Page 29 of The Alpha's Bullied Pregnant Mate

She heard her phone chime as she walked towards the bus stop and scrambled wildly in the pockets of her thick coat in search of the phone. Fannar, you asshole. Finally. Took you long enough.

She found the phone and unlocked it. Hi, Isla! Been a minute. Coffee break in town at noon? It wasn’t Fannar. She was so disappointed that she returned her phone to her pocket without replying the text from Elsa.

Isla wasn’t in the mood to speak to anyone else, and the weather seemed to match her countenance. She brooded the whole ride into town and all the way till she got to her desk in the library.

She had one mission only that day. To find out why she suddenly couldn’t stop longing for a man she had hated only a week ago, and why a scar from over a decade ago still hurt her like something recent.

The library was empty when she arrived, to her delight. She took off her jacket and hung it on a wall behind the counter, and then she started digging. It took her a better part of four hours of thumbing through journal after journal, and a whole thermos of coffee before she found the text she sought.

It was an old book, with parchment-type paper and leather bound. She’d found it only by accident, and the pages were so brittle she had to turn them carefully to prevent them from falling apart.

It was an anthropology by a human called The Mating Habits of Mythical Creatures. Isla had found the title interesting, and had only considered the book a reasonable distraction from her intense search for something factual. She considered it nothing more than leisure reading for children and young adults.

She’d been reading the book for an hour when she got to a chapter titled Lycans and Werewolves. This caught her attention and she read through more slowly. And for the first time in over five hours, she saw something that spoke directly about what she sought.

Her heart hammered furiously in her chest as she read a particular text.

In some cases, and again, this is one of the rarest cases, there may exist a bond born entirely by accident. If a young wolf, recently transformed, bites a female to which he feels an attraction, while in his transformed state, that young wolf would have initiated the bond mark.

There exists the possibility of this young wolf killing the female if he has not learned to master his new found cases, and there have been reports of such deaths over the years, although sources may be hard to come by in this regard.

The bond mark, if done by an adolescent wolf, would remain inactive until the wolves come of age. If this process of bonding is interrupted, the bond mark will be incomplete. In that case, both wolves can choose to either break the bond, or complete it, both of which present different risks.

Unfortunately, until such a choice can be agreed upon between the two werewolves, the bond mark will wreak havoc on both their lives. Despite the complexity of this bonding system, it’s still known as the strongest bond between mates.

Isla read the text over and over again, wondering if she had missed something. Anything. She remembered how Fannar had bitten her years ago. It was all her fault. Why had she tried to help him? Why couldn’t she leave him alone?

He’d bitten her, right there on her neck. It had not affected her then because they were just a pair of kids. The whole time she’d been avoiding him, the bond mark had remained dormant, until she agreed to attend that ill fated meeting.

She was furious. She bit her lip and swallowed tears. She didn’t know how to feel, how to react. A violent wave of emotions buffeted her, blowing her one way and then another.

Fannar had bonded with her. Worse, the bond was far from complete, thanks to the janitor who had broken it off. The text had said that there was a possibility of killing the female if the young wolf was inexperienced. That was Fannar’s first transformation. One didn’t get more inexperienced than that.

He could have killed me that day, she realized. But he didn’t kill her. Instead, he’d left a freaking partial bond on her neck. She wanted it gone. She wanted it broken. She flipped through the book looking for a way to get rid of the bond but the author didn’t describe it.

She didn’t want to believe what she’d just read, but it struck too close to the truth for her to disregard it. What did it mean for her to be bonded to Fannar? It didn’t excuse all that she’d done to him in the past, and it certainly didn’t make them true mates.

The worst part was that Isla knew Fannar probably didn’t remember every attacking her. There was a lot he didn’t remember from their past but it didn’t make her any less furious at him. Instead, she felt angrier than she’d been in days.

The longing she felt, the hunger, her pain. None of it was real. She didn’t truly like him. She was only reacting to the mark he had given her. She wanted it broken, and she had a clue his mother would know how to go about it.

But did she want to tell him? She wasn’t sure about that. What would it change? He didn’t seem interested in her and probably never was if he could go so long without even a call or a text. That was only make breaking this easier for her, but only after she had made enough from him to start her new life.

She closed the old book gently and returned it to the shelf. She stretched and moved her limbs slowly, and then put the dozens of books she’d pulled off the shelves away as well.

She was going to play Fannar’s game, make enough to settle her parents and to leave, break this cursed bond, and then leave Frost Peak for good. The thought was a hearth fire in her chest, and it kept her warm, despite the darkness she felt from what she’d just learned.

Chapter 12 - Fannar

“What do I do?”

Callahan watched the snow slowly drifting down through the window in Fannar’s office, swirling whiskey in a glass. “It’s rather simple. You can’t keep avoiding her. That much is certain. You clearly feel something for this woman, right? So why not try to turn your arrangement into something more real?”

Fannar drummed on the desk with his fingers, his eyes facing the ceiling. “That’s the thing. I didn’t plan to avoid her, at least not at first. But I needed time to process what you guys said. I’ve never been in this situation before, Callahan. Ever. It’s all very new to me.”

“I know this.” Callahan turned away from the window and settled into one of the high backed chairs. “I’m one of your closest friends, remember? Now, I won’t deny that I’m finding some… pleasure seeing you squirm like this. I mean, it’s you after all, right?

“Still, this is happening, Fannar. Get comfortable with that thought. This is happening. So you have to decide. Are you going to embrace it, ignore your fears and chase this feeling? Or, are you going to turn away from it, and try to live as if this never happened?”

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