Page 11 of Bullied Pretend Mate (Silverville Firefighter Wolves #3)

I wake up reaching for Felix, expecting to find him because his scent is all around me, on the pillow under my head, and on the blankets wrapped around me.

Last night, my dreams were full of horror movie monsters, candy, popcorn, and Felix, his body against mine, his breath hot on my ear, his hands gripping me.

Now, I blink and sit up, looking around and realizing I’m not on the living room floor anymore, not in our nest. Felix must have carried me to his bed last night.

His bedroom is simple, with light gray paint and a king-sized bed in the middle of the room, the gray sheets slightly darker than the walls.

A tall, light wood dresser holds a watch and a shining bottle of cologne.

Wondering if someone got it for him, I push out of bed and walk over to it, picking it up and smelling it.

It’s the scent that sits over his natural one, the slightly spicy addition to him that I’ve been trying to place.

And I can smell it on me. It must be from last night, when he carried me in here.

The thought of that makes a hot blush spread up and over my cheeks. Felix must have carried me to his bed last night . Which means he had to lift me up. I swallow down the embarrassment of that, the thought of him struggling under my weight, and try to figure out what I’m going to do now.

Last night was fun, which was bad . It reminded me of how much I loved to spend time with him. How much we once knew about each other and our families. All the built-in information Felix still knows about me that I would never have to share with another person.

I set the cologne back where it was and pace for a second, trying to take several deep breaths. Trying to prepare myself for the moment I walk out of his bedroom and find him in the living room. Is he still asleep? Is he waiting for me?

Did I say anything embarrassing in my sleep last night?

Finally, I just force myself to walk through the door and into the living room. Felix isn’t there.

When I walk into the kitchen, I find a plate of strawberries and grapes on the counter, along with a note to look in the microwave. When I do, I find a stack of confetti pancakes, like we used to make when we were kids.

I swallow down the gooey feeling in my stomach, fight against the warmth I’m starting to feel for him. The sense that forgiving Felix for everything is going to be easy.

Every time he does something like this—something sweet, something reminding me of our shared history—I have to fight the urge to forgive him for everything. To accept that he’s changed.

But I’ve been through all this before. When we were kids, I thought we were best friends forever. Then, once we hit high school and popularity started to really matter, he dropped me.

And he’ll drop me again. I’m here to get the inheritance, and I’m leaving. I’m not letting these feelings mess up my head, and I’m definitely not letting them put me in another position where Felix can break my heart like he did.

I heat up the food, sit down at the table, and try to ignore how good the pancakes are.

***

“Maeve! I’m so glad you could come!”

My throat feels like it’s coated in sand as I walk into the restaurant in downtown Silverville and spot Phina Winward and Valerie Foley sitting at a table, waving me down.

Or, rather, I suppose they’re probably Phina Sorel and Valerie Cambias now. Did they get married? Do the human thing and take their mates’ names?

If they did, it’s like they’ve become new versions of themselves. Women, the town can forgive, even after everything.

“Hey,” I say, my voice coming out through gravel. I set my purse on the ground and take a seat, feeling their eyes on me as I tuck my legs under the table, sit up straight, and turn to face them.

“This is weird,” Valerie says, glancing between the two of us. “Right? It’s weird to be together again.”

The three of us glance at the fourth empty chair at the table. But there were five of us back then, and I wonder whether they’re thinking of Aurela or Tara, which of the two they miss most, and who they’re picturing in that chair.

Tara could take care of herself. But there’s no way she survived that fire, the way it consumed her from the bottom up, licking at her body with a relentless hunger I’ve never seen from flame before.

Aurela, on the other hand, always gave me the sense that something was wrong, even when she denied the question. Even when she was quiet enough that you could forget she was there, forget that something could hurt her at all.

“So,” I clear my throat, look at Phina, then Valerie, leaving Valerie’s question unanswered. “What’s up? Why did you want to meet?”

Hurt passes over Phina’s face. “I thought…Well, I guess I thought we could catch up.”

Anger and hurt flutter through me. I grit my teeth and look away from Phina, knowing she went through her own shit. But when I look away from Phina, it just leads me to look at Valerie.

Valerie, who ran away before we faced our punishment from Holden. Who disappeared. There were five of us, but at the end of it, only Phina and I faced any real punishment.

“Before coming back to Silverville,” Valerie says, lacing her fingers together and leveling a gaze at me as though she can hear what I’m thinking, “I was bouncing around Colorado, picking up shitty jobs and trying to avoid my magic. It caught up to me, and I ended up back here. Lachlan—well, the short of it is that I started another fire.”

The sound of that strikes fear right through the center of my heart. I can’t stop myself from glancing around the restaurant, afraid that someone might be listening in. I can’t stop thinking about what it was like for me after the first fire.

Staring, jeering. A stranger shoving me hard enough into a brick wall that it dislocated my shoulder.

“And I stayed here,” Phina says, thanking the server when she drops off a round of drinks for us. “My grandmother died and left me her house. Nora and I lived there until it burned down in a daemon fire.”

I suck in a breath through my teeth. “There were a lot of fires, weren’t there?” After the initial fire, there were quite a few of them before I finally left town.

“Yes.” Phina looks down at the table and swallows. “And there haven’t been some in a long time.”

“Why did they stop?”

“Xeran isn’t totally sure—it’s really hard to investigate after the daemon fires.

But at first, he thought it was Declan starting them as part of an insurance scheme.

Then, after Declan’s death, his brothers were trying to harvest the daemon energy, but for them to try and harvest it, it was starting fires. ”

I stare at her for a moment. “ Harvest it?”

Valerie rolls her eyes. “Yeah, it was stupid. They’re just so greedy, and I guess they couldn’t stand not being in power. Not having control over this place.”

“Are they, like, in jail?” I ask, though I know the answer.

Phina’s face darkens, and I wonder what it’s been like to help Xeran through this. It seems like his brother, Kalen, is the only family he might have left.

“Sorry,” I mutter, shaking my head. “I know better than that.”

The fact that we were minors and girls meant we were spared the absolute harshest of the pack’s punishments.

Valerie clears her throat, and she and Phina share a look before Phina turns to me, shifting in her seat. “If I’m being honest, Maeve, this is about more than catching up.”

I thought so.

“Since Phina and I started talking again, we realized…well, basically—”

“You know how Xeran publicly rejected Phina?” Val cuts in, leaning over the table and meeting my eye.

I swallow, nod.

“Well, Lachlan and I…we were together, too. And he broke my heart right around the same time Xeran broke Phina’s.”

“Since repaired,” Phina amends. “But, yes. Basically, we were wondering if you were going through anything at the same time.”

My mind flashes back to that moment in the hallway with Felix.

The kiss I waited and waited for. How, when I finally got it, he made it clear that it would never happen again.

The way he told everyone that I had a crush on him.

The way that, in itself, became the joke.

That I would be stupid enough to like him, to think there would ever be a chance for us.

“With Felix?” Valerie prompts, her eyes earnest, seeking.

I swallow. They knew about the crush thing, about the way people started to laugh at me more in the hallways. Maybe even Valerie and Phina whispered about it between themselves.

But they don’t know that I wasn’t totally deluded. That Felix did kiss me. That there’s always been something between us.

Felix and I just click together. Soulmates.

Mates.

Without thinking, I reach up and touch his mating mark on my neck, thinking about the rightness of it. How fitting it felt to have his mouth on me, his mark staking a claim on me.

“That’s what I thought,” Valerie says, biting her lip and leaning back in her chair. “It’s, like, too weird to ignore. The fact that all three of us were going through something similar at that time.”

“You mean, going through something more than being a fat teenager?” I ask, casually, reaching out to the tray of fries and popping one in my mouth, just for something to do with my hands. “Something more than being a loser and a magic wielder?”

“You should know that Xeran is working on making changes for the magic wielders in this pack,” Phina says. “Now that the fires have stopped, he’s making more progress on the amendment to the pack rules.”

“Why should we even talk about it if the fires have stopped?” I ask quietly. We haven’t been kicked out of the restaurant yet, but it’s still hard for me to accept the fact that people are okay seeing the three of us together in public.

“Don’t you want to know more about what happened back then?” Valerie asks, pausing with her hand halfway to her mouth. “When everything went down, it just…it felt like everything was out of control. Like, I don’t know how we got from one place to the other.”

For the first time in years, I feel the slightest sense of comfort about that day. If Phina and Valerie also felt like everything was out of control, then that means my experience of that day is not completely off.

“Yeah,” I say. “I don’t know, either. I guess it would be good to figure it out. But how do we even figure it out?”

Phina leans forward on the table and meets my eyes. “I have some ideas.”