Page 88 of Claimed By My Fiancé's Brother

I’d never felt more at peace as I did in those hours when I held Eleanor as she slept, her scent permanently entwined with mine, her hair splayed across my chest and her arms wrapped around me. But I couldn’t sleep.

I knew what came next…how I had to hurt her.

“I hope you can forgive me,” I whispered, stroking her hair away from her beautiful face.

Could she ever forgive me for this? For leading her on once more? For giving her hope for what could never truly exist between us?

“I need you to be happy forever and I…I can’t give you forever.”

That was the one thing Dylan could give her that I couldn’t.

She was right.

I should have let her get mated to him.

CHAPTER 15

ELEANOR

Iwas running.

Something seemed off about the motion, but I was too busy trying to escape to think too much about it.

Maybe if I had, I would’ve slowed enough to stop myself in time.

But I didn’t.

The pool came out of nowhere, and before I could pull myself to a stop, my momentum had carried me too far, and I was falling.

The shock of the ice-cold water hit me harder than the fall, and my limbs stiffened.

I’d never been in a pool before. I’d never been in any body of water that wasn’t my bathtub, to be precise.

Father never allowed me to venture more than a few meters away from the pack house, so there’d never been a need for me to learn how to swim or fight or do anything else that wasn’t directly beneficial to him.

And now his extremely controlling tendencies would be the death of me.

I struggled, trying to make my way back to the surface, but each flap of my arms only seemed to drag me farther underwater.

Air. I needed air.

But I was rapidly running out of it.

I flapped harder, but my limbs betrayed me, growing heavier by the second.

My vision swam as my struggles dwindled to nothing. The pressure on my lungs to take in the water and give in crested, and absolute fear consumed me.

Fear that this life would be all I ever knew.

That I would die without ever knowing a life outside the Red Moon Pack. How pathetic would that be, to die without having truly lived?

I didn’t know what made me look up, but something did, and I saw him.

Not that I could pick out any details at that moment. All I saw was a powerful blurred movement in the water heading straight toward me.

I saw a second chance at life, and I reached out to it.

I felt a touch. A spark. Then darkness.

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