuck? This isn’t real.” He began turning in aimless circles. “That’s not the email I sent. That’s not the video I attached. This can’t be happening to me.”

His face had paled; even the blotchy parts were shades lighter. His hands were shaking as he clicked and scrolled frantically on his phone—that was still going off. “Who did this? I never sent this! Where the hell did that video come from?”

He’d sent the wrong video?

I went to my inbox and saw that I had hundreds of unread messages—all of them replies to an original message with the subject line: I regret to inform you the McIntyre - Garrett wedding has been cancelled. I scrolled down until I found the original message sent by Gregg and opened it to find a video attachment with a freeze-frame image of Gregg putting bills in a stripper’s thong.

Never would I have imagined I’d be overjoyed to see such an image of my ex-fiancé. But my heart felt lighter than it had since Gregg’s arrival as I double-clicked on the video and a montage of Gregg cheating on me played out across my phone screen.

There were multiple video clips of Gregg getting lap dances, several of him making out in bars with different women, one of him having sex with someone else at his office, and another of him having sex inside his car in his office building’s parking garage. Some of the images were grainy and hard to see, but they were clearly of Gregg and women who weren’t me. The montage appeared to have been assembled from various surveillance videos.

In my elation, I emitted a watery giggle as I turned and beamed at Raul next to me, babbling, “It’s not us. My life’s not ruined. He didn’t send out the elevator sex tape. Or the one of us in the foyer.”

“He tried,” was Raul’s stony reply, his eyes on my unraveling ex.

“I have to destroy those tapes,” I processed aloud as the sobering reality that they were still out there hit me.

“Already done,” Mike said with certainty.

Gregg’s head jerked up from his phone at Mike’s assertion. “You,” he accused, his wild eyes those of a trapped, desperate animal as they glared first at Mike, and then at Raul. “You guys did this. You ruined my life. Posing as a bunch of fucking babysitters!”

Mike and Stephen burst out laughing, and it occurred to me I hadn’t seen Stephen crack a smile before now, much less laugh.

“This one’s sharp, Bethy,” Mike said, dropping both the British accent and the towel on his head at last. “Wherever did you find him?”

“Who are you?” Gregg demanded, his eyes darting back and forth between the three of them. “Who hired you to do this to me? Bethany, these guys set you up. This is a corporate sabotage scheme. And you fell for it.”

My jaw dropped open. This was somehow my fault that he’d sent the wrong sex tapes to our entire guest list?

“Ah, Greggie with too many g’s,” Mike said with a sigh, “you’re gonna wish we were only part of a corporate sabotage scheme.”

“Now can I change my outfit?” Stephen asked on a whine.

I didn’t hear Raul or Mike answer him, but Stephen snarled ferociously and transformed into a giant brown wolf.

Instinctively, I screamed and scrambled behind Raul’s back.

Gregg tripped over his own feet and fell backward, landing on his ass. He quickly sprang back up again and darted for the door when the brown wolf snapped his mammoth jaws at him.

Before Gregg could reach the door, Mike was somehow standing in front of it, his yellow wolf eyes flashing menacingly. “Wolf got your tongue?” he taunted.

I didn’t understand what Mike meant by that, but then Gregg’s hands flew to his throat and he spun around, his jaw opening and shutting, his mouth moving to form words, yet failing to make a sound.

“No one objects to me disabling his vocal chords, right?” Mike looked to Raul for approval, commenting with disdain, “I can’t stand the sound of a coward squealing. And I believe we’ve all heard enough bullshit out of this one that we can skip his final words. It’s bad enough reading them from his mind.”

The brown wolf growled at Gregg, causing him to jump and scream soundlessly. My ex-fiancé looked like he might cry as his head whipped back and forth between the giant wolf snarling at him from the living room floor and Mike—with his scary glowing wolf eyes—blocking the only exit.

Gregg’s panic-stricken eyes cut to me, where I stood peeking out from behind Raul’s back—and entering my own state of shock—as I watched the disturbing scene play out. Gregg mouthed, “Help.”

“I’m afraid she can’t help you,” Mike told him. “And there’s no need to mouth or pantomime; we can hear your thoughts loud and clear. We know exactly what a sorry sack you are.”

They could hear thoughts?

They could disable a person’s vocal chords.

The brown wolf transformed back into Stephen—dressed in the slacks and T-shirt he’d been wearing earlier when he’d come in with Kitsune.

“The truth is, we’re not exactly mannies,” Stephen revealed the obvious. “And now that you know about us, we can’t let you live.”

Slowly, my bloodless fingers released their grip on the back of Raul’s T-shirt I’d unconsciously been clutching as it dawned on me the extent of danger Gregg and I were actually in.

Also, I realized Raul was growling—a lot.

He hadn’t touched or so much as glanced at me since I’d ducked behind his back to get away from Stephen in wolf form. As I cautiously inched around from behind his broad shoulders to get a better view of him in profile, I saw that his eyes were as feral as Mike’s and Stephen’s, and his face was a mask of murderous rage—aimed squarely at Gregg.

“Sure, we do some babysitting here and there,” Mike expounded, waving his hand about. “But we’re more like an elite werewolf special-ops unit. Maybe think of us as a lethal, supernatural version of the Baby-Sitters Club. But instead of organizing daycare camps for kids, we spend our time warring with enemy packs and paving the way for a next-level breed of super-werewolves.”

This was so much worse than Raul being part of the Brazilian mafia. He was in the werewolf mafia.

I still had my phone in my hand. Did 9-1-1 accept texts? What could the police possibly do against three huge werewolves with the ability to poof places and immobilize speech?

“But enough chitchat, eh?” Mike smirked at Gregg, who looked about ready to piss himself. “I think my boss wants a word with you.”

Mike’s attention transferred to Raul. “Think you can finish this without shifting and making a mess of his entrails all over my step-cousin’s living room? If we don’t wrap it up and get out of here in the next twenty-six minutes, we’re going to have more minds on our hands to erase.”

What?

“I won’t need that long.”

Faster than I could blink, Raul was in front of Gregg, his hand wrapped around his throat, choking him.

My own breath left me, and for a moment I froze—too petrified of what I was seeing to move a muscle.

“Let him talk,” Raul said to Mike. “I’ve decided I do want to hear his final words after all.”

Upon Raul’s directive, Gregg began making terrible gurgling and choking sounds in the back of his throat, wheezing pitiably over what little air supply Raul’s hand around his neck would allow.

“Stop it.”

The words left me, but they were so faint and breathless in my paralyzed state that I barely heard them myself.

Gregg’s tongue wagged aimlessly in his open mouth, his hands yanking desperately at Raul’s wrist.

Holy shit. This was real. This was serious.

“What did you say?” Raul mocked him, tilting his ear toward Gregg’s increasingly purple-red face. “Was there a final, burning question you had for me? Wait—did you just ask why? Are you serious? Nah, that wasn’t it. Who? Really? That’s what you’re going to go with—still asking who I am?”

“Wow. I do believe that’s what he’s trying to say,” Mike confirmed with a laugh.

Raul and Stephen started laughing as well as the three of them shared a look, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how any of this was funny.

“What a dumb final question,” Stephen assessed. “How disappointing after so much set-up.”

Mike gave a nod of agreement. “Even why would’ve been better.”

Raul shook his head in amusement at my suffocating ex-fiancé in his unforgiving grasp. “Well, Gregg, some might say that I’m a nobody babysitter who has just hit pay dirt. A loser club rat who got lucky with your girl last night.” Raul’s laughing countenance abruptly fell away, and he leaned in to whisper, “But they’re wrong. Know why? Because she was never your girl. She was always mine,” he seethed. “You’re the one who got lucky. And now that luck has run out.”

What—what did he mean by that?

“Take a good look at my girl, Gregg, because it’s the last time you’ll ever see her.”

Oh, God, he was going to kill him.

I had to do something.

Gregg’s eyes bugged out as Raul raised him off the ground by his throat, growling, “Who am I? I’m the guy who worked his ass off his whole life, the one who earned every damn thing he has—the scrapper kid who had to claw his way up from the bottom of the food chain while watching assholes like you get handed everything you wanted in life.”