He Used Me 8 Years, I Chose His Rival Alpha

Chapter 3

Back at the Shadowfang house I stood under a punishing shower and let the heat do what it could.

I knew every scar on my body the way other women knew the curve of their own jaw. The burn on my wrist. The starburst of pale, ridged skin across my sternum where the wolfsbane had eaten through me. The line on my arm that never quite faded.

Each one had been earned for Liam.

When the old Alpha died, Liam had inherited a pack in chaos. The borders were thick with rogues, the elders restless, the rank-and-file uncertain. He'd needed to be at the center holding everything together, so I had taken the front. I had hunted rogues alone in the dark for weeks. I came home half-dead more than once. I had carried the worst of it on my back so he could keep the title.

He had wept into my hair afterward, swearing that once the pack was steady he'd give me a life soft enough to forget the scars.

A year later, a rival pack had ambushed our patrol with diluted wolfsbane,a coward's weapon. Selena had thrown herself in front of me and taken the wave of it across her own chest. She slept three years for that. Three years. Three years of her warmth gone quiet inside me, her voice a whisper I could barely reach.

Liam had held my hand at her bedside and said, Elena, no one will ever take your place.

And I had believed him.

I picked up my phone and pulled up our old messages. They lived there in long, neat ribbons of his promises.

Once the pack settles down, we'll go public.

Next year I'll bring you before the elders. Make it official.

Elena, just a little longer. I'll make you my Luna. I swear.

I scrolled until my fingertips were numb.

His most recent post had gone up ten minutes ago. He stood with Clara at the edge of a beach. They were laughing into the wind, his arm around her waist as though he had grown it there.

The caption read: Finally found my fated mate. The rest of my life is yours.

I stared at the picture for a long time.

Eight years of my body, eight years of my breath, and he had never even thought I was worth the words fated mate.

I closed the app. I went into my settings. I wiped the phone clean.

Every conversation. Every photograph. Every careful little memory I had hoarded like a starving thing,gone in one tap.

I blocked his number. I blocked every account, every channel, every name he answered to. When it was done I tossed the phone onto the duvet and lay back.

A lightness rose through me I had not felt in years. The rotten room inside my chest had a window thrown open.

I was nearly asleep when a soft knock came at my door.

Kael sat in the corridor with a small porcelain bowl balanced on his lap. The steam climbed off it in thin gold ribbons. Meat congee, fragrant with ginger.

"Rowan said you hadn't eaten," he said. "It's good for the stomach."

I took the bowl. Before I could thank him he was already turning the chair.

"Eat it. Go to sleep. You don't have to be up early tomorrow."