Werewolf Gambit

Chapter 4

"Get. Out."

My wolf trembled, snapping, fighting to reach her in the same moment it snarled defiance. I shuddered. Holy s**t, I was going to shift.

"Get out. Now." My voice was deep, guttural, animalistic.

And poor Chelsy with her dull human senses was finally perceptive enough to understand the danger she was in.

She stumbled back one step, then another, raising her hands in front of her. "S-sorry. I'm sorry_"

"THEN LEAVE!"

She yelped like a puppy and scampered off the porch and down my stairs, sprinting down the path and across the driveway to jump the low fence between our properties, then dart back up the path on her side to her own front door. She shot a single, terrified glance back over her shoulder before she disappeared inside.

I stood there, shuddering, wrestling with my wolf, knowing if I didn't keep that leash snapped firmly around its neck, I was going to shift and go after her, take her, make her mine, mark her s**t, no!

With a pathetic whine in my throat, I dove for the door into my house and threw myself inside, turning and locking it with shaking, human fingers that wanted to claw, wanted to curl, wanted to become a wolf's paws

No. No!

My entire body shuddered and I almost shifted. Swearing and praying, I raced around the house, locking every door and window because they would be much, much harder to open with a wolf's teeth and claws. And then, when I'd made myself as caged as possible, I began to pace, working off as much of that excess energy as I could. Breathing deeply the way my mother had taught me as an adolescent wolf, when our urges and animalistic behaviors were so much harder to control.

I shook my head. I would not shift. I would not shift. I would not.

Mate.

No!

"I reject the bond! I reject it!" I hissed. My wolf flattened his ears and bared his teeth. "I am not taking another mate I won't!"

But even though the bond wavered, it didn't disappear. I could still feel it there, like the line on the horizon when the sun was just about to rise, where the darkness was lifting, so slowly, you didn't even notice at first.

"No... please. I can't. I can't go through that again," I whispered.

I shook my head and continued to pace like a wolf in a cage.

Which was exactly what I was. A wolf in a cage of grief. And determined to bite out the throat of the male that had fed it to me.

Hours later, finally calm, I sat in my favorite chair in the TV room. The television was turned on, but I wasn't watching or listening.

My eyes were on the picture that sat on the shelf next to the television.

It was Lauren, my first mate and Alpha Female, her mouth wide and smiling, both hands up and curled around my forearm because I was holding her back against my chest.

My face was pressed against her neck. The camera couldn't see the way I was tasting her mate-mark with my tongue. But she'd always been ticklish, so her head was tucked sideways into her shoulder as she tried to stop me reaching that sensitive skin.

We were both laughing.

It was taken in the early days of me beating my brother for Alpha, when we were still finding our feet as leaders, but we'd had a happy pack and our lives ahead of us. Everything had seemed... near perfect.

Grief was a cold brick in my belly.

"I will avenge you," I whispered. "I will make him pay for what he did. I swear it.",

Mom made me go to classes the next day. Because she said it was only the fourth day and my first session in an English class, which was my major.

Villains and Anti-Heroes in Modern Fiction was technically a second-year class, but my Advisor let me take it because I'd won a President's Award in English during my last year of high school. This class was the one I had been the most excited about for my first year.

Yet, here I was creeping around campus, trying to get to the room without seeing anyone I knew. All while trying to ignore the tightness in my chest that had appeared yesterday when I'd talked to my very hot, but very insane neighbor.

When he came at me on the porch I thought he might actually kill me. I had fled, terrified. But even when I calmed down later that night I still couldn't relax. I wanted to be at the windows, looking for him. In my mind I kept seeing him pull himself up and over that railing on the porch. The strength he showed, his muscles rippling under his wet shirt and the way he'd stared at me... I shivered at the memory.

Too bad he was insane.

Too bad I spent the whole night waking up from dreams about the crazy guy in which he was making my heart beat hard for reasons that had nothing to do with fear.

And when I woke for real in the morning I was flushed and flustered and feeling strangely confident for the first time since I walked into Denver's room.

Stupid me decided I should turn on my phone. Thad turned it off when I was driving away from Denver's dorm and hadn't turned it back on until this morning.

But by the time I'd been watching notifications pop on my phone for thirty seconds, mostly with messages that started

"OMG!" all the false confidence I'd found in my sleep disappeared. I told the phone to clear all notifications, then threw it aside.

I knew somewhere in that mess would be a ton of text messages from Denver. Plus, who knew how many texts and DMs from classmates and mutual friends from high school. Word was getting around.

I hadn't opened any of them. I was terrified.

I blinked out of the memory and dropped my head because a group of girls I was walking past broke into excited giggles as I passed them. I flinched, but kept walking. No one said my name or called after me. I prayed they were laughing about something else.

I was holding my water bottle in one hand and my phone in the other. If anyone looked at me I would pretend I was interested in something on my phone and hadn't seen them.

As I got close to the door into the English Literature building, I took a deep breath and pushed my shoulders back to show I wasn't ashamed. But just as I stepped inside, my phone buzzed.

When I tapped the notification it brought up a picture. And when I saw it, I almost fell over. My thumb slipped and suddenly I was stumbling down the hallway staring at my phone.

Chelsy, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?

The image was a screenshot from p*********y with all the important body parts blurred out.

But the caption read, Who knew you could be a virgin and a p**n slut?

And the face of the woman riding the guy... was mine?

I stopped dead in the center of the hallway, gaping at the image.

Obviously it had been photoshopped. But the comments were full of crying-laughing emojis, and the soundtrack that played over the top that sounded like a woman gasping... over and over again.

No one would care that it was fake because they would want to believe I'd done that to get back at Denver.

I was going to throw up.

Humiliated, terrified, and raging, I panicked. I looked up quickly, searching for an escape. But I couldn't find one. There were people everywhere, and it seemed like they were all

staring at me. I heard the sound of that woman gasping somewhere else in the hallway and almost puked.

Instead, I turned to flee out of the building, when the door opened ahead of me and that group of girls walked in.

They all saw me standing there, and their eyes went wide, and they began to laugh again.

Shit. s**t.

I wasn't even thinking, I just turned back around, pretending to ignore them, and walked as fast as I could down the hall.

The room where my class was being held was a small one.

Maybe if I got that far I could climb out of a window?

It seemed like every face jeered, and every word was a whisper or a hiss of an insult, like every single person in that hallway knew what had happened and was laughing at me.

I kept swallowing a lump in my throat, blinking rapidly, begging God just this once to let me not cry.

Then I saw room 220 and with a stifled sob, hit the bar on the door and went inside. only to find a much smaller, but eagle-eyed group of students I didn't know sitting around in clusters, some in seats at the tables, others leaning on the tables or bookshelves around the room near their friends.

And at the back was her.

Melinda Black. The one Denver was f*****g.

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She and her friends all looked up as I stalked inside and her face went wide with delight. "Holy s**t, you've got balls," she laughed.

I shuddered to a halt-this couldn't be happening. Why would God put her in my first English class!?

Everyone turned to look. The classroom went utterly silent. You could have heard a pin drop.

And in that moment I knew. if I backed down from her, I would never live it down. And I'd never forgive myself. No matter what, I couldn't let her see that I was scared.

"Well. they're bigger than yours," I said lamely.

Somebody snorted, and my confidence wavered. But Melinda laughed.

"Seriously? Did you just"

"What's going on here?" a deep voice said from the doorway into the room behind me. But I ignored it.

I didn't have time to plan. I just worked with what I had.

I stalked up the aisle between tables towards the back of the room where Melinda sat on a table, one leg crossed over the other, bracing with her arms so her breasts were pushed together by her elbows, grinning at me.

She raised an eyebrow when I stopped in front of her and slipped the top off my water bottle.

Then I dumped it over her head.

"Since you're so thirsty, maybe this will help."

The room around us exploded with cheers and curses and laughter.

Melinda, who'd jumped up with a gasp the moment the water hit, her hair now plastered to her face on both sides, stared at me in shock.

Then her eyes narrowed and she launched herself at me.

"You b***h!"

She came straight for my hair. I ducked and threw up an elbow, then a blind fist that only glanced off her ear before sliding over her head.

She squealed and dropped to crouch, throwing her arms over her head which was satisfying.

"Pretend p**n? Really?" I screeched as I grabbed her hair and sleeve and tried to throw her to the floor. But she leaped to her feet again, her lips peeled back from her teeth and hooked an arm around my neck.

We struggled, plowing down the aisle between the tables, the guys in the room cheering and clapping, and the girls screaming.