Page 20 of Rejected Exile

But she's gone now, and she's never coming back for me.

I made sure of that.

And I don't, for one bit, regret it.

* * *

Oh god, Kieran, it hurts! It hurts!Red smears and frightened brown eyes. Hands on my arms and blood down her face. The grey stones stare in judgment.Kieran, please, do something!

There was nothing for me to do.

So she died.

I startle awake from a half-dream to find myself on my old tattered leather sofa, a pillow hastily shoved beneath my head. Blinking, I stare up at the popcorn ceiling and sigh. Yet another trip wasted by the worrywarts around me. Yet another day when I went to sleep and failed to stay there.

It'd be funny if it weren't so pathetic. Like all things in my life, letting go of living is just another failure.

Tara.I dream of her often. The scared eighteen-year-old girl. Three years later I feel miles older, but she'll always be eighteen, because she'll always be dead.

I wonder what she'd be like if she'd gotten to live. If she hadn't been stuck with me in that Mating Circle trying to make the best of something neither of us wanted. Because I'd always love Delilah, and she would never be Delilah.

She knew. Told me, even, that she knew. Tara was an arranged match made by the alpha to soften the blow of my disastrous first match, but neither of us knew how to settle into it. When the time came for us to complete the Mating Ceremony and form a mate bond, we were still strangers. The mating threads between us barely even grew.

A few days before that disastrous moment in the Mating Circle, she confronted me. Told me that she'd sensed something was off, but it had taken her a while to figure out what. Then she declared: "It's Delilah, isn't it? You rejected her, threw her out on the streets like she was nothing, but you loved her. Youstilllove her. Why did you do it?"

A question for the ages. The answer still haunts me. As the ground in Juniper turns to graves, I wonder: did I reject Delilah shortly before the curse began, or did the curse beginbecauseI rejected her? Maybe it's egotistical to think that something I did when I was still a teenager would kill all those women. But I can't help playing with regrets in my mind.

A few feet away in the kitchen, Finn and Roarke are having a conversation in not-so-low voices. The tone is growing heated between them, the volume rising. Roarke is probably trying to make me dinner to soak up the vampire venom, and Finn is no doubt trying to convince him to stop bothering.

Lance has already given up on me; Finn will be next, and Roarke... well, Roarke will give up the day he stands at my grave. Maybe a few years after. I don't know what possessed him to be so loyal, but I wish he would realize that the friend he's still holding out hope for no longer exists.

A big part of me died in the Mating Circle seven years ago. Then four years later, the rest of me died. Now all that's left is someone who shouldn't still be alive.

"It was one thing when you wasted your time on himbefore," Finn mutters, barely bothering to keep his voice down. "But now? Roarke, the Summit is happening soon."

"And? I'll show up to vote like everyone else. You know the totem bearers will be the ones doing most of the picking.”

"No. It isn't like that." Frustration in his voice. "You need to put your hat in the ring.”

"Politics don't interest me. Besides, isn't Lance the strongest wolf in the pack these days?"

"You'd be a great leader."

"I wouldn't." Roarke says it easily, like it isn't a lie. He even adds, "I wasn't groomed for the position, and we both know that the best alphas are born to it."

I turn my head towards the back of the sofa and try to block out the real world, desperately reaching for whatever of the vampire venom still flows through my blood. What I want is to be gone, now, to anywhere but here.

Finn snaps, "Kieran was groomed for the position since birth, and we both know where that ended up." Silence. "Are you seriously going to stand there and tell me that you won't put yourself in the running because you're afraid of taking it fromhim?"

"That's not it. It just—it isn't for me."

"It would be if you spent more time with your pack and wasted less time on a lost cause."

Another long moment of silence. There's a sound like a spoon stirring. Roarke is probably heating up soup for me. I don't know why he bothers.

Then he says, in a resigned voice, "He's not a lost cause. Not yet. I can't believe that."

"Well, try. Nothing is waking him up from that stupor. Nothing except the fact that—"

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