Page 34 of Sold Rejected Mate
Hyperventilating. Just a stupid teen, thinking about what my parents would think.
Because she was right, and I knew it. I’d felt the tug, the pull of our bond, from the very beginning. That was why I sought her out, why I slipped into the detentions, sitting next to her. Crossing every line I set for myself, except one.
I told her she was delusional. I told her she should have known better.
I turned around five minutes down the road, coming back for her, but she was already gone. And despite the fact that I knew she couldn’t shift, I couldn’t find her in the woods. Even as my wolf, even sprinting through the trees.
“No,” I breathe, shaking my head, mind flashing back to Green. “She wouldn’t…she would have said something, right?”
“Would she?” Xeran asks pointedly, his voice low but firm.
Valerie.
Everything makes sense. The way she flinched when I touched her. The careful distance she kept. The way she looked at me like I hurt her.
Because I did.
Even though I turned around to find her, the damage was done. That fire was the next day, and Valerie wasgone. Disappeared, like she’d never existed at all. I thought I was never going to see her again. Sometimes, I wondered if she was dead.
That’s what the constant, thrumming pain of separation felt like, especially in the first few years. And no matter how much I tried to soothe it with the girls in and out of my place, it never quite filled the hole.
“Guys!”
The sound of Soren’s voice jerks me out of the haze over my brain. Xeran and I turn, watching Soren as he waves his arms at us, climbing higher and closer, panic in the whites of his eyes.
“The fire,” he gasps, pointing behind us, “it’s changing course. I don’t know if it was the wind or…something made it flare up. There are two fronts, and it’s headed for town—”
When I turn and see the glow of blue against the clouds, the first thing I feel is dread, mixed with exhaustion. The heavy knowledge that the night isn’t over, and I’ll need to push my body even harder, even farther.
Then, I realize which way the fire is heading.
“Go,” Xeran says to me, his eyes on the other front. He doesn’t need to tell me twice—I shift, start in the direction of my place. Before I’m too far, I hear Xeran say to Soren, “I need to get Phina and Nora—”
Then I’m gone, running through the trees, my paws hitting the ground awkwardly at first until I find my stride. Once I do, the trees fly past me.
My wolf has stronger lungs, but no mask, so the effect is just about the same. I race through the foliage, looking up to keep an eye on the fire, which pushes forward even more aggressively, almost like it’s striving against me, fighting to stay ahead.
A race.
As I run, the memories come flooding back. Almost a decade of guilt. Regret. Memories of how she used to smile, the way she’d run the tip of her middle finger over the curve of my bicep, the way she’d playfully bite at it like she just couldn’t help herself.
I’d return the favor, pressing my teeth lightly into her wrist like a vampire, tempting myself with the sensation of marking her. It was always right there, within reach.
And I never did it. I couldn’t.
Instead, I told her about the pressure of being a Cambias. The weight my father placed on the family name.
I remember the night she told me about her magic. I remember the fear behind her eyes, like I might sell her out. And the trust there when she showed me, with shaking hands, how she could create a tiny spark of light in her palms.
“You have to be careful with that,” I’d said, my voice low, though we were alone at the ridge. I wanted to tell her never to do it again, but I couldn’t get past the awe I felt. Xeran would have raged, I knew, to see it. He was so dead set on being the perfect incoming supreme.
But it was so beautiful, and it was a part of her. How was I supposed to be anything but astounded?
And the night I broke her heart, that pressure had been building for weeks. My mom flitting around, complaining that I hadn’t asked anyone to the prom. Her not-so-subtle hints about my future. My father’s talks about the kind of mate I would need to choose, how she would have to be fit for the Cambias name.
A stray certainly would not fulfill that role.
Back then, I started to get nervous that they knew. Then, right after a long lecture from my father about responsibilities, Rie told me she loved me. That she could feel in her heart that we were fated mates.
