Page 77 of Heart Broken Mate

“Your mate is coming,” he said and jumped to the nearest tree, taking one long look at me before he dropped again. “Do you know where I am from, Hayley?”

I knew he was going to leave before Luke showed up—he’s never been comfortable around him because he felt intimidated—so he must know Luke was still far away.

“No, but I have always wondered.”

“Take a guess. I never fit into the pack, and I always stayed by myself. I never was good at making friends, and I look malnourished, even though my werewolf powers cover that up very well. Which people do you think live like that?”

“The segregated clans?” I asked, and he nodded.

“My people will fight. They just need a reason to.”

Almost immediately, he swung into the tree again and was gone.

The segregated clans were just like the lost tribes, but they weren’t a myth. People knew of them, and people visited them in their abode. They frown on visitors largely because they abandoned the werewolf community to escape their drama and politics. They have been pawns in their game for way too long, and when the Tarloux uprising happened, they saw an opportunity to seek life somewhere else, and they took it. If they hadn’t, the Tarloux would have crushed them because they were stern believers in the royalty and the moon as a goddess. They would have rebelled against the Tarloux, and they would have been massacred. The escape was the best thing they could have done.

The trees shifted again, and Luke stepped out and into the clearing I had chosen for myself. He’s made himself comfortable with the new crowd we have, but I have chosen to stay deeper into the woods. He was spending more time with his lone wolf friends now and catching them up on all that happened with thetwo of us gone. They were all ready for the war. They seemed like they had been ready for the war since the day they met.

“We’ve been fighting since we lost our packs,” one of them, Mikhail, said. “The fighting never stops. Not with others and not within you.”

I don’t know what it is like to lose a pack, but I know what it is like to lose your family and for the one person who you looked up to die by your hands. It is never a pretty affair. So, maybe I do understand some of the pain that Luke was carrying around with him.

There was something different about him this morning, and I knew it was because of the people around us. As much as he likes hunting and the woods, he seemed to do perfectly well with people, too. I wished I was like that.

“How is Jade?” I asked after his godson, the boy that had ascended before we left.

“He won’t stop extended his claws, and he keeps bugging Bonne about where they go when he retracts them.”

“Bonne will enjoy that,” I said.

“He’s got his head buried in war books and strategies. His kid is now a distraction to him. You know how he gets.”

I have come to know Bonne some more and come to like him. He is a very attentive werewolf and a strange person for a werewolf.

“If anyone will win us this war, it is Bonne,” I said, and Luke smiled at that. He pulled me closer to himself until my head was resting against his chest, and I took comfort in him.

“Your friend has been here,” he said.

“Ilad, yes. He had information.”

“What information?”

“We’ll lose if we don’t get more soldiers. The Twin won’t fall for our trick to get them to the mountains and attack there. They have the highest number of expendable resources. We don’t. They can drag the war on for as long as they want and take us out slowly. We need a big battle that will happen once and end the war for us to win. We don’t have the number, though.”

“He never comes with good news, does he? That friend of yours.”

I chuckled at that. “He had some good news this time. A place where we can get more soldiers.”

Luke pulled away from me and looked at me skeptically. We had exhausted all other options and came up with naught, and now Ilad has a place for us to get soldiers.

“Ilad is from a segregated clan. He thinks we can get soldiers there.

“Oh, that’s not going to work,” Luke said dismissively. “Those people hate other werewolves, and they’ll kill us if we ever go around them.”

“Don’t be so quick to dismiss the idea. I trust Ilad. He says his people would fight, and they just need a reason to. Let’s give them a reason to.”

“It doesn’t sound like a good idea,” Luke said.

“You just don’t like that it came from Ilad,” I said, and he sighed.

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