Page 66 of Rejected Exile

My wolf notices it even before I do. There's a vivaciousness to Delilah that was missing before. God knows she had beauty and charm in spades, but now there's a little something extra.

Her skin glows. Her eyes dance. I can hear the strong beat of her heart, and watch her gracefully move around the kitchen, a mug of coffee in her hand.

But the smell. God, the smell of her is something else entirely. Like dark molten chocolate, sharp herbs, and a burning bonfire.

The wolf inside me wants to grab hold of her, pull her to the ground, and rut inside her.

The man does too—who am I kidding? There aren't two parts of me that want to fuck Delilah Glass. It's all of me that wants her. Man. Beast. Both.

Which is why my heart is so full of despair. Because the instant I saw her with Kieran, their clothes half off, him pinning her wildly against the wall, silver threads all around them—I knew. I can't have her.

Especially because it would mean taking her away fromhim.

I glance over at him as Delilah explains the details of how the microchip was removed from her neck. Half-listening to her words, I study Kieran for a long moment while he isn't watching. He's sitting opposite me at the table, his eyes absolutely glued to her face, his pants freshly zipped up and his arousal lessened in the air, though there's no hiding to a werewolf what he just almost did with her.

I've grown so used to a shadowed version of my best friend in the past few years. There have been endless painful nights looking for him in the woods, dragging him to the clinics, pushing him into his shower stall and turning on the water, all of it just to try to bring him to some semblance of the older brother figure I use to have. Before the hunting trip, he'd grown so gaunt I worried he wouldn't come back, but Niall reassured me he'd look out for Kieran.

Now he's finally got color in his cheeks. There's still messiness to his hair and dark circles beneath his eyes, but he sits up straight, and when he picks up his mug and brings it to his mouth, his hands don't tremble at all. As Delilah makes some quip he actuallylaughs,the sound low and quiet but achingly alive.

My heart feels like it might burst into a thousand pieces. I've never felt lower in my life, or more sick.

The best and only friend I've ever had in the world is falling in love with his childhood sweetheart all over again. He's finally starting to come out of the darkest phase of his life, and he might actually survive because of her. I look at his eyes and I see hope for the first time in years.

And because I'm a terrible, awful, selfish friend, I can't even appreciate it at all. I should be dancing for joy and congratulating him.

Instead, I want to rip his throat out.

All to make room for me inherheart.

"So that's it, I guess. I didn't think it would work so quickly." I look at Delilah's eyes, so full of joy, their forest green depths shimmering with merriment. My lungs feel so tight I don't think I'll ever take another easy breath in her presence. "There are a lot of questions I still have about how it got there, who put it there, and why my dad never told me, but—I'm excited, not gonna lie. This changes everything."

It does.

It really, really does.

Twenty-Two

Delilah

Iwon't pretend that I understand half of what I'm reading, but Lance seems so hopeful that we'll find something in my father's office, and I don't want to bring him down.

"There has to be an answer here," he argues, arranging several books and thick manila folders around him. "I photocopied most of what I thought was important, but clearly I missed something. There's no way our alpha would've accepted a shift-repressing microchip in his only daughter if he didn't know about the curse in advance."

Chewing on my lower lip, I weigh Lance's words carefully. "Wouldn't he have said something, though? I mean—if he knew. There were so many lives that were lost, and he did nothing."

"He didn't donothing," Lance argues, glancing over at me. "Your father tried everything he could think of. He changed the rules of the pack to allow mate bonds to be broken. He hired witches and occultists to walk the land and look for a physical source of the curse. He even let wolves leave the pack if they chose—though most chose to stay. I'm sure that if he'd had more information, he kept it to himself for good reasons."

Maybe. I thought I knew my father, until my fourteenth birthday, when the warm, loving father I'd once had became someone wholly different. After that day I considered him a cruel and heartless man—and it's hard to see him as anything else.

The more I learn, the more I realize I don't fully understand him and never did.

"There were things in his bedroom," I admit to the guys. "It was all witchy odds and ends, so I cleared it out because it gave me the spooks. But you're right. If there was some way to get rid of the curse, he would've tried it—his room certainly made it seem like he was looking for something."

"I'm glad you agree. Now we just have tofindit."

Glancing around the room, I observe that not everyone looks as convinced by Lance's theory. While Kieran and Roarke are gamely going through every one of Dad's filing cabinet drawers, looking at even the most mundane financial documents, Finn is leaning up against the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, balancing a golf ball between his knuckles.

Since I'm not doing Lance much good curled up on the floor with all these pieces of paper about microflora and prions that I barely understand, I excuse myself and join Finn near the books. He raises a brow as I walk over, then turns to put the golf ball back in its little case.

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