Page 18 of Wolf Hunted (Rejected Moons 1)

“So,”Isay,“howdid you come to be in that cage in the first place?”

“I told you,” he says. He’s only half paying attention to me because he’s ripping into the deer meat with his teeth. “My alpha put me in there.”

“Because?”

He rolled his eyes. “He’s a dumbass.”

“If that’s true, then how did he get to be alpha?”

“You were part of a pack once, weren’t you?” he asks. “You said you knew about asshole alphas.”

“Yeah, but there’s a difference between an asshole and a dumbass.”

“Now you’re splitting hairs.”

“My alpha didn’t lockmein a cage.” No need to admit that he tried to kill me. There are all kinds of things about the night of my mating ceremony that I don’t really feel like sharing with Nate.

He looks at the piece of meat in my hand. It’s more than I need. We cooked a bunch and split it evenly, but I’ve clearly eaten a lot more recently than he has, and my share is going to go to waste. He’s still hungry. Icouldshare it with him. I know that’s what we’re both thinking.

“Tell me what happened with your alpha,” I suggest, holding up the meat. “You can eat this while you do.”

He rolls his eyes. “You drive a hard bargain.”

“Take it or leave it.”

“Fine.” He snatches the meat out of my hand. He takes a big bite and chews voraciously, then says, “I stole food.”

“What? From the pack?” Stealing from your own pack is a horrible crime. The pack is a family. It would be like a parent taking food away from their children. Only a monster would do it.

What kind of man is he?

“Of course not from my pack,” he says. “From another pack. Rivals of ours.” He sizes me up. “Maybe yours.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I think I would have heard about it if someone had stolen food from us. Nothing like that has happened recently.”

“You don’t think your alpha might have kept it a secret?”

“We don’t do things that way in our pack,” I say. “We don’t keep secrets unless we have to.”

He nods. “That’s what my alpha’s like,” he says. “He’s so controlling that he has to be the only one who has any information about anything. And everything is done his way, or it’s not done at all. That’s why he got mad at me for stealing food, see? He had told us not to do it, and I went anyway.”

“I don’t get it,” I say. “If your alpha commanded you not to, how did you get around that?”

He grins around a mouthful of meat. “Easy,” he says. “He saiddon’t go tonight, so I waited until after midnight.”

“And that worked?”

“It was a loophole. My alpha’s not so great at closing the loopholes. Was yours?”

Honestly, I have no idea. “I’ve never tried to get through a loophole before,” I tell him. “I’ve never tried to disobey an alpha’s order.”

Except…that isn’t true, is it? I disobeyed Bruce a few days ago in the department store, when he told me I had to come out. I wish that had been a loophole. Most likely, it was Moon Caster magic.

Then there’s my mate bond with Victor. That’s an alpha bond, and according to Bruce’s order, I’m supposed to be doing everything within my power to conceive with him. Victor rejected me, but that wasafterthe bond was created. It’s still there. I can stillfeelit working on me. It’s driving me insane. Every moment, I feel the way I did in the tent with him. I feel the way I did when he said he wanted to come before I could.That feeling has become my whole life.

And I shouldn’t be able to run away.

So maybe I have more experience with disobeying alphas than I realized.

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