Page 20 of Kidnapped Rejected Mate
“I can’t believe Soren, the rule follower, is suggesting I break one of our pack’s strictest tenets.”
Soren shakes his head, his brow furrowing slightly, “But it’s not anymore. Xeran is…Well, I mean, Phina uses her magic.”
I swallow down my body’s reaction to her name. I try to think about my other friends—Phina, Maeve, and Valerie—as little as possible. When I do, I just get overrun with grief and shame.
“I didn’t know that,” I whisper.
“Yeah,” Soren says, his face softening as he moves his spoon through the bowl in front of him. “I mean, kind of hard for the supreme to be pissed about magic usage when his luna is a proud magic wielder. And, besides, I mean, her magic has helped to strengthen the town against the fires.”
I bite my lip, then lift a finger and light the lamp effortlessly. After that fight with the cryptid, I’ve been slowly regaining my strength, magic pooling back into me steadily. Lighting a lamp is practically nothing.
“Wow,” Soren breathes, his face illuminated by the flame when he turns to look at me, something like admiration in his eyes. It takes my breath away. “That’s…that’s pretty impressive, Aurela.”
Heat blooms inside me uncontrollably, spreading to my face and forcing a smile over my lips. This feels just like high school again—Soren and I, sitting and talking quietly during Foods Club. Him feeding me bites casually, my stomach turning over with pleasure at the sudden influx of food.
“Thank you,” I whisper, forcing myself to take a bite before I say something else. Something about missing him, about not understanding why he broke things off back then.
Something about how even though it’s not true, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something fated about me and him. Something written in the stars, always trying to pull us back together.
Chapter 11 - Soren
The elk stew is perfect, and I can tell Aurela likes it, too. I only wish I’d had the time or ingredients to make something with it, like a sourdough loaf or some rolls.
“I miss Foods Club,” I say, because she’s gone quiet, and I don’t want the goodwill between us to fade. Hunting together was fun—Aurela’s wolf is strong, fast, and she helped herd the elk toward me so I could deliver the final strike, burying my teeth into the thing’s neck.
“Oh, really?” Aurela asks, her face flickering in the light of the lamp. Her cheeks are slightly pink, those long, loose, golden curls mesmerizing in this setting. She looks like a goddess, even in that old t-shirt of mine, and I want nothing more than to strip it off her body and spend some time getting to know the new her.
If I didn’t know any better, I might have thought she waspurposefullypushing against me this morning. That she felt how hard I was and was trying to get a rise out of me.
Maybe it was punishment.
If it was, I deserved it.
“Yeah,” I say, putting a stop to the thoughts of her in bed this morning. It does me no good. “I mean, I don’t really have a lot of time for cooking anymore, not with all the fire stuff. I cook at the firehouse sometimes, but that’s not really the same. I have to consider all the guys and their sometimeslimitedpalates.”
Aurela laughs. “I would eat anything you cooked for me. That’s why I loved the Foods Club so much.”
“Did you stay? After I quit?”
As soon as I say it, I know I shouldn’t have asked that. I quit Foods Club because of that night, when her parents came tome and told me what would happen if I kept seeing her. I wasn’t going to make Aurela sacrifice her extracurriculars.
“No,” Aurela says, her cheeks heating, and she must be thinking of everything back then, too. How things ended between us.
That was one of the most painful days of my life.
She reaches for her camp cup and takes a sip of water. “My mom made me quit. She thought…she said the club was making me fat.”
The realization hits me like ice water in the face—how skinny Aurela was back then, how eager she was to eat during Foods Club. The way she’d look at the food—even something like vegetable stew—like it was off-limits.
Like someone had been controlling what she ate. Keeping her that faint, pale, skinny girl.
“Did your mom starve you?”
It comes out harsher than I intend, but when the anger hits me, I can’t keep it down.
Aurela blinks at me in surprise, the light blush on her cheeks turning to a full, deep crimson. “Oh—I mean,” she coughs, reaches for another sip of her water. “I…no. I don’t know how to explain it. She was just always really concerned about whether or not I would be able to find an alpha. And she thought the best way to do that was being extra careful about my…figure.”
I’m biting my tongue hard enough to draw blood, breathing hard, trying to relax the grip I have on my spoon.
