Page 27 of Bullied Pretend Mate (Silverville Firefighter Wolves #3)

At first, when I shift and start running from Felix, it’s with the futile knowledge that he’s just going to catch up to me again.

But I couldn’t stand there for another second, watching him realize how much he hurt me.

For some reason, it made it even worse that he didn’t know. That he could so easily make my life miserable without it being an explicit part of his plan.

When I was living in Los Angeles, I’d resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to resolve my feelings for him, even as my body continuously tugged in his direction.

That I would have to leave things between us the way they were because I was never coming back to Silverville.

And it wasn’t like I would just run into him at a bar in L.A.

, be able to ask him why he was so fucking mean to me back in the day.

And now, having the answer, I wish I’d never learned.

When I first start running from him, I hear him crashing through the woods behind me, and it makes my heart race. What happens if he catches me again? Where do we go from here?

I don’t want to look at him. I don’t want to talk to him. It fills me with a sort of desperation I’ve only ever felt at one point in my life.

But now, I know better. I know how to run .

Doing something I’ve never done before, I reach into myself, look for the magic bubbling just under the surface.

Magic casting as a human is fairly straightforward, but we never tried it in our wolf forms. Maybe because Valerie couldn’t shift, and the whole point of our little group was that we were accepting of each other.

Up until this moment, I’ve never questioned whether or not I could cast while in my wolf form.

I’d never thought about whether something like that would even be necessary.

I pull at the magic, fan it like a flame until it’s available to me, and force it down into my paws, letting it infuse through my body. It winds around my veins like a current, warming my blood, supercharging me.

Forcing me to run faster, faster . I’m a blur through the forest, nothing more than a copper streak among the trees. I run so fast that I start to fear I might not be able to weave through the trees fast enough, that I might collide head-on with one of them.

As I’m an omega and Felix an alpha, there’s no chance that I’d be able to outrun him on a normal day.

But this isn’t a normal day, and I’m not a normal omega.

And when I reach the crest of the valley, stopping to breathe and looking out over the moonlight-drenched forest, I know that he’s not going to find me. He lost me a long time ago.

If I could use my magic to get away from him, then I could also use it to find the blue-haired girl I really, really need to talk to right about now.

***

“Maeve!”

An hour later, I’m still moving through the forest, switching between my human and wolf forms, smelling for the girl I’m convinced is up here in the woods.

When I turn, heart starting to pound, it’s not Tara I see.

“Fucking hells,” Valerie says, running up to me, her green hair pushed back into a ponytail. I realize she and Phina are both wearing workout sets and have their hair up. They’re breathing hard when they reach me.

“What are you guys doing here?” I ask as Phina steps up next to me, raising her hand to my face. It’s all scratched from the bramble, but I can barely feel the sting. I’ve only been focused on one thing—finding Tara.

“We came to find you,” Valerie says, glancing at Phina for a second. “It’s like—I don’t know. We just felt some weird tug to come out here, then we caught your scent and followed that.”

“Felix is probably worried about you,” Phina says, glancing back toward town. “What’s wrong? Why don’t you come back with us so we can figure this out? I’m sure he’s losing his mind with worry.”

“Ha, right,” I mutter, bitterness and something else coursing through my veins—something I don’t want to look too closely at. Something tender and caring.

Something a lot like love.

“What’s going on with you two?” Phina asks, lowering her voice like she doesn’t want the cryptids up here to hear us.

I bite my lip as I look at these two women who grew out of the same tragedy as me. Who went through that night on the ridge and somehow came through on the other side with beautiful families, beautiful lives right here in Silverville.

And I tell them the truth.

About my grandmother, about the tricky rules for inheritance. About the scheme Felix and I cooked up, and how, somewhere in the middle of all that, I started to fall in love with him.

“Has he apologized to you?” Phina asks, her voice quiet.

“I think…he didn’t realize he was hurting me back then,” I say, not able to meet her eyes.

I know Xeran was awful to her back then.

That trying to claim him and getting publicly rejected is a lot more terrible than some whispered rumors moving through school, than what she might see as a little run-of-the-mill bullying.

I go on, “And I didn’t really give him a chance to apologize. I ran because…because I’m terrified that this is going to happen again. That I’ll give him another chance, and he’ll use it to hurt me.”

“I think the expectations in this pack are ruining a lot of good things,” Valerie says, her voice quiet. “All these parents raising their pups with a focus on pack standing, how they can get ahead in life. And I think it just gets worse with every passing year.”

“We’re not raising our babies like that,” Phina says, glancing at Valerie, who nods at her. “We’ve already promised we’re never going to look down our noses at their friends because of the family they come from.”

It makes sense for Phina—she’s always been on the receiving end of judgment, just for being a Winward. And for Valerie, who started facing the same song when it became clear she was a non-shifter.

“I just don’t know what to do,” I whisper, feeling that familiar pang of loneliness pushing into my chest.

“You love him?” Valerie asks, but as she’s looking at me, I know she knows the answer to that—it must be written all over my face. Maybe it’s always been written all over my face.

“Yeah,” I answer, anyway, admitting it to myself just as much as to her. “I do. I think I kind of always have.”

“I think so, too,” Phina says, reaching forward and pushing some of the hair out of my face, then digging into her pocket and pulling out a tissue for me. “Here.”

I take it, and Phina sits back on her heels, going on, “It’s kind of obvious that the two of you are mates. I didn’t recognize it back in high school because I was so busy with my own stuff going on, but I can see it now. If it helps, none of us had any clue that you were faking it.”

“Faking it,” Valerie repeats, grinning. “Must have been pretty easy.”

“Val.” Phina shoves her a bit, and Valerie shoves back playfully. “Be nice.”

“It’s okay,” I laugh, using the tissue to clean up some of my running makeup. “It was easy. Everything with him is easy. It’s kind of frustrating how easy it is.”

“Sounds about right,” Valerie says, nodding. “That’s what it was like with Lachlan, too. Like, no matter how angry you are with them, you’re still connected.”

“It’s hard to tell someone to throw away the mating bond,” Phina murmurs. “And it’s not what I’d recommend. If it’s at all possible, you and Felix should try to reconcile.”

“It’s possible,” I say, swiping at my face with the tissue. “I mean—running out here was only partly because of Felix. The other part…”

Phina and Valerie stare back at me, their faces flush with the light from the moon. Phina’s blond hair looks darker than before, and Valerie’s nose is long and straight, just like I remember from high school. Freckles spatter over her nose and out onto her cheeks.

“The other part was about Tara. I think—I noticed Felix had this smell about him, and under the ash and the smoke from the fire, there was—”

Their eyes go wide the moment I mention it, like it’s clicking into place for them, too.

“Oh, gods,” Phina says, scrambling to her feet. “The smell of the daemon fire always reminded me of high school, but I thought it was because of what happened.”

“You’re right,” Valerie says, her eyes darting to me. “It even smells like her out here. Just a little bit.”

“Kind of minty,” I add, swallowing, thinking about the first time I caught her scent in that bathroom. “Kind of sharp, right?”

“Right,” Phina says, voice low. “So maybe we should—”

But before Phina can finish what she’s saying, another voice rings out through the little clearing we’re in, bouncing off the trees and sending a chill down my back here in the moonlight.

It drags my brain back to high school. Reminds me of what it was like to hear that voice telling us what to do, pushing us toward one another. Calling a meeting to order, challenging Aurela to another face-off, pushing us to make our magic stronger.

“I can’t believe you bitches are talking about me behind my back,” someone says.

When I turn around, she’s standing there, a hand on her hip, her blue hair as vibrant as ever, her gaze focused on us. In the distance, there’s the sound of something catching, like a match running along the bark of a tree.

“That is so incredibly rude,” Tara adds.