Page 35 of Betrayed Wolf Mate

Winning last night had been a near thing. Even armed with iron and surrounded by a group of shifters with a spec-ops background, I’d be dead if Jameson and the others hadn’t driven off Farrow’s pack and the underlings when they had. And almost certainly a large portion of the rest of us would have died as well.

The shock on my face must have been obvious because Rand chuckled. “Yeah. That was pretty much my reaction, too.”

“Wish we’d had it yesterday,” Jameson said. “Would have made the fight a lot easier.”

“That’s an understatement,” Rand said.

“The fact that they got it at all is insane,” I said. “And they’re certain it’s real?”

“They got the name out of a fae creature who owed them,” Rand said. “Fae can’t lie, so yeah, this is about as real as it can get.”

“What is it?” I asked, looking between my friends.

“Akronachis Danien,” Rand said.

“Mouthful, right?” Jameson said, grinning. “No wonder Names are so well-hidden if they all sound like that.”

This was incredible. We knew Akron’s Name. We actually had a chance of beating him. And if we were able to beat him,that meant Stella would finally be safe. She wouldn’t have to live in fear or guilt or have to look over her shoulder for the rest of her life. She wanted to be her own person. She might actually get the chance to do so.

“Where is Stella, anyway?” Jameson asked. “I would think she’d want to hear the good news.”

“That’s another massive understatement,” I said, my head spinning with relief. “She’s asleep. She had her own kind of rough day yesterday.” Still, with this news, I felt like I should wake her up.

I walked up the stairs, picturing how happy she was going to be when she heard. Everything she’d dreamed about would be possible once we killed the demon.

I went into my bedroom, where she’d spent the night. But she wasn’t resting peacefully like when I’d left her.

In fact, she wasn’t there at all.

There was no sound of the shower or smell of shampoo. She wasn’t in the bathroom. But what really made my skin prickle with unease was the fact that her scent was stale, as if she hadn’t been here for a couple of hours. Since just after I had woken up.

On her pillow was a folded piece of paper. I walked slowly to it, reaching for it tentatively as if it were a bomb or a venomous snake that needed to be handled delicately.

The paper didn’t bite or explode, but it might as well have.

I unfolded it and read the short message inside, one that made my wolf howl in hurt and anger and made my own mind swim with a variety of emotions as I tried to process what I was reading.

I’m not going to be responsible for more damage. I’m leaving. Please don’t follow. – Stella

There was a two word post-script below her name.

I’m sorry.

It took me a long time to accept that what I was reading was reality, even if all my senses told me it was. Stella wasn’t here and hadn’t been for some time. She’d snuck out while I was downstairs, probably via the balcony. But I didn’t care how she’d done it. The point was that she had left.

She was deliberately putting herself in danger, knowing that I wouldn’t have let her go off alone while Akron was still out there. But she was gone now. And she didn’t want me following.

None of it made sense, and I didn’t want to process what I was seeing. There was no way that this was reality. She couldn’t be gone. She couldn’t have left the way she did.

Finally, I snapped out of it. The letter fluttered to the floor as I raced out of the bedroom and back down the stairs to where Jameson and Rand were lounging. One look at my face, and they both straightened, moving from relaxed to completely alert.

“Did she come down?” I asked, but I already knew the answer. Not waiting for them to respond, I ran to the back door, shedding my clothes as I did. The back of the house opened out into the woods and the mountains beyond. If she was really leaving, then she would have gone that way.

Racing outside, I shifted, sniffing desperately for any sign of her. But her scent was muddled and impossible to track properly She’d hidden her trail from us—from me—the same way she had masked it from her old pack.

But I wasn’t going to give up that easily. I couldn’t. She couldn’t have gotten far.Not unless she left right after youwoke up, a nagging, unpleasant voice in my head pointed out. I shoved the thought away. Accepting that fact would mean that I’d accepted she was gone, and I couldn’t do that yet.

I ran through the woods, trying to track the faint traces of raspberries and sugar that made up Stella’s scent. My wolf took over, running faster through the woods as he tried to find her. I could sense his desperation and anger growing more and more as she continued to elude him.

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