Page 63 of Defeated

“Zoe?”

I silence the voice in my head screaming at me to tell Chris to turn the car around and drive us far, far away from here.

Chris squeezes my hand again. “We don’t have to…”

His voice fades when I see him.

Harlan. Pack enforcer. Hated mate.

The reason I spent two years running from town to city to town again, hoping to find a place I could start over. A faraway place from his cruelty that I spent a year enduring.

I hate him.

If there was a stronger word, I’d use it instead, because those four letters don’t do justice to the fury, the pain, the need to scream in his face exactly how I feel about him.

I need a bigger word. A stronger one. One that will knock him down the way he knocked me down.

A mate loves you, protects you, comforts and reassures you. They are everything to you and you are everything to them. Harlan destroyed all meaning of the word, nearly destroyed me.

More than ever before, I truly understand everything he took from me. Not only my home, to the point it no longer felt like home, my pack, my safety, my happiness, and very nearly, my life.

Harlan was—is—my mate, and he spent a year trying to destroy me.

He is confidence personified as he strides from the house, head back, smirking.

Somehow, he looks even more handsome than when I left. He’s still wearing all black, his brown hair a little longer than I remember, but he’s the same.

More of his cruelties bubble up in my mind, drowning out Chris’s reassurances. I stop feeling his hand squeezing mine.

My heart is so loud in my head, someone could play the drums beside me and I wouldn’t hear a thing.

I’m back in a place I swore I would die rather than ever return.

“Zoe?”

Chris’s voice finally punctures through the overwhelming sensation I’m drowning.

And then I can breathe again.

A brunette is standing just behind Harlan. She’s beautiful, and I think I remember who she is. Isabelle, the alpha’s younger sister. She orbited the same sphere as Harlan, the alpha, and the more powerful in the pack.

I wasn’t good enough for him. No matter what I did or said, I never would have been enough. He always would have believed he deserved better. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think he’d been determined to humiliate me and drive me away.

Two years ago, I’d have cried about it. But now?

I didn’t believe I was strong enough to do this, that I would second-guess myself or convince myself that we belonged together. It’s one reason I asked Chris to come with me.

I think none of those things as I pull my hand from Chris’s, unbuckle my seat belt and push the car door open.

As I climb out, Harlan is saying, “See, told you she’d eventually come crawling back.”

My wolf snarls. The first sign she’s given that whatever feelings she had toward Harlan died right along with mine.

I take five steps toward him, stop with several feet separating him from me, and jab my finger at him. “You are a piece of shit, and the biggest asshole on the planet.”

Silence.

It felt good to say it. So good I want to scream it even louder. But that isn’t why I came back here.

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