Addicted to His Rejected Mate

Chapter 7

[Killian]

I wake up with her taste still in my mouth and rage boiling in my veins.

The ceiling above me is cracked and yellowed, the mattress beneath me sagging like it’s personally insulted by my weight. For one nauseating second I don’t know where I am. Then it slams into me: her shitty little apartment. Her bed. Her scent branded into my skin like a f*****g tattoo.

Sera is curled away from me, sheet barely covering the curve of her ass, my fresh bite mark glaring purple on her shoulder. Mine. Again. Like some pathetic animal that can’t follow basic instructions.

I rejected her. I watched her bleed on my marble floor and felt nothing. I paid her to disappear.

So why the f**k am I here, c**k still half-hard from whatever my wolf did while I was conveniently unconscious?

My wolf stirs, smug and satisfied, purring mate like he’s proud of himself. I slam him down so hard my vision fractures.

Get up. Get out. Fix this.

I’m on my feet before the thought finishes forming. My clothes are scattered like evidence at a crime scene.

I find my pants halfway under the bed, shirt shredded—her nails or mine, doesn’t matter. My phone is miraculously intact on the floor. Eight missed calls. Seventeen texts. The merger meeting started twenty minutes ago.

Of course.

I’m thumbing a frantic SOS to Liam—location pinned, bring a suit, move your ass—when something catches my eye on the floor.

A sketchbook. Open.

My face. Page after page of my face. Not photos. Drawings. Obsessive, meticulous, borderline psychotic. The exact tilt of my mouth when I’m about to destroy someone in a boardroom. The way my eyes look when I’m bored of people’s excuses. She’s been studying me like a f*****g stalker.

Something cold and vicious coils in my gut.

I flip through it slowly, deliberately, letting the rage build. Dozens of sketches. Hundreds of hours. This pathetic little wolfless girl has been jerking off to the idea of me while I didn’t even know her name.

How dare she.

I snap the sketchbook shut with a crack that should wake the dead. Sera makes a small sound and shifts, sheet slipping lower. I don’t look. If I look I’ll pin her to that mattress and remind her exactly who she belongs to, and that is not the plan.

The plan is control. The plan is never again.

I’m out the door before she opens her eyes.

Liam’s Bentley idles at the curb. He takes one look at me—barefoot, shirt clutched to my chest like a goddamn romance-novel heroine—and his face goes through three stages of what the f**k.

“Drive,” I snarl, sliding into the back.

He pulls away smoothly while I wrestle into the spare suit he brought. The silence lasts exactly four blocks.

“You rejected your mate,” he says finally, voice careful. “That’s what you told me. Formal ceremony and everything.”

“I did.”

“So why do you smell like you spent the night balls-deep in her?”

I punch the seat in front of me. The leather dents. “Because apparently rejection doesn’t stick when she’s my f*****g True Mate.”

Liam almost rear-ends a delivery truck. “Come again?”

“Just get me to Eva. After the merger.”

He glances in the rearview, eyes wide. “Killian—”

“Drive, Liam.”

The merger meeting is child’s play. I close the deal in twenty-seven minutes, smiling while I carve up the other side’s valuation like butter. They leave shaking my hand and thanking me for the privilege of being bled dry. Standard Tuesday.

As soon as the last hand is shaken, I’m in the car barking Eva’s address. Liam doesn’t ask questions anymore. Smart man.

Pack Voss estate feels too big, too quiet. Eva waits in the solarium, sunlight glinting off her silver hair like judgment. She takes one look at my face and sighs.

“Sit, child.”

“I’m not a child.”

“You’re acting like one. Sit.”

I sit.

She places her hands on my temples. The examination is gentle but invasive—her power sliding under my skin, tasting the bond, tasting the fracture. When she pulls away her mouth is a thin, unhappy line.

“True Mate,” she says quietly. “I suspected. Now I know.”

The words hit like a bullet I always knew was coming.

“Ordinary bonds can be severed,” she continues. “True Mates are woven by the Moon herself. You can reject the words, Killian. You can reject the girl. You cannot reject fate.”

My laugh is ugly. “Watch me.”

“You already tried.” Her eyes are ancient and sad. “Tell me, how did that work out for you last night?”

I can’t answer. Because I woke up inside her, buried to the hilt, her tears on my tongue and my wolf singing like I’d come home.

Eva leans forward. “You have Mate Madness.”

The phrase lands between us like a live grenade.

“It’s rare,” she says. “Happens when an Alpha forcibly suppresses a True Mate bond. Your wolf will take the wheel every full moon—seeking her, claiming her, protecting her. The more you fight, the worse it gets. Eventually the moon won’t matter. There’ll be no you left. Just a rabid animal wearing your face.”

I’m on my feet before I realize it. “Find a cure.”

“There isn’t one.” Her voice cracks like a whip. “Not a safe one. Restrain yourself with silver if you must. Or accept her. Those are the choices.”

Silver. I’ve seen what prolonged silver does to Alphas—burns that never heal, minds that shatter. My father used chains the last year of his life. They found him chewing through his own wrists when the madness finally took him.

I won’t become that.

“I’ll pay anything,” I hear myself say. “Name your price. Find the ritual. Find the witch. Whatever it takes.”

Eva’s eyes narrow. “You think cruelty makes you strong? Your father thought the same. Look where it got him.”

“Don’t.” The word cracks like a gunshot. “Don’t you dare compare me to that weak, broken—”

“You’re already worse,” she says softly. “He at least loved her.”

I’m across the room before I realize I’ve moved, fist slammed into the wall beside her head hard enough to crater plaster. “Find. The. Cure.”

She doesn’t flinch. “I’ll look. But until then, let your wolf have her on full moons. Restrain yourself with silver if you’re too proud to share a bed with an Omega. Keep fighting and you’ll lose everything you think you’re protecting...”

I leave before she finishes the sentence.

Outside, the sky is bruising toward night. The next full moon is twenty-seven days away.

Twenty-seven days until I lose control again.

Twenty-seven days until I crawl back to the one person I swore I’d never weaken myself with, shove her against the nearest wall, and beg with my teeth in her throat.

And the worst part?

Part of me can’t wait.

I pull out my phone. Thumb hovering over a contact I shouldn’t have saved.

I type one line to Liam.

Find out everything about Sera Winters.

Everything.