My mate and my gift

Chapter nine: Mira

I had my headset on, blasting music in my ears to drown out the knocking on the door. I did not want to talk to Matthew, let alone see him. He could rot in hell for all I cared!

When I had been walking to my room after class, Matthew’s scent had led me straight to Roxy’s room. Just as I suspected, he didn’t want a mate! He wanted a new toy. Well, he had another thing coming if he thought that was going to be me.

The following days I did everything I could to avoid Matthew. I was constantly testing the air for his scent to check if he was near, and when I caught his scent I would walk in the opposite direction. When we happened to be in the dining hall at the same time, I would make sure to sit with someone, not leaving space for him to sit next to me, and stare intensely on my food and then I’d leave quickly the moment I was done, not giving him a chance to follow, which I knew he would try to.

After a couple of weeks, I was sitting in my room working on my laptop when someone knocked on the door. I looked up from my laptop, waiting for a sign of who was behind the door.

“Mira?” Roxy’s uncertain voice called out. “Can I come in?”

Why was she here? We hadn’t talked since that day she walked in on me and Matthew in my room. She had been ignoring me for days and every time I tried to talk to her, she would tell me she had something important to do and leave. The other girls had tried to ask me about the situation, but I didn’t want to tell anyone about me and Matthew – and it seemed like Roxy hadn’t either. Soon the girls began to avoid me as well, probably because I was becoming distant. The only person who still talked to me was Sascha. She had managed to get Roxy to tell her what had happened, and Sascha had been trying to be supportive, but she was adamant when she told me that she didn’t approve of my way of handling things.

I had worked fine for me. I had been free to spend most of my time making music, researching the stock market and I didn’t have to come up with silly excuses when I went to my software engineering classes.

I had been making great progress on my album and was probably only one or two songs away from being done with it.

Although a part of me didn’t really want to talk to Roxy after the way she had been treating me, I couldn’t help but look at the title of my newest track; I had called it Proxy. I had also done something completely new with this track; I had added lyrics to the song. I had recorded the lyrics in an empty common room, pretending to practice for karaoke.

I got up, hid my laptop in my desk drawer, and opened the door, reluctantly letting her in my room.

“Why are you avoiding Matthew?” she asked bluntly and straight to the point. I took a step back in surprise.

“Why do you care?” I blurted out, not able to contain myself. Wasn’t this exactly what she wanted?

I felt tears well up in my eyes, and there was nothing I could do to prevent Roxy from seeing them.

Her face softened as she stepped towards me, lifting her hands to wipe away the tears that was now rolling down my cheeks.

We ended up spending hours talking about what had happened the past weeks. She told me how she was over Matthew now and how she had been scolded by Sascha for hours on end about how you do not get between mated wolves. Sascha had told me that she had talked with Roxy, but I didn’t know she had actually scolded her. Roxy told me that Sascha had been mad and even threatened to treat Roxy the same way Roxy had been treating me if Roxy did not change her attitude towards me. I guessed it had worked. And I guessed that Roxy had come to like Sascha more than I thought – after all, she had a lot of other friends. I told her that technically Matthew and I weren’t mated – ‘yet’. That last word just creeped into my mind.

“Sascha told me a bit about your situation” Roxy finally said. I looked at her, terror on my face. Roxy shook her head and gave me a soft smile. “She didn’t tell me any details, just that your childhood wasn’t… let’s say… normal?”

Normal? I didn’t even know what normal was. My life had never been normal, not as far as I could remember. My only memories of my parents were from when I was three years old, and how they would always tell me to be true to myself.

“My parents were killed a month after I turned three” My voice was barely a whisper. I had never told anyone about any of this before. “In the war” I quickly added. Roxy nodded. She knew which war I was referring to. When she and I were kids, there was a pack with an alpha who had gone mad with lust for power. He had gotten it into his head that he was going to be the supreme alpha, ruler of all the packs in the world. At that time, his pack had been the biggest and strongest pack, and he had conquered or wiped out countless of packs before he reached our forest. The three packs; Night, Luna, and Shadow, had joined forces and kept our ground. Many other packs had come to our aid and eventually defeated the mad alpha. But the cost had been great, especially to my pack. We had been hit first and our numbers had been halved. In one night, my life had been changed forever.

“I was placed with a pair who hadn’t been able to get pups of their own, and at first they were thrilled to have me. But whenever I misbehaved – and as you know, if there is one thing a young wolf knows how to do, it’s trouble. Roxy nodded in response. – they would lose their temper and I would suffer whatever punishment they saw fit. Sometimes, it wasn’t so bad, and I would be locked in my room for a couple of hours. Other times they would hit me or push me around the house, knocking me into walls and furniture. If something broke when they did this, they would blame me. Sometimes when it was really bad, I would be locked in my room for days without food.”

Roxy was covering her mouth with her hands, fear written on her face.

“As luck would have it, they died in a car accident while driving to a conference a couple of towns away, when I was 12. Or at least, at the time I thought myself lucky to finally be free of them. I guess the Goddess didn’t approve of my cynical point of view, and I was placed with a new family, one that had a daughter, who was a few years younger than me. But she had a weak health and as a result her parents doted on her while neglecting me. At first, I didn’t care much, because I was being left alone and was free to do what I wanted. Then, after about a year, she died of a common illness, and the parents needed someone to blame – which of course was me. The first months after their daughter had passed, I was locked in the basement, given food once a day and with only a tiny window to provide light and fresh air. It was during the winter and I was wearing a t-shirt and a thin pair of jeans. I wasn’t allowed a blanket or shoes, not even socks.

One night it was raining heavy and the wind knocked a stone through the window. Water spilled into the basement and the floor was covered. I was soaked and cold, but they didn’t care. After a few days I got sick. Like, really sick. I was burning up and shivering at the same time, probably running a bad fever.

A passed out daily from the fever and a few times I thought I wasn’t going to make it through the night.

But somehow I did.

When I was finally let into the main house again, not much changed. I got food once a day, usually their leftovers from dinner, and the days were spent locked in my room, only being let out to go to school.

When I was 15, they gave me a phone. Not to keep in contact with friends, but to keep tabs on me, calling me every minute to know where I was. But that phone was my only escape. I managed to get my hands on a pair of earbuds and music saved me from going over the edge.

When I was 16, my female caretaker also got ill and had to be hospitalized at a human hospital, which did not go over well with her mate. Every night she was in the hospital, I would suffer through him screaming and yelling and throwing stuff around. One evening I had the misfortune of having taken a shower just as he decided to have one of his fits, and a lamp hit me in the back of the head when I got out of the bathroom. Reflectively I shouted ‘Hey!’, but that was the last thing I should have done. He had me by the neck, pushed against the wall and dragged me to the tub still filled with water. He pushed my head in and pulled it out right before I fainted from lack of air. He did this over and over again, until I finally collapsed on the floor, crying, and throwing up water”

Tears were rolling down Roxy’s cheeks, and her hands were trembling. I noticed I was crying too.

It felt really good to finally let it all out, to let someone know what had happened. No one had believed me in the past, but Roxy did. It was clear from the look on her face.

“When I was 17, the female caretaker died after a year in the hospital, and the situation at home got worse. I would get daily beatings, he would ‘forget’ to provide food for me and he would lock me in my room whenever he was out of the house. One night, he even came to my room, drunk and craving intimacy. It had taken all my strength to push him off of me, and I had managed to escape and lock myself in the bathroom. He had passed out from exhaustion while banging on the door. The following morning, my alpha came knocking on our door, asking if I wanted to move to the mansion. My so-called caretaker argued against it, saying I was still too young to go live with all the other wolves. My alpha said that since I wasn’t actually his daughter and he had been through so much already, surely, he needed some peace and quiet in his life and some time to just be himself. Besides, it was not like I was going far away, he could visit me every day. He didn’t, of course. I moved to the mansion immediately, bringing only what I was wearing, but finally I was free, and I never looked back. I swore to myself that I would never again let anyone but myself dictate my life or make my choices for me”

Roxy pulled me into a tight hug, and I cried like I did the night my parents died. I felt like a little girl again and I desperately needed someone to tell me that everything was going to be all right.

She stroked my hair gently as she rocked back and forth, still with her arms around me. For the first time in my life, I didn’t try, or even want, to push away someone who tried to get close to me.

Roxy told me about her own past, how she and Matthew had been neighbors and played together since they were pups. She told me that she had lost her dad to a freak accident when he was on patrol and fell in the river. He had been rescued from the water, but they couldn’t empty his lungs of water fast enough and he had died. Roxy had been 14 at the time. She had spent days in her room, not eating and barely sleeping. Matthew had come over one day and stayed with her while she cried. He had come by often, usually just sitting with her and listening if she needed it. One day he had promised her that he would never let her end up alone. After that, she had latched on the Matthew like a tick. He became her lifeline and in extension, her protector and soon after her lover. She told me that she reacted the way she did when she heard that Matthew and I were mates, not because I was stealing him from her, but because she was afraid of who she would become without him.

She also told me that she had hated herself for weeks because she knew that what she was doing was wrong and how childish her actions were, but she had not been able to stop herself. But now, hearing that the loss of her friendship wasn’t the only reason I kept running away from Matthew, actually made her feel relieved, although she had been hoping that after she and I made up, I would stop avoiding Matthew. She had hoped that she could make up for what she had done by bringing him and I together, but she understood that this was something that I needed to come to terms with myself.

She also promised not to tell Matthew about my past.

We were both still crying when we left the room to go get dinner. We stopped by Sascha’s room to ask her to join us. Her face lit up with joy when she saw us together and gathered us both in a big hug.