Page 60 of Wolf Bonded (Rejected Moons 2)

He scoffs. “I’m not the one who was pretending to be something other than what I was,” he says. “I’m not the one who’s been lying to everyone for years.”

“I didn’tknowI was part Moon Caster,” I say. “And all of you know that. Everyone knows I’ve never known who my father was. Everyone knows my mother always kept it a secret, right up until the day she died. But sure, go ahead and call me a liar if that makes you feel better about yourself.”

“I don’t need to feel better about myself,” Harley says. “You don’t really think I feelguiltyabout this, do you?”

“We were friends,” I say. “We’ve been friends all our lives. You want to act like I’m the bad guy, but I don’t think I could have tiedyouto a tree without feeling a little bad about it. At least, not until you did it to me first.”

He shrugs. “We were only friends because I didn’t know what you were,” he says. “If I’d known you were trash, I would have taken you out a long time ago.”

I roll my eyes, even though I know provoking him is probably a stupid idea. “Okay,” I say. “So you’re right. You haven’t changed. Youwerealways an asshole.”

“I don’t need your approval,” he says. “Nobody gives a damn what you think.”

“Then what am I doing here?” I ask him. “If none of you want me, or care about me, and you all think I’m trash, why’d you bring me back?”

“Alpha’s orders.”

“So Victoristhe alpha now?”

I can see on his face that he knows he’s said too much. He turns away from me.

“Don’t worry about it,” I tell him. “It was really obvious.”

“Shut up. You don’t know anything about it.”

It couldn’t be more obvious to me that I know plenty about it. But whatever helps him sleep at night, I guess.

What’s more important right now is that Harley is obviously having trouble keeping his mouth shut. He’s rattled by me. And I can use that to my advantage.

At least, I hope I can.

“So Victor gave the order to bring me back here,” I say. “Why? What did he want with me?”

Harley ignores that.

“It can’t be because he’s my alpha mate,” I say. “He doesn’t want to mate with me.”

“Nobody could possibly want to mate with you,” Harley says, obviously provoked. “Who would want to mate with a Moon Caster?”

“My mother did.”

“Your mother was a whore.”

I should have seen that coming. Still, the visceral reaction punches through me, and I jerk against my chains. Harley laughs cruelly.

“She deserved what she got,” he says. “Poisoning our whole pack like that. By sleeping with a Moon Caster, she let bad blood in. If you’d been allowed to mate with Victor, that bad blood would have been passed down. He’s insanely grateful that he caught you before it could happen. He wants nothing to do with you now. That’s why he brought you back here. He wants you dead, and he wants to be the one to do it.”

That’s no particular surprise to me. We knew Victor wanted to kill me. The only reason we stopped worrying about it was that we thoughthehad died in the earthquake.

Still, it’s not quite adding up.

“If he wants me dead,” I say, “how come I’m not dead? How come he didn’t rip my throat out the moment he saw me?”

Harley laughs. “Did you want him to? I’ll bet you did. I saw how you reacted. You would have let him do anything to you, wouldn’t you? Fuck you or kill you, you probably didn’t give a damn, just so long as you got his hands on you for a moment.”

The hell of it is, I’m pretty sure he’s right.

But I’m not going to tell him that.

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