THE UNPRECEDENTED PURPOSE

Part 1

I expected it to be simple. Boy meets girl, girl falls, boy ignores and rejects, girl gets furious, boy realizes she was meant to be, boy grovels and girl begrudgingly forgives. Something tragic occurs to girl and boy realizes his life is worthless without her so he goes through hell and rescues her then happily ever after. But NO, it couldn't happen to me that way.

I Leo Cadini, nothing seemed to ever go the way it was expected for me. Out of all the children my father had, I had to be the one from a mistress. Out of all the males he'd fathered, I had to be the one who stood out with curly dark coloured hair and a face identical to his. There was no hiding me nor his shame. I had to be creative not to look so much like him. I had to be innovative to be a wall flower. I had to be secretive in order to have freedom.

His mate knew the truth the day I was born and my mother had to be killed, for it was the law and final. I being his child could not be killed until my eighteenth birthday when I was expected to fight for my rank and place with my brothers. Which would then determine my fate, to die or be exiled depending on how well I fared. Winning over my brothers would guarantee my position at the table of commons but I would still be the bastard so I would have no title with a brother who would probably hate me after that.

I had five brothers still waiting to be ranked so luck wasn't on my side either. It is not that we hated each other. It was funny how opposite the truth was. You would think that they would hate me for being the bastard and that my step mother would hate me for reminding her of the infedility of her husband. Far from being the case, Alrina loved me with all her heart as if I was one of her children. She'd breast fed me and brought me up as one of her own and my brothers and sister adored me.

My father was weird in his own way but he adored me as much. They all babied me since I was the youngest and I hated it. My eight brothers were too over protective of me and my four sisters made it even worse every time they came to my rescue.

Yes my father had thirteen children. Four pairs of twins, one set of triplets and then Arillo and I who were the last batch, came out as one. We were the surprise and my step mother liked to refer to us as the receeding genes. She often said we were almost forgotten.

I was known to be stubborn and problematic but because of how the family treated me, the whole pride did the same. They treated me like a child who needed patience and understanding no matter what trouble I got into. This made my peers jeer at me and I could never stand up for myself with the jokes that went around. My siblings would appear even before I could get the chance. If they weren't there, their spies and appointed secret protectors would suddenly appear. It was really annoying.

Shifter school was tough and I met all sort of creatures but because of my family, everywhere I went, I was treated like the youngest despite my age even in the presence of younger shifters than me.

I never got time to associate with other shifters so much since the screening they went through before becoming my friends was always too much to handle. My siblings took it upon themselves to approve of my friends and that meant going through the scrutiny of all twelve of them then there was my parents. Teenagers are never that patient and understanding, so, even one friendship would have been a miracle for me to garner.

My father was king and everyone in the shifter community knew I was the doted on prince, a title I took from my stepsister and she was happy to relinquish it. I was also a carbon copy of my father when he was my age which made things a little difficult for me.

It was no surprising that on my eighteenth birthday I was suddenly finding myself dumb founded standing infront of the shifter university for my first year because of a male with the most mesmerizing eyes I had ever seen. He had fiery coloured hair which I could see was dyed. His smile brought very deep dimples on the side of his face and his perfect face seemed to radiate. He had not yet seen me as he was deep in a conversation with his friends.

Yes, I was in love. The cliché kind that hits you with all it's got and the one that still finds you when you have convinced yourself you didn't want it. He was my mate. Go figure.

His body was fit, dressed in very tight jeans and a t-shirt. Yeah, we had adopted a lot from our human companions. After all shifters were half human. We were human first before we became the other half and going back to our roots was kind ingrained in us.

He was holding sunglasses on his right hand and a back pack on his left. Probably a habit he picked after being around the mundane. He had a look of someone who went to school with the humans and fit well with them. He didn't have the savagery of the shifters hanging around him and his stance spoke of someone comfortable with his human skin a skill we rarely achieved unless having practiced it almost daily and for longer periods. In other words, it happened only if you rarely shifted.

He laughed at something that was said then suddenly with shift in wind direction, he started sniffing. I moved to the side and hid behind my older brother Aru who just laughed at me ogling the kid. He had clearly been watching me since he was the one dropping me to school and had insisted to take me to my first class. Don't blame me, it was either accept that or have all my brothers drop me to school like the child they thought I was.

"You should hold your head high and talk to him. He seems cute and he could be a great distraction before you meet your mate." Aru said and I looked at him strangely.

It shocked me because we knew same sex was really a debate in the pride family. A debate that was still hard to approach. Just like the humans, prides were homophobic because they claimed same sex mates have no meaning since they never increased the numbers in the pride. So they were considered an experimental phase in your passage to adulthood and much encouraged for that. Yes, we found ways to cover the fact that we couldn't accept homosexuality. He had not realized that that was my mate which was a good thing or maybe he just chose to ignore that my mate was male.

With a homophobic based society, it wasn't strange that he'd not connected the two together. Most same gender mates in the pride rejected each other and got married to other people who were mate less, widows or widowers.

Aru was the second born, the first son in my father's house and among my siblings, he was the one who took the role of being my protector too seriously as if it was his only purpose for existence. He was one of the reasons I still allowed them to treat me like a child.