Page 22 of The Alpha's Silent Mate

What?

Shay snorts in amusement. “All those lessons about keeping yourself apart from everyone, of always expecting an attack to come from another pack, and the thing that kills him is one of his own.”

What does an isolated seventeen-year-old boy who has lost all of his friends and now his father do?

Shay doesn’t leave me to ponder my question for long.

“I immediately challenged the shifter who’d killed my dad and won. And then I was alpha.”

Seventeen and an alpha of a pack of hundreds. I can’t begin to imagine what that must have felt like, especially for someone who had never wanted to be alpha at all.

“It wasn’t easy. In a way, Dad was right. The distance between me and everyone else made it easier to punish my old friends when they fell out of line. As the years went by, I felt myself grow colder and harder. And lonely. Most of all, I was lonely.”

But you couldn’t have been alone since you were seventeen.

“Then I met someone.”

A woman.

I’m trying so hard to steady my breaths, to hide any small reaction that will betray how I feel about Shay being with anyone, that I gasp in surprise when he rolls until I’m on my back and he’s gazing into my face.

His eyes search mine, and moments later, a faint smile touches his lips. “I shouldn’t feel as pleased as I do that it bothers you.” The smile fades. “When I think of anyone touching you or kissing you, I want to rip them apart with my bare hands.”

I press my hand over his heart so he knows I feel the same way.

He takes my hand and lifts it to his mouth. “No,” he murmurs against my skin, his breath tickling the sensitive skin on my palm. “I never want these soft hands to know any violence.”

Too late.

His gaze sharpens. “But I didn’t find you in time, did I?”

With the subject veering dangerously close to a past that will haunt me forever, I study his chest so he can’t read the truth in my eyes.

“She betrayed me,” Shay murmurs.

My eyes snap back to his face.

His expression is blank, but I hear the pain in his voice. “The woman who I thought I might have a future with. Her loyalty was to her family’s pack—and to the man she’d left behind when they sent her to tempt me.”

They didwhat?

Despite the pain in his eyes, one corner of his mouth turns up. “Yes, pup. You heard right.” After a moment, he continues. “Kira led me into an ambush. One I nearly didn’t escape.”

He takes my hand and presses my fingers against his left side, just under his armpit. “Feel that?”

My fingers explore the deep groove. Even with fast shifter healing, he would have needed stitches to hold the wound together while it healed. And it would have taken days instead of hours.

I nod.

“One man had a knife, which I hadn’t been expecting. Dad beat it into me that weapons were for humans, never for us.” He shakes his head. “He was wrong about that, too. But this land is valuable. All my life I grew up hearing just how many shifters coveted it.”

My mind struggles to comprehend how what Shay is telling me can be true. I grew up with the same stories, that we shifters fight with tooth and claw.

We don’t use weapons.

Ever.

“I fought as a wolf, like I always do. But I didn’t see the man creeping up behind me with a blade in his hand until it was almost too late. He…” Perhaps reading the mounting horror in my eyes, his voice trails off. “Well, he didn’t kill me.”

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