2
1423 Words
Chapter Two
I do not sleep.
I lie on my back staring at the ceiling of my apartment and I read those four words approximately nine hundred times inside my head until they stop sounding like words and start sounding like a trap.
She was never mine.
She. Not I. Not me. She.
He did not write: I never wanted her. He did not write: it meant nothing. He wrote she, like he was talking about someone else. Like Mira Vale, standing at his side in that white dress on my eighteenth birthday, was not a woman he chose but a woman who happened to him.
I want to throw the note in the trash.
It is currently on my kitchen counter because apparently I have lost my mind.
I met my wolf the night of my sixteenth birthday. That is how it works for us. The shift comes when we come of age, a door opening inside your chest that was always there but always locked. I remember it as the best night of my life. Running through the Blackmoon forest for the first time in my wolf body, the ground under my paws, the whole dark world smelling like possibility.
I was happy then. I was genuinely, stupidly happy.
I believed in fated mates the way I believed in the sun. Not because someone told me to. Because I had felt the pull of it at fifteen when Caden Black walked past me in the pack compound and my whole body went sideways. I did not know what it meant yet. But my wolf did. She had always known.
Two years I waited. Two years of stolen glances and careful distance because he was the Alpha's son and I was the daughter of a dead enforcer and an Omega mother, and those two things did not belong in the same sentence.
But the mate bond does not care about rank.
I should have remembered that the mate bond also does not care if it destroys you.
My eighteenth birthday was a clear night in October. Cold enough to see your breath. The whole pack gathered in the great hall, which smelled like pine smoke and roasted meat and the particular kind of anticipation that fills a room when wolves are all in the same space and something important is about to happen.
I wore a green dress. I had saved for three months to buy it. I remember that specifically because it felt important at the time, proof that I was taking it seriously. That I was ready. That I looked like someone an Alpha could stand next to.
I saw him across the hall and my wolf went so still inside me it was like she was holding her breath.
He was already looking at me.
That is the part that still costs me the most when I let myself think about it. He was already looking. Not the casual glance of a man who noticed a woman in a green dress. Something else. Something focused and complicated and almost pained.
I thought it was desire.
I was eighteen and I thought I understood what I was seeing.
Then Mira Vale walked in on his arm.
She was beautiful. I will not pretend otherwise. Dark hair, perfect posture, the kind of effortless confidence that comes from being told your whole life that you are exactly where you are supposed to be. She held his arm like she had been holding it for years.
My wolf made a sound inside me I had never heard before. Low and broken and confused.
I told her to be quiet. I told myself I was misreading the bond. I told myself there were a hundred explanations.
Then Caden stepped forward in front of the entire pack and opened his mouth.
I remember the exact words. I will remember them until I die.
"I, Alpha Caden Black, reject Sara Cole as my fated mate."
The physical sensation was not what I expected. I expected pain, the way you expect pain from a fall you can see coming. I did not expect it to feel like someone reached between my ribs with both hands and pulled something out that was not supposed to come out. Something that had been part of my architecture. Something load-bearing.
I went down.
Not gracefully. Not quietly. I went down hard on both knees on the stone floor of the great hall and I could not get up because my body did not understand what had just happened to it and my wolf was making that sound again, low and broken, only louder now.
Nobody moved.
Forty wolves in that hall and not one of them moved to help me up.
I remember looking at the floor. The pattern of the stone. Counting the lines between them because I needed something to focus on that was not the sound of Mira's quiet, satisfied exhale. That was not the cold weight of Aldric Black's gaze on the side of my face.
That was not the absolute silence from the man still standing five feet away from me.
Jasper got to me first. My brother, who had been at the back of the hall, who crossed the entire room in about four seconds and got his hands under my arms and said my name in a voice I had never heard from him before. Rough and furious and cracked down the middle.
He walked me out.
I did not look back.
That was the mistake. Or maybe it was the only thing that saved me. I still do not know.
Because I did not see what Jasper saw.
He told me about it two years later, when enough time had passed that he thought I could hear it. Caden's hands. Balled so tight at his sides that his knuckles had gone white. The way his jaw was working like a man biting down on something he was not allowed to say. And his eyes, which did not stay forward the way they were supposed to. His eyes dropped to where I had gone down on the floor and the expression on his face in that single unguarded moment was not cold.
Jasper said it looked like a man watching something he loved being destroyed and being the one holding the weapon.
I told Jasper he was wrong.
I told myself the same thing for three years.
I am still staring at the ceiling when my phone lights up at six in the morning.
Unknown number. I should not answer. I answer.
"I need you to listen." Caden's voice. No greeting. No preamble. "I know you do not want to hear from me. I know I do not have the right to ask you for anything. But I need fifteen minutes and then I will leave you alone for the rest of your life if that is what you want."
I should hang up.
"What does the note mean," I say instead. "She was never mine. What does that mean, Caden."
Silence. Not an empty silence. A full one, the kind that has too much inside it to speak.
"It means," he says carefully, "that the arrangement with Mira was made when I was nineteen and I was not given a choice. It means she was a transaction my father made. It means I went to him three days before your birthday and I asked him to find another way."
My chest has gone very tight.
"And," I say.
"And he told me if I did not reject you publicly and permanently," Caden says, "you would not make it to your nineteenth birthday."
The room is very quiet.
"He told me your death would look like a rogue attack," he says. "He told me he had already made the arrangements. That the only way to keep you safe was to make you worthless to him. To make the pack believe the bond meant nothing. To make you leave."
I cannot speak.
"Sara." His voice drops. "I have spent two years looking for you. I need you to let me prove it."
I open my mouth to tell him I do not believe him.
Three sharp knocks land on my apartment door.
I freeze.
Nobody knocks on my door at six in the morning. Nobody even knows where I live. I have been careful. I have been so careful.
"Sara." Caden's voice has changed completely. Low and hard and urgent. "Do not open that door."
- Writer
