Page 77 of Rejected Moons (Rejected Moons 3)

“There’s something you should know,” Nate says.

“Something else?”

“Yeah. The ones who are coming now—it’s the alpha and your mate. That Victor guy. The one who wants to kill you himself,” I say. “If they win this fight, they won’t just chain you up. They’ll kill you here and now.”

Chapter Fifty: MILO

IgrabEmlyn’sarmand pull her off to the side. “Are we being insane?” I whisper.

“Definitely,” she says. “But can you be more specific?”

“Trusting Nate.”

“Oh, nobody’s trusting Nate.” Her mouth is set in a firm line. “But he’s right. We can’t stop him from fighting the wolves, if that’s what he wants to do.”

I look over her shoulder. Nate is stripping down, tossing his clothes over the branch of a tree. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, and then his body ripples into a shift, and the wolf emerges.

Nate as a wolf is definitely intimidating. He’s bigger and bulkier than I am. I can tell that even standing several yards away, even in my human form. He’s not someone I’d want to go up against, and he definitelyissomeone I want to have on my side in a fight.

The only problem is that I can’t be sure he’s on my side. What happens if we get into the fight and he proves himself disloyal?

We alreadyknowhe’s disloyal! This is the most foolish plan anyone’s ever had.

“He was going to turn you over to them, Emlyn,” I say. “This is too much all at once. You and I should just run for it.”

“You heard what Nate said,” Emlyn says. “They’re already almost on us. If we try to run, they’re just going to keep tracking us until they catch us, and we’ll have exhausted ourselves trying to get away. It makes more sense for us to turn and make a stand now.”

“What Nate said!” I exclaim. “You’re trusting him again!”

“Well, if he’s lying aboutthat, we don’t have a problem!” she says. “We’ll just stand here for a half an hour, they won’t show up, Nate will look stupid, and we’ll leave.”

I have to admit, she’s got a point there. It would be a stupid lie. Which means that Nate is probably telling the truth.

That doesn’t change the fact that he’s overall untrustworthy, though. The creep.

“I’m not comfortable with him watching my back in battle,” I say. “You and I are going to need to stay human throughout this, you know. Wolves can’t do magic.”

“We don’t need to stay human,” she objects. “We might get to a point where it makes more sense to shift, and we need to be prepared for that.”

“Okay, yes, fine,” I allow. “But we’re going to want to be humansomeof the time. Are you really saying you’re comfortable standing around in human form while Nate’s in play?”

“I’m not afraid of Nate,” she says.

“He was going to—”

“I know what he was going to do, Milo,” she interrupts. “I’m not saying he’s off the hook for that. But what is he going to donow? Think about it. He’s been exposed. He knows we don’t trust him.”

“If we’re in battle, he could turn on us again. He could fight on the side of your old packmates.”

“Okay, but think about it.Whywould he do that? He was going to sell me out to get a reward, but there isn’t any reward in it for him if my packmates have already tracked me down on their own. Nate’s a dick, but he isn’t stupid. And he’s shady, but the one thing we can rely on him for is to look out for his own interests. He’s not going to fight alongside a wolf pack if he doesn’t stand to gain something from it. He hates wolf packs, remember?”

“Or he lied to you about that.”

“There’s no way he lied to me abouteverything,” she says. “That’s just impractical. It’s irrational. Nobody would do that. He had no reason to make up a story about mistrusting alphas and the pack structure.”

She’s right, but I still feel uneasy. This fight would have made me nervous under the best of circumstances—if we were having it at night under a full moon, I still would have hesitated. But it seems like every possible detail is going wrong. We’re going to be fighting during the day, it’s a waning moon, we haven’t had time for Emlyn to perfect even basic combat magic, and now Nate is here.

It’ll be a miracle if we get ourselves through this fight in one piece.

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