Page 26 of Bullied Pretend Mate (Silverville Firefighter Wolves #3)

Maeve is fast .

I breathe hard, shifting when I hit the tree line, just like she did. I have to catch up to her, stop her. Get her to listen to me.

More than that, she can’t be running through these woods alone.

It’s not safe for an omega—for anyone, really—to be running blindly. She could hit a valley she’s not aware of. Get stuck somewhere.

Or, a creature of the woods could call out to her. One of the strange figures we’ve seen dancing and twisting with the daemon fire. She could hear the haunting, echoing laughter among the trees and unwittingly follow it to her death.

As I run after her, my breath coming hard and fast, my paws pounding along the ground in a thundering, almost deafening staccato, I think about the stories of cryptids my father’s mother would tell me, growing up.

Colorado cryptids, hiding amongst the forest. Tall, shadowy creatures who might reach out and pluck an unsuspecting child from between the trees.

Take them home as a captive, or suck the soul from their body right then and there.

At first, we thought they might have died in the fires, that the daemon flame choked them out and drove them extinct. But there have been more stories of them from hikers since the fires died down.

The cryptids in these woods are protectors, coming after the loggers and poachers, and they can’t be too happy with the flame that keeps razing the trees, leaving behind nothing but soot and ash.

I try not to think about what might happen if one of them gets its hands on Maeve.

Reaching up from the water and pulling her in, keeping her below the surface until she drowns.

Swarms of shining green fae, so small they look like bugs, swarming in through her ears and mouth, dicing up her insides for daring to show her face in these woods.

Each thought makes me run faster until I turn the corner and see her wolf.

Copper and shining in the moonlight, flitting between the trees like an auburn streak of lightning. Gorgeous. Just the sight of her—and the twist of my scent in her own—makes me want her.

When I collide with her, I’m trying to take her down easy, gently. As I do, I wonder why it is that we haven’t done this before. Shifting together, coming out to the woods.

Though it is definitely something I’d like to do during the day. Something that would be more enjoyable without the constant thoughts of tree-walkers trying to petrify me into bark for eternity.

“What the fuck —” Maeve grunts after she shifts back, scrambling off me, her hands sinking into my fur. Obviously, I’ve shifted around others in their human forms before, but this feels different, more intimate.

She stands, breathing hard, her dress tattered and torn, one of the sleeves hanging off her shoulder. As comfortable as I feel in my wolf, I have to shift back to talk to her.

“Maeve—”

“You can’t just— tackle people!”

Anger rises up in me, and I turn on her. “And you can’t just run away every time something scares you!”

“What are you—”

I stalk toward her, standing right in front of her, trying to breathe through the way her scent sits, thick and sweet, in the air. “Tell me you’re going back to Los Angeles because it’s what you really want.”

She blinks at me, takes a tiny step back. “What?”

“Tell me,” I urge, stepping toward her, not letting her put space between us.

“That you’re going back to Los Angeles because it’s what’s going to make you really happy.

That it’s what you need. If you tell me that you're going back to California has nothing to do with you running away from this thing between me and you, then I’ll believe it. I’ll accept it.”

Maeve looks like I’ve slapped her. Like she’s either going to throw up or start crying.

I’d take anything over the carefully blank expression she’s trying to assemble to keep her real emotions from showing.

I’d take anything that lets me keep her, rather than allowing her to hide this thing between us away.

“I—” She shakes her head, turns away, an angry sob rising up in her throat and breaking free.

I stare after her, not understanding why this is so hard for her. Not understanding how she could not want this thing, with how good it’s been for us.

“Do you realize what life was like for me in high school?” she asks, turning around, tears streaming down her cheeks as she looks at me.

“Do you realize that it was all that shit with you that drove me to that group? With Phina and Tara? That it all led up to that awful night that ruined everything ?”

At first, the name Tara stands out to me because I have no idea who she’s talking about. But I move past it quickly, shaking my head. “I mean, I know Holden was hard on you after the fire, but—”

“ No .” She crosses her arms. “Not after the fire. Before.”

I stare at her, and she lets out a bitter laugh, drawing the backs of her hands over her cheeks to wipe away the tear tracks.

“ You made my life miserable, Felix.”

“ What ?” I’m really confused now, trying to take another step toward her, but she holds her hand up. “We didn’t even talk in high school.”

“Which you made sure of,” she snaps, frowning at me. “The second we got to high school and you realized you had a place among the popular crowd, you dropped me. You were my best friend, and then one day, you realized I wasn’t good enough for you.”

I think about the pressure from my parents. The constant reminders that this was the time to surround myself with the right people. And Maeve was, even if it was never explicitly stated, not one of the “right” people.

So I did what they wanted me to. Surrounded myself with the right friends—Xeran, Lachlan. Even Soren, who came from a shitty family, but on the merit of being best friends with Xeran, he’d earned a spot in our friend group.

“I…” Memories are flooding back to me, coupled with shame. Guilt. Talking about Maeve behind her back to the others. Making sure they weren’t onto me, didn’t realize that I had a crush on her.

That my eyes followed her everywhere she went. That, sometimes, all I wanted was to go and sit at her table. Because she knew me. Because we were into the same nerdy shows, stuff Xeran and Lachlan didn’t care about.

“You made high school awful for me,” Maeve says, choking through her sobs, and I feel my insides start to shudder at the sight of her like this, falling apart.

Falling apart, because of me .

“I…” I try again, but I don’t know what to say. What is there to say?

It’s dawning on me that all this time, Maeve has seen me as her high school bully. And that’s what I was.

I never did it to her face, never said mean things directly to her. And I thought that made it okay. But the things I whispered about, justifying them because I thought it was keeping me safe? Those got back to her.

When I followed my parents’ orders and gave up my friendship with her, I was only ever thinking about the way that made me feel. Not her.

Which explains the way she looked at me that first day. The reason she felt so uncomfortable in that elevator was with me. Why she laughed at the idea of us keeping up a fake relationship.

For more than ten years, when Maeve thought about me, she saw me as her bully. As the guy making things hard for her.

And I’d always thought of her as the one that got away.

Other than the fire, high school was a breeze for me.

I had a good position at the top, and I spent more time and energy protecting that than ever trying to make things better for her.

As the memories blink through my head, I realize that was all of us.

Too afraid to like who we liked, so concerned with what our parents thought of us.

I think about Xeran and Phina. He publicly rejected her because of the social pressures, which made him miss the first ten years of his daughter’s life. Lachlan pushed Valerie away, too, and almost lost her last year because of it.

And here I am, realizing I’m not an outlier. That I’m exactly like them, having lost something.

Except there’s one difference. At least they were smart enough to realize what they were doing. At least they knew they were hurting the people they loved.

I stomped around and hurt Maeve without ever realizing that’s what I was doing.

“Maeve,” I try again, voice breaking, the crushing reality of how much I hurt her making it hard to think. “I—”

She’s hurting—she has been hurting—and I’m the one who caused it. For second, it’s overwhelming, making it impossible for me to find a way out.

But I have to. I’m in love with her, and there has to be a way I can fix this, a way I can make things up to her. An apology that won’t try to explain my way out of it, but show how much I regret being the one to hurt her.

How I’ve changed.

How I feel about her now.

I’ll spend the rest of my life making her happy if it means she’ll agree to stay here in Silverville with me. If it meant she could ever possibly forgive me for the pain I caused her back then.

But I don’t get a chance to go on, to finish what I’m saying. Because she shifts back before my eyes, her entire body seeming to glow as she turns and bolts into the forest again.

I shift, try to chase her, but after ten minutes, it’s clear she’s doing something to go faster than I can keep up with, using her magic. I shift back, breathing hard and leaning against a tree, my entire world spinning.

Maeve is running into the forest, further and further away from Silverville.

And something—a sense deep and sure, almost like it’s coming from the tenuous bond between us—tells me that history is about to repeat itself.

And this time, there’s not a chance in any of the hells that I’m going to let her get hurt.