Page 30 of The Wild Wolf's Rejected Mate

He almost got us all killed, and Khalil, with his death wish, was happy to egg him on.

“What did you trade?” I growl at Alroy. “Your ever-loving mind?”

Max nips my hand, taking advantage of my distraction to express his displeasure that I’m wrapping up his guts so they don’t plop onto the forest floor. I hoist his carcass high in the air and give him a shake. “Enough, gray belly! You’re bleeding all over the place. You’ll leave a trail.”

Finally, he sees sense and goes limp. His paws and tail dangle like a chastised pup’s. I set him down on a log and finish binding the wound. He got the worst of it. It’s a miracle no one died. Alroy and Khalil didn’t recruit our best for this misadventure. Just our dumbest.

“Could you not smell a trap? Is your snout stuck as far up your ass as your head? Eh?” I tie off the bandage and pat Max’s haunch. He grumbles and immediately starts gnawing at the shirt I used to staunch the bleeding. I whack his nose. He waits until I walk off a few paces before he starts back at it.

I get in Alroy’s pasty face until it blanches so white, his freckles look like they’re floating.

“I’m sorry, Alpha,” he whimpers, baring his neck and backing away.

“For the hundredth time, I’m not the alpha.”

All the males in the clearing, wolf and man, give me that look. I bare my fangs, and their gazes slide away and their heads tilt.

“I’mnotthe goddamn alpha.” I repeat it loud enough to shake the remaining birds from their perches in the high branches. Signaling to Killian Kelly exactly where we are. Now I’m being a dumbass, too.

If I were the alpha, I wouldn’t be here. Alroy would have felt obliged to run his fool plan past me. I wouldn’t have heard it from Max too late to stop this sad-sacked, Fate-forsaken pack ofabsolute shit-for-brains from crossing into Quarry Pack territory before I could reach them.

I wouldn’t have seenher.

I wouldn’t feel like this.

“By all rights, we should be dead right now,” I snarl and swing my gaze around the clearing, and they stumble backward. “If Kelly wasn’t more interested in the traitors in his own pack, we’d be worm meal.”

Well, Alroy and his band of merry dipshits would. Kelly is a majestic fighter—unworldly—but he defaults to expecting his opponent to come at him head-on. That’s how the lost packs fight—in roped-off stages with bells announcing the first blow. It’s a good thing he wasn’t raised in First Pack. He’d be invincible if he’d spent his pup-hood like us with his pack brothers leaping onto him from behind every boulder and every tree branch sturdy enough to hold them.

As it is, it’d be a toss-up whether I could win against him. He’s clearly not the young, stupid male he was back when I found my mate.

Annie.

My guts knot, and my gorge rises. The old rage drags its claws down my skin from the inside. I ignore it, scanning my pack to see who else is hiding a potentially mortal injury. Elis is crouched low to the ground with his rear up in the air. I grunt and carefully keep my eyes focused on the others while I slowly sidle closer to him.

Killian has learned a few things in the years since I basically strolled onto his territory. His patrols still travel the same routes, but they’re staggered, and they overlap, and he has sentries at the river now. And his reputation as a monster has even reached us. He must be fearsome indeed if even out in the camps, we hear tales.

He relies on his opponent being thrown when he shifts mid-air, though. He wasn’t raised playing snatch ’em like we were in First Pack. I was king of that game. I could predict where a tail would appear, and I’d grab it and swing the wolf like a lasso and then let him go to see how far I could make him fly. Those were good times.

Maybe that’s what’s wrong with my packmates. I threw too many of them into tree trunks when we were pups.

“What the hell were you thinking?” I bark at Alroy, sneaking a glance at Elis’s wolf. He’s trying his best to hide a gash in his belly, but blood is seeping into the dirt around him.

“I was thinking three unmated females,” Alroy answers, awfully defiant for how badly his hands are shaking.

I snort. Except for the blessed one, not a single one of those females was unmated, and I’d like to see any of my pack brothers claim the blessed one’s wolf. He’s a beast. You can smell his size. He must be as big as a moose.

“You’re a fool.”

“You don’t understand,” Alroy whines, his face flushing from white to red like beet juice poured into a glass of milk. “Fate gave you a mate. You had a choice.”

A choice. Annie’s stiff body and fear stench flash in my memory. I wouldn’t call walking away a choice.

She’s even thinner now. Her brown eyes are hollows, eating up even more of her face. Back at the Quarry Pack dens, while the Byrnes were strutting around and blustering like stuffed roosters, she didn’t look at me once. Not even from the corner of her eye. Her fear stink was the same as I remember. My wolf almost took our skin. If I wasn’t stronger willed than him, he would have.

I never told the pack that she didn’t want me. I told them she was too afraid to live like a real wolf, that she was twisted inher head like the others in the lost packs, so I left her where she belongs. Where she wants to be.

I hate her, and I hate myself for it. It feels wrong to despise such a weak and cowardly female, so I am ashamed of myself, and I hate her for that, too.

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