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Of course he did. And Grace was pretty darn certain what came next.

Enraged at Alexandre choosing Genevieve over her, the woman cursed him.

And there it was. The curse.

That night, a terrible pain struck Alexandre. His body burned with fever and shivered with chills. For three days he suffered before falling into a deep sleep that lasted for a week. When he awoke, he was no longer a man but a—

Grace jerked away from the grimoire, dropping the pen.

—a large black wolf.

Oh, my. Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood all rolled into one. It had never occurred to her to wonder where shifters had originated from. They just were. Like witches. Could this be…? No. Because it didn’t explain where bear and cougar, fox, coyote, badger and crow shifters came from. She’d had a toad shifter come into the Thrifty Witch a few years ago. An unfortunate birthright, if there ever was one. No. This was something different altogether.

This wasn’t a distraction. There was something to this story, a hidden truth. She continued with more interest and urgency.

The witch—

Whatever her name was beneath another blob of ink.

—had not counted on Alexandre’s ability with animals or his love for Genevieve. He mastered the wolf, taking control, but he remained a wolf. And Genevieve stuck by his side as they searched for a cure.

Good luck with that. Curses were difficult to get rid of at the best of times. If this witch were as powerful as the story implied, finding a cure would be like finding a lost ball in high weeds.

They found such a witch in the small settlement of Langeais who agreed to help them. She couldn’t undo the curse, but she could alter it, allowing Alexandre to be both man and wolf.

A wolf shifter.

But there were limitations.

There always were with curses.

He must spend time as a man and time as a wolf. Repressing the wolf and living only as a man would drive him insane. If he stayed always as a wolf, he would lose his humanity.

Interesting. Grace hadn’t known shifters had that limitation. Except these weren’t ordinary wolf shifters.

Alexandre and Genevieve accepted the consequences, and the witch altered the curse.

And…they lived happily ever after. But the story wasn’t finished. She had another page to go. Huh.

But a curse is never a simple thing. The true horror of it soon became clear. As a werewolf, Alexandre’s body could heal itself far beyond that of a man. He was resistant to disease, and he would live longer than his peers and his beloved Genevieve. He would live to watch her age and die.

Alexandre and Genevieve went back to the good witch, pleading with her to do something. Unwilling to disturb the flow of nature, she gave them one option. She’d devise a spell to allow Alexandre’s bite to turn Genevieve into a werewolf like him.

Grace fell back in her chair. Mercy me. The ability to make new wolf shifters. She’d never known of a shifter capable of turning humans into werewolves. If this part of the story were true, that was one heck of a secret.

She returned her attention to the grimoire. Were there more shocks in store for her?

Alexandre remembered the pain of his turning, and he begged the witch to ease the transition. Fearful of unleashing werewolves on the world in ever greater numbers, the witch refused.

Smart witch.

Not wanting Genevieve to suffer as he had, Alexandre fled. But Genevieve was determined. She took the witch’s potion, hired hunters, and tracked Alexandre down. She cast the spell, but Alexandre refused to bite her. Undaunted, and counting on a werewolf’s ability to heal, she stabbed herself in the heart with a hunter’s knife.

That woman was in love. To be willing to die for him… But that was the way of it for shifters. Their mate bonds were unbreakable except by death. Thoughts of Alain intruded. His intensity, his dominance. The way he’d focused on her body, her pleasure with a singlemindedness that had left her breathless. Imagine being his mate and the focus of all that for the rest of her life. Her body lit up like the Aurora Borealis.

Grace shook herself. She wasn’t his mate. She was a witch who’d tried to steal a grimoire from him. Still had plans to. Maybe.

She turned the page and got back to translating.