Page 70 of Rejected Exile

"Don't worry about it," Finn says smoothly, all charm. He steps forward and lightly squeezes Delilah's shoulder in reassurance. "You're doing your best."

She shoots him a grateful smile, and I feel the snap of angry jaws inside me. Ever since that horrifying night three years ago, my wolf has been an unruly thing, hard to summon and harder to contain. I get the sense that if I let him out right now he'll tear out Finn's throat—so I try to gentle him and keep him at bay, though to be honest, I'm not thrilled with Finn right now.

As if feeling my glare on him, he glances over his shoulder, smirks a little—and steps back from Delilah. Only a single step, though. And there's still arrogance written in every line of his body, as if to say:I'm not taking her now, because I don't have to. I can take her any time that I want.

I'd disagree with that, but Finn has earned his arrogance. I've seen him charm the clothes off women like it's nothing. He never leaves them unhappy or unsatisfied, even if he's dating their best friends—and I'll never understand how he pulls it off.

All I know is that he better not treatDelilahlike one of his many townies, or I'll tear his head off his body with my bare human hands. No wolf required.

Delilah continues, and I tamp down my murderous rage enough to give her a reassuring smile, still hopeful that what she's about to reveal might mean there's a chance for us.

"The alpha in this journal does research into what's happening with his wolf pack after two females die during the shift. What he discovers is a history in some of the alpha artifacts, one that was never fully explained to him.

"Apparently, one hundred and fifty-four years before his female wolves started to die, the same curse took hold of the Glass Pack, which then had a different name and was a small pack, comprised of a handful of French fur trappers and Natives who had what many felt was a curse.

"The wolves then looked for answers to what was happening to the females—and why so many were dying, while others weren't. They quickly discovered that a wolf-witch hybrid, a woman who'd been cast out of her own pack among the early settlers, had given them a gift that was a double-edged sword. She'd laid an intricate spell on them, one tied to the years and their generations.

"Because of her spell, every seventy-seven years, the pack would undergo a transformation. Either the female werewolves of the pack would become strong, the strongest ever seen, and go on to birth a new generation of werewolves—or every single one of them would die. She called it a gift because the female wolves would be the strongest, too strong to ever be cast out by their people like her. But it was also a curse because it killed the weak without warning.

"The alpha in this journal discovered that seventy-seven years before the curse fell on his pack, there had been great fortune in the pack. Seventy-seven years before that, every female wolf had died. And so on until the very founding of the pack, when it wasn't more than a dozen werewolves taking shelter near a Native village.

"He researched and researched for a cure to the curse. But he never found one. Instead he was forced to watch as, for nearly a decade, every female wolf in the pack died. Then one day it just... stopped. The next full moon rose, every female wolf was called to turn, and none of them passed. For years after that, until he stepped down in his role as alpha, he waited, but none of the women died again.

"Until seventy-seven years later, I guess—in the early 1940s, if I'm doing the math right. And now." Her eyes are sorrowful as she looks down, grasping the folder in her hands. "Either every young, unmated female wolf of the pack becomes strong enough to defeat the curse, or they all die."

A silence falls over the room. Lance clears his throat. "Does it say whatstrongmeans? How did any of the female wolves even survive?"

"No. And I have no idea." Delilah glances up at us, tears in her eyes. "All I know is that if this is right, then we have several more years of deaths to live through. And what's worst about it—every mated female who joins the pack will die, and every female who was born into the pack will die after she chooses a mate. Either she becomes strong enough on the day she's mated to beat the curse... or she just doesn't. We don't even have a way of knowing which will happen until it's too late."

Heaviness settles in my chest. Grabbing onto Williams' tattered old desk chair, I pull it to me and sit on it heavily. Memories are playing out in my mind over and over again, and I try to make sense of them.

"Delilah." She looks to me with wide eyes. "When did your Dad find this information? Maybe you said, but I missed it. Do you know?"

Blinking, she looks down at her hands, her shoulders bowed with something like grief or pain. In a low, quiet voice she says, "He found this a few months before my fourteenth birthday."

I feel everything spin around me, the world tilting beneath my feet. She's not done.

"A few days later, he booked me a doctor's appointment to have a weird mole removed from my skin. I don't even remember it—it didn't occur to me until I read it in his notes. But it must have been the day he put the chip in my neck so I wouldn't be able to shift during my ceremony."

It's hard to remember everything that happened on that fateful night seven years ago. So much of it has been suppressed into the deepest parts of my mind.

What I do remember is that, not long before Delilah and I were to be chosen as intendeds, William came to me. He told me that it couldn't happen, would never happen. And that I had to reject her at the ceremony—not before, and certainly not after, but during.

If I didn't, he would exile me from the pack, not in the way he exiled Delilah. But by stripping the clothes from my body and tying me to a boulder at the foot of the mountains, the way only the most shameful werewolves were once punished.

He never told me there was a good reason for it.

I always blamed myself. But now I know.

"So it's true, then," I say aloud, looking up at Delilah, feeling the weight of three other males on me. "None of us can ever take a mate. Because it'll kill them.

"It was never the land, or the water, or anything we could have stopped. It really wasus."

"So that's just it, then." Delilah brings the folder up to her chest and clutches it. "I really neverwillhave a mate. I can't. Because if I do, it'll kill me for sure."

"And your father knew why all along," I tell her, "and he never even told a single one of us."

All that time. All those chances. He could've told me—could'veexplained why.

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