Page 28 of The Wild Wolf's Rejected Mate

I stare at the dark green brew, and the thin tendrils of steam rising into the air. My mate is gone. I’ve already muffled the bond to a cold, fading shadow in my chest. Soon, I’ll be able to consign it to the deep well where I consign all the bad things thathave happened to me in my life. If I do this, that’s it. It’ll be me, alone, forever.

Safe, the voice whispers.Safe forever.

“All right. I’ll drink it,” I say.

Abertha blinks. “Oh, no, not the tea. That’s for me. For my nerves.”

She stands again to go rummage in her cupboard and comes back with a waxed paper box with green and blue swirls sealed in plastic. It’s human. They love to seal paper boxes in plastic.

She passes it to me. “I’ll let you open this. Humans do these things up like bear traps.”

Out of habit, I reach for the knife in my ankle holster, but it’s not there. I must have lost it during my shift.

A memory flashes in my mind. The knife clattering to the linoleum floor in the lodge basement. A wave of sick horror rises in me, clogging my throat, until I swallow it back down. That’s the distant past. I’m not there, in that moment, anymore. I know how the story ends.

The male died. Somehow, in the confusion that followed, Abertha got the knife back and brought it to me. She said, “Life lesson—sometimes the magic needs time.”

I take a deep breath and force my brain back into the moment. The text on the box comes into focus.

Plan B.

What was plan A supposed to be?

I try to pry the plastic apart, but my nails are torn from what happened by the river. Eventually, I use my teeth to rip the package open. In the end, after I unbox and unwrap everything, it’s only a tiny white pill.

“This is it?” I ask. “It’s so small.”

Abertha hums in agreement and sips her tea. She’s letting me make the decision, but really, it’s no choice at all. If I can makeit like this never happened, erase it without hurting anyone, of course I will. Keep the egg in the fridge.

I pop the pill and chase it with a sip of lukewarm tea.

“It never happened,” I say to myself.

“Didn’t it?” Abertha raises an eyebrow.

“No.” And in the rush of deciding for myself, a molten flood of frustration fills me. I don’twantthis.

I don’t want to have a failed mating. I don’t want to go back and tell Una and the others that I mated a strange wolf from the Last Pack, and I rejected him, and he walked away, disgusted. I don’t want them to look at me with even more pity.

I can’t bear for them to whisper about me behind my back and shake their heads yet again. It took years for the females to stop looking at me like I’m a ghost, a walking reminder of Orla’s dead body and that basement and the horrors of Declan Kelly’s time.

I don’t think the pity would have ever stopped if Killian hadn’t sent the worst-off females away to live in other packs. He sent my Aunt Nola to Salt Mountain. Before she left, she got so bad, she wouldn’t leave the house. Once the ones who couldn’t get over it were gone, the others let themselves forget, and they let me blend into the scenery like I wanted.

My failed mating is going to turn back the clock. They’ll stare and whisper, and in their eyes, once again, I’ll see nothing but regret that they couldn’t save me from what that night did to my head—and that they couldn’t save themselves at all.

It’s too heavy to bear.

“Can you make it so no one knows?” It’s a child’s request, but I want it like a child wants magic to fix the unbearable, and I’msurethat she can.

“What do you mean?” Abertha narrows her eyes.

“Cast a spell. Make it so that no one notices that I’m different now.”

She shifts back in her chair. “That’s a big ask, little girl.”

“I can pay.” But actually, no, I can’t. I have some money stashed from our farmers’ market sales, but most of it slips through my fingers. There’s a human at the market who weaves yarn from alpaca, and it’s so soft, I can’t resist, and I spend most of what I make before we leave town. “I can work off the cost.”

A speculative gleam lights in her eyes. “You know, no one can dodge their fate forever.”

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