Page 117 of How to Lose a Pack in 10 Dates

My head swims as I curl up tighter. My body’s already trembling again, slick dripping between my thighs, muscles locking with another sharp pulse of heat.

I close my eyes, and they’re there. Not really - but I swear I can hear their voices, can feel phantom touches.

I see Wes kneel beside me, palm on my sweat-slick back, whispering,You’re safe. I’ve got you.

I feel Cam kiss my shoulder and say,Let me help, baby. Let me make it better.

I hear Jace groan in my ear;Fuck, you’re so sweet like this. Let us take care of you.

It’s not real. And it never will be again.

I curl into the wreckage of the nest I didn’t mean to build. Everything is soaked. My whole body feels wrong, my limbs aching with the need to be held and touched and scent-marked. The air feels abrasive, and I can almost feel them: still reaching, still bleeding. I press a pillow between my legs on the off chance that it might quiet the screaming in my body.

It doesn’t.

My body wants them. Myheartwants them.

And I am completely, utterly alone.

The sob cracks out of me before I can stop it. Then another. And another. They wrack through me, curling my body into a tighter knot of pain and want and shame, and I bite my own hand to muffle the sound.

I’m going into heat, and no one’s coming. They won’t touch me. They won’t scent me. They won’t believe me.

I whisper their names, one by one. And still, no one comes.

I’m not just alone: I’mabandoned.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Jace

The house doesn’t feel like a pack house anymore.

Cam barely talks. He’s still making coffee for all of us in the mornings, still loading the dishwasher, still folding blankets, but it’s all mechanical; as though if he keeps doing the same rituals, maybe she’ll reappear in one of them. Maybe she’ll be curled up on the couch again in one of his hoodies, or dancing barefoot in the kitchen with cereal in her hand.

She never is.

Wes barely speaks either, but with him, it’s different. The silence is sharp, not soft. It’s the kind of quiet where every closed door feels final. He’s angry, and as every word he doesn’t say builds up behind his eyes, I don’t know if he’s holding it in for our sake or hers.

Probably both.

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to outrun it. I’ve been in the gym twice a day, every single day since she left. Lifting, sparring, sprinting—anything to burn her out of me. Out of my chest, out of my scent, out of my fucking head.

It doesn’t work.

I still feel her in every room. Her scent has faded, but it’s not gone. Her absence is loud in the places she used to linger—on the stairs, by the fridge, perched on the damn counter like she owned the place. I still half-expect her to tug at my shirt, to roll her eyes and call me out when I say something stupid. Still find myself glancing toward her room, waiting to hear her voice.

It never comes.

My mind replays it over and over as time passes on. She looked me dead in the eye, practically in tears, and swore it wasn’t what it looked like; but Isaw it.I saw the words, the steps, the plan; and you don’t come back from that. You don’t explain that away with a laugh and a shrug and a second draft.

Right?

…I don’t know anymore.

The longer she’s gone, the more I start questioning everything. Not her intentions—those I’ve dissected to hell and back. But mine.Ours.

Did we give her a chance to explain?Reallyexplain? Or did we just… shut down? Shut her out?

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