Page 28 of Broken Arranged Mate (Badlands Wolves #4)

I regret the words the second I close the bedroom door behind me.

My body is still nothing but emotion, anger, and fear and grief rolling through in thick, tight contractions, and instead of thinking about it straight away, I take in the room around me, grounding myself in the details.

Cream-colored walls, king-sized bed with what looks like an ancient, pale pink duvet. A single plain dresser made from desert willow bark, stained a light oak color to match the bed. Functional, but unloved. Simple and without character, just like the rest of the house.

My body starts to calm when I think about how I’d turn this space into something better—a warmer, earthy color on the walls, something like home. Plants to survive the dry air, the desert heat. A thrifted chair is in the corner of the room.

Then, without warning, I picture Oren in here, a smile cutting over his face when he sees what I’ve done with the place. It hurts more than it should, a fantasy of what it would be like if we were happy.

I know I shouldn’t have said that to him. The look on his face told me that it landed, that it hurt as much as I wanted it to. That monster was exactly the right word to shoot straight to the center of him and hit its target.

In the back of my mind, I’m aware of the fact that I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want to cause him pain, I just want him to understand how I feel, what it was like for him to leave me in this house agonizing and alone, hurt more by the absence of him than anything my heat could have done to me.

But it feels like the two of us just can’t figure out how not to hurt one another.

I’m tired, so I start to peel my clothes off, my mind going slightly numb from the events of the day.

This thing started out so simply—I would marry Oren Blacklock to help my pack—and has now become something tangled and sticky, something I don’t quite understand.

A mess of emotions and intentions that are so fuzzy I can’t quite pick them out.

There are times when it feels like I know Oren more than I know myself. Glancing at him across the room, our eyes catching, a deep, unnamable certainty hanging between us there.

And then there are times when he feels impossible to me.

Oren, touching me that first night, rejecting me as his mate.

Oren, showing up again years later, asks my brother for a temporary spot among the Ambersky.

Oren, everywhere I looked, and yet never really tangible, staying out of the way as best he could.

Oren, becoming the alpha leader, and Oren suggesting a marriage to me.

Going through with it. Marrying me, then touching me, holding me, trailing his fingers over the slope of my hip and murmuring words against my skin I couldn’t make out, but that sounded so, so much like the three words I was dying to hear from him.

It’s like there’s something about him that I can’t quite figure out, and I’m so tired, so spent from being with Beth, that I can’t even think about it right now.

So, instead, I fall into bed, pull the covers up over myself, and fall fast asleep.

***

A sprout of dense desert cotton pushes up through the dry earth, barely retaining the sparse moisture provided to it. It grows for a week, reaching up and out toward the sun, until, in a violent, desperate ripping, it’s pulled from the ground and mangled into a bin.

From the bin, it’s spun into fiber, sent off to a processing facility, and dyed. Woven, changed, and turned into a duvet. Then to the store, and finally, purchased by an older woman, who brings it back to her house, washes it, and tucks it onto a bed.

This bed. The bed I’m sleeping on.

I see all this in a single flash, a comprehensive history of the blanket, and feel the strangest sense of connection with it, that little sprout of desert cotton that’s now lived its life and ended up as the blanket keeping me warm.

Then, the history turns into something different, something hazier and less sure—a version of the future that’s hard for me to make out.

Oren stands at the end of the bed, and he’s shouting something, but I can’t quite make it out. Then I realize I’m in the bed, under this same duvet, and when I look down—my vision still blurred around the edges, fuzzy and unsure—I see blood on my hands.

I wake with a start, sitting up in bed and gasping for air, cold sweat over my body, the images replaying through my head again and again. That little desert cotton sprout. Oren is watching me as I bleed.

Pushing the covers off, I grab my phone and huddle in the corner of the room, dialing the first person I can think of to help me.

“Ash?” Kira asks, her voice bleary and still thick with grief. “Everything okay?”

“Sorry to wake you,” I say, and when I speak, I can hear the tremble in my voice.

Logically, I know that Oren would never hurt me. But I can’t find another way to explain away the images I just saw. Him standing at the end of the bed, the blood all over me.

“Is there…is there ever a chance that your premonitions are, like, metaphorical?”

Kira is quiet for a moment. “What do you mean?”

“Like, could you have a vision where something happens, and it’s really just like…a dream. Like, you can interpret it how you want?”

“Ash, did Beth pass her gift to you?”

I pause, biting my tongue. I should have known better than to think I could ask Kira these questions without her figuring something out.

“Yes,” I say, lowering my voice even more, hands shaking around the phone. “And I just had a vision that Oren was…I don’t know. He was there, and there was a lot of blood—I think I need to get out of here. Maybe it was just an accident, but if I leave, I can stop it from happening, right?”

“ Ash ,” Kira says, and her normally steady, maternal tone is completely gone.

“Listen to me—the first couple of premonitions you have can be unreliable. You can’t make decisions based on what you see in them, because sometimes you’re not getting all the information.

You haven’t learned how to see everything yet. ”

“I have to get out of here, Kira,” I whisper, already starting to move around the room, hoping I’m doing it quietly enough that Oren can’t hear me.

“Just—wait—” I can hear her moving on the other end of the line, whispering something softly under her breath, likely to my brother.

He told me that I could call this off at any time. If I asked him right now, he would come and get me.

But I don’t want Dorian. I want Kira—someone who knows exactly what this is like. Someone who’s had her own premonitions and made her own mistakes by acting on them.

“I’m coming,” she whispers. “Please, Ash, don’t leave before I get there. It would be dangerous for you to be out there alone.”

Grayhide territory is obviously dangerous for so many reasons, but I’m arguably more equipped to handle it than Kira is.

I could point out to her that I’ve been training to fight from a young age—when Dorian was training, too—but reminding her that she’s got less defense on her side than I do probably isn’t going to help.

I tell her I won’t leave until she gets here, then hang up, grabbing a plain black backpack from the floor.

I’m not entirely sure about what I’m doing—if I slowed down for even a second, I might be able to talk myself into staying.

Use a little bit of logic here. But no matter what the explanation is for that premonition, I don’t want it to happen.

Oren would never lay a hand on me. Even with everything that’s happened between us, I know that with certainty. Which means whatever was happening in that premonition was an accident or a fluke. If I leave now, I can stop it from happening.

What’s the point of a premonition if you’re not meant to change the future?

As slowly and quietly as I can, I pack a bag and slip through the window, using the stone bricks on the side of the house as my foot and hand holds.

Instead of dropping to the ground like I might at the gym, I lower myself gently, letting each foot touch one at a time before turning and sneaking through the softest part of the ground.

My only advantage is that I know the outside of this house now, and I know Oren must be exhausted. Besides, the lock on my door is still on, so that will delay him slightly in coming after me when he does realize I’m gone.

Crouching low and moving quickly, I sneak to the end of the driveway, then to the end of the long dirt road that will bring Kira toward me. She must have managed decently with my instructions, because about an hour later, I see her headlights in the distance.