Page 27 of Rejected Exile

Wincing, I banish the old memory away. Seeing Kieran earlier has brought up all those old memories. I hate the way it makes me feel—how I find myself crying at the drop of my hat, arms trembling, my stomach in knots. There's this horrible, twisted part of me that wants to run to him, get down on my knees andbegfor him to love me.

Reaching up, I scratch idly at the scar on my neck only to find a bandaid in my way. That's right—I put it there to stop me from tearing the skin away. Sighing, I decide to find something else to do while the pizza cooks, and resolve to go through my dad's things in his old office.

Lance may have taken much of the research with him, and I found all the old unpaid bills, but there's more up there. Things that need to be thrown away, others that should go to lawyers and accountants, and probably a lot meant for Niall or the next alpha. But if there's anything in there I might want—like old letters, or family genealogy—now is the time to grab it, before someone else shows up looking for files.

As I go through the filing cabinets, I keep thinking about Lance. He said he would be in touch. I haven't heard from him today, but maybe he's just... busy. Looking through the files, or scanning them for me.

Hopefully, that's it. Hopefully, he hasn't been talking to others in the pack, people who were there when I was exiled, who told him how sad and pathetic I was. How I cried and begged for Kieran to accept me even without a wolf. I carried on so long that even Queenie and Niall took pity on me and suggested something might be arranged. Only for my own father to exile me in disgust for my complete weakness.

It occurs to me, in my darkest hours, that he might not be my father at all.

But I shake that thought off as I always do, busying myself with his filing cabinet. I've reached the locked drawer and decide to hunt for the key like I told Lance I would.

Though I sometimes feel self-conscious about being shiftless, Iknowmy father is truly mine. We have the same heterochromia: one brown chip in two green eyes. Besides, werewolves aren't easily fooled by bastard children like humans. The bond, once forged, doesn't lie—and my mother was, by all accounts, truly smitten with my father in every way.

Besides, I know his mind. I may never forgive him for exiling me, but I can predict with unerring accuracy where he hides things he doesn't want to be found. That's how I discovered the beer stash when I was thirteen—and threw out all his packs of cigarettes when I was ten. And it's how, after only a few minutes of searching, I find the key to the filing cabinet stashed behind a framed photo of Mom sitting on the bookshelf.

The little silver key slides into the locked cabinet drawer easily. Turning it, I open up the drawer expecting to find an entire treasure trove full of files—and instead discover just a single dark green file folder with a few sheets of paper inside.

Frowning, I reach down, grab the file, and open it.

It only takes me a few minutes to read all the pages and study the diagrams.

But it takes several long minutes more for me to read them again, then a third time, and a fourth. That's how many times it takes for me to believe what I'm seeing.

As the truth sinks in, I reach for my cocktail glass—and discover it empty. That will have to be fixed. Soon. Tonight is a five or even six cocktail night.

"My whole life was a lie."

My fingers go up to my neck, and dig into thescaron the side of it.

I was never shiftless at all.

Ten

Delilah

Questions spin through my mind: why, how long, who did it, why, how,why!?I want to scream in my father's face, but he's ashes in an urn by now. No one can give me answers, but these cold black and white pages tell me plenty.

As I put the ingredients for a double cocktail into the mixer and give it an aggressive shake, several key facts fall into place in my mind.

First, the scar on the side of my neck, with a large piece of scar tissue in it, is actually some kind of inhibitor chip. It prevents me from being able to shift—it has this whole time.

Second, my father knew about this, and it seems, based on the locked filing cabinet, that he wanted to keep it a secret.

Third, he quite possibly knew from the very moment I was rejected that I wasn't shiftless at all—I was just being prevented from shifting by foul anti-werewolf technologies that are supposedly outlawed here in the states.

Fourth, the chip was put in there for a reason. At some point, for some reason, my father—or the entire pack, for all I know—decided it was safer for me not to be able to turn into a werewolf.

Fifth, I can take it out now that I know.

As I strain my cocktail into an extra tall glass, rage and anger fill me. But what overshadows them is the overwhelming, sharp-edged pain. I've suffered for so long, felt unlovable and unwanted for seven years. My only family, my own people, turned me out. And the whole time—none of it was necessary.

None of it ever had to happen.

I was never broken.

Tears drip down my face as I take the first sweet and sour sip of cocktail. The pain coalesces into a dense fist in the middle of my chest. Each beat of my heart aches and rips at it, until I feel like I might go mad at any minute.

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