Page 50 of Alpha's Bullied Mate
“I don’t know,” I confessed.
“I think you need to figure it out,” Dakota told me. And despite the smell of sex thick in the room, the tension felt so heavy.
“Yeah,” I told her. “But I want to figure you out. What’s keeping you there? What’s keeping youfrom here?”
Dakota was silent for a long time. In an intimate motion, she lifted our clasped hands and pressed her palm to mine, stretching her fingers out to line up with mine. The size of my hand engulfed hers. She gave me a sad smile.
“Will you really not trust me with the answer?” I asked.
She didn’t answer again. The silence stretched. And then she inhaled deeply. “When I was younger, I had a brother. His name was Callum, two years older than me. During high school, I was the good girl, the top grades girl. Thegoody two-shoes. I wanted to be better than my brother because my parents were priming him to be an alpha, but every week he’d come home bruised and battered, like I told you.
“Sometimes, I was dealing with that, staying awake all night to make sure he came home okay. Staying up to make sure he had me there if he needed patching up. Then I’d come into school and you’d be there and you were the bane of my damn life, Aidan.”
I went to talk but she let out a short laugh and I knew the comment wasn’t malicious.
“A week after we graduated,” she continued, “My brother left one afternoon and never came back. We all thought the worst. That his pack had actually killed him, that he was lost, dead in a ditch somewhere, passed out. Every bad scenario would spin through my head. I’d stay awake, watching the drive, just waiting. One day, one day.
“He never ever came home, and I lost myself, while my parents lost themselves to grief. We grieved him without ever knowing if he was dead.He’ll come back when he’s ready, my mom would say. I partied in college, let my grades drop at first until I realized I could cheat on tests to stay on top without ever putting in the effort. I did things I’m… Not proud of. I needed to be as far away as possible from the goody two-shoes girl who waited for her brother to come home. I went through boys to get information. I asked from here to Atlanta about him. Fucked about, tried to find him, and nothing ever came up.
“When you disappeared the other day, it brought all that back. The worrying, the missing, the waiting. A year later, he sent us a letter. He said he’d abandoned his pack and wanted to go alone. He’d moved state, some lone wolf colony somewhere down in South Dakota. It took him a year to give us that closure. Ayear.” Her voice was soaked in bitterness. “And once we had it, my parents turned to me, then. They’d lost their golden child so they needed to make a new prodigy.”
When I turned to look at her, her eyes were sad but her mouth had that tight, angry pinch to it. “My mom had me reading up on Silverlake Valley, learning its history, its layout, all the packs. Everything. She primed me for the Mating Games, expecting me to become the next Luna. And I believed I couldhave been. For the longest time, I kept my hopes up and even had that crush on Fenrys.
“But then I lost. And I didn’t even really care in the end. I just knew I’d have to return a failure to my parents and prepare for them to shove me into the next Luna contest or whatever they could find. When Thalia offered me a place in their pack, I jumped at the chance. The chance to not have to come back here, to face them. To face being their next disappointment. I was their second chance and I failed them.”
She sighed and let her head drop back against the pillows but after a few moments, she shifted so her head rested on my chest. The side of her face pressed to my skin, her breath warm. Her lips moved against me.
“So you might not trust Fenrys but I remained loyal because, without knowing, without him ever prying, he accepted me into his pack. He gave me a place to hide without knowing I needed one.”
That admission punctured through my heart.
Because Fenrys could give her that and I couldn’t. Because her staying with me meant that she would be back in Oak Hill, back where her parents could get to her. I nodded, unsure of what to say, what I could offer.
I needed to let her go, I realized with heartbreaking clarity. If shewasmy mate but Oak Hill wasn’t where she could live, had needed to escape, then I couldn’t keep her here. But if she was my mate, how could I let her go? How could I stand it? How wouldshe?
“Dakota,” I whispered.
“Yes?”
“Thank you for trusting me.”
Silence settled between us.
“Aidan?” she whispered back.
“Yes, Wolfie?”
I felt her swallow, felt the wetness of tears sliding onto my skin. “Call me that again.”
I let out a quiet, soft laugh. “Wolfie,” I repeated gently. “I thought you hated it.”
“Feels different now.” She pressed a palm to where my heartbeat thudded. “Hold me tonight, Aidan. Please?”
And how could I ever let her slip from my arms? For this one last night, I held my mate.
Chapter 26 - Dakota
When I woke up, it was exactly as I’d feared. The bed was cold and empty. Again.
