Page 6 of Broken Pregnant Mate
But I didn’t get a kiss. Instead, his blank expression turned to something worse—something furious, and directed right at me.
“We are not mates, Emaline.”
Normally, I would never have argued with him, but that night, I did. “Yes, we are, Aidan, I know you feel it too—”
“I don't.” His eyes met the ground, and he said, voice terse, “There’s someone else, Emaline. I know we’re not mates because I…I have my mate already. And she’s not you.”
Hearing it had made my organs crumple, turning to dust inside me. But still, even if it was true, I couldn’t stand the thought of being without him. I put on my bravest face, shrugged through my tears like it didn’t matter.
“Okay,” I’d said, knowing my voice was far too high. “That’s fine. But…don’t leave me here. I want to come with you. We’re a team, right?”
With the last word, I’d stepped forward, wanting to punch him lightly in the arm, remind him that we could go back to a time before my silly, stupid confession. That we’d been best friends for a long, long time.
But what he said next was pointed, made to hurt, and it did an excellent job of slicing right through me.
Face darkening, he’d turned to me, practically spitting the words.
“If I bring you along, you’re nothing but dead weight, Emaline. That’s what you’ve been this whole time—dead fucking weight.”
Even thinking about it sends a shudder of sorrow down my spine, body reeling into what it felt like that night. The cool, dry air against my skin, scraping, the air charged with static electricity and threatening a sandstorm.
My hair was practically standing on end. And Aidan stood just outside that old barn, holding his arm, looking at me like I was the one who’d hurt him, when all I’d ever done was love him.
Dead weight.
Sighing, I slide the food back through the slot for Trenan to come collect later, knowing I won’t be able to bring myself to take another bite.
Forlornly, I look over the room, hoping there is—and yet, knowing there isn’t—something that can take my mind off of everything.
There’s a chessboard—I’d asked for knitting needles, and was denied for obvious reasons—a small stack of books, and a little bag of anise-flavored hard candies I’ve become obsessed with. Items that most other prisoners, held somewhere much stricter than this, might be dying for, would kill to get their hands on.
When I first got here, I was able to lose myself in the books, reading about all the places I could go. To the tundra, the icy, frost-ridden land of the Llewelyns, with a matriarchal alpha structure and an all-omegas college.
According to one of the books, the Hysopp region to our west was a land of mile-high trees, massive flying squirrels, and deer big enough to feed a pack for a month. And within the trees and dripping foliage could be the legendary Hysopp coven, incredibly powerful witches not seen by any other groups for over a century.
But now, I feel nothing when I look at them except a dull throbbing in my knee. A sign that I should get back in bed.
I cross the room and crawl into the twin-sized bed up against the wall of my cell. It has a navy blue cover, the kind that’s stitched to look like the bed is always made. It presses down on my toes, trapping them to the mattress when I stretch out, so I tuck my feet up under me, curling into a tight ball.
Chapter 3 - Aidan
The moment I open my eyes, I think about killing Jerrod Blacklock.
Even before I wake up, those thoughts loop through my dreams and fill my thoughts, flashing the scene of my mother’s death, reminding me of the conditions I was forced to grow up in.
The group home existed simply because of Blacklock’s pointless, endless violence at the border. Shifter children drifting through the society, with nothing and nobody to their name, Jerrod seizing their family’s assets and never returning them.
Just like what happened to Emaline.
Biting my tongue, I throw the covers off my body and force myself into a sitting position, digging my palms into my eyes. I know from experience that the best thing I can do is get busy, move my body, and occupy myself with thoughts of what comes next.
If I linger in the past for too long, I just get paralyzed with anger and fear.
Standing, I move through the same routine I follow every morning—turn to the side, open the blinds. It’s early enough still that the sun hasn’t even started to peek over the horizon, leaving the downtown area in a deep midnight blue. Off in the distance, I can just make out the shape of the mesas, towering and formidable.
I remember walking, running, stumbling past those mesas on the way to the border of this territory, not having any time to stop and marvel at them. I’d always seen them as a kid,out in the distance, a marker of the spot where the land went from the dry, shifting sands of the desert to the dry, red rock of the Ambersky pack, but had never been close enough to think of them as anything more than smudges in the distance.
Within five minutes, I have my running shoes on, and I’m pushing through the apartment door and out onto the street.
