Page 22

22

KAT

I used to think I was intelligent.

I pulled myself up from foster care.

I was Trash Girl, splashed across the national papers. The girl found living like a wild animal on the streets, digging through trash to survive.

But I made something of myself.

I didn’t let foster care break me.

I refused to let Blaine’s betrayal crush me.

I graduated from high school as the top of my class.

Then I stopped being Rylie Cooper so I could be someone else. Someone who didn’t have a past I was ashamed of.

I became Kat Meadow, a name I plucked—I thought at the time—out of thin air, but it’s a name that bears a striking resemblance to Kataleya Prairie, the girl I was before I became Rylie Cooper. Because the people who raised me were not my real parents. I know that now.

The mom I grieved for and the dad I hated for what he did to me were not my parents at all.

They stole me from my real parents.

Maybe they found me wandering alone in the forest. Maybe they saved me from the bear that my real dad feared had killed me.

I don’t remember.

But I have become so many people in my life already and I’m only twenty-two.

Could I afford to go to one of the best colleges in Montana? No.

So I made applying for scholarships a part-time job alongside the full-time job I worked every summer since I was sixteen to pay for the education that would help me make something of myself.

And I succeeded.

I was class valedictorian with a job in the best accounting firm waiting for me before I’d even graduated.

I am not stupid.

So what the fuck am I doing running from my feelings?

Only when my lungs burn and my muscles ache do I slow and absorb my perfectly silent surroundings.

I don’t know how long I’ve been running, but a long time to be this winded.

There are feelings inside me I wish I could pluck out like a balloon, cut the ribbons attaching it to me, and watch it fly away into the sky. Then it could become someone else’s feelings. Or it could float away and keep floating forever. Not my problem, but not anyone else’s either.

But feelings don’t work that way, no matter that I wish they would.

I rub the heel of my hand against my heart. I’m certain now that something happened after I saved Leo from the rampaging deer.

Aren, the Wolf King, called me mate and that word did something to me.

His smell is becoming an obsession. I keep wanting to lick his neck.

And bite it.

My heart trips when he smiles.

I hate him so much I wish I could stab him with my fork for all the ways he hurt me but I know I can’t.

Not him.

Even if he deserves it.

“Mate,” I test out the word, quietly, softly, barely audible at all.

There is power in that word and it has tied me to Aren, a weave so dense it’s impossible to separate the strands. They are in my heart.

Marisa told me the bond was unbreakable. Aren told me that before. I hadn’t believed him; I hadn’t wanted to believe him. But it’s true.

And I don’t know what to do about any of it.

I could run from him, return to the city, but those feelings are in my heart. They would follow. Probably so would that Viking idiot I hate so much, but I wish would kiss me again like he did before.

This isn’t love. What I had with Doug was love.

It was milky tea.

What I have with Aren is a triple shot of espresso.

Every time I had coffee again, it would always feel somehow lacking.

I recall the pull I felt when I first saw Aren, the Wolf King, sitting on his black stone throne, paging through a file as I sat on the floor at his feet.

He hadn’t said one word then, hadn’t even looked at me, and I’d felt it

And I know that even if Doug hadn’t died. Even if I didn’t have a wolf inside me that meant I could never be the normal human girl Doug would want to build a life with, that we would never have a future.

Meeting Aren changed something in me, is still changing something in me.

I hate him, but when I’m near him, something inside me feels whole in a way I never felt before.

“A marriage of souls,” I whisper the words Finan said in the dining room.

I met my soul mate when I didn’t believe they existed, and all I want to do is run as far away from him as possible. But when I close my eyes and sleep, a part of me reaches for him because he’s mine.

I kick the nearest tree because I can’t kick myself for being so stupid as to have feelings for a grade A tool.

“It doesn’t work.”

I jump at the male voice coming from over my left shoulder, spinning to face it. I knew it couldn’t have been Aren, but I braced myself for it to be him anyway.

It’s one of his enforcers. The one who tried to convince me that Marisa wasn’t a bad person for hanging me off the deck railing by my neck because she was jealous of the attention Aren was paying me.

Si.. something.

Simon?

Silas .

That’s his name.

He’s standing near a tree, gazing off into the distance.

“Were you following me?” Instinctively, I eye his wide shoulders and wonder if I can take him in a fight if it came to it. My wolf is eager to try, but few things scare her. She’s always up for a challenge.

“We do a regular perimeter walk to check for any unfamiliar scents and tracks,” he says, still not looking at me. And, more importantly, avoiding answering my question.

I arch my eyebrow. “And your perimeter watch happened to wind up feet from me?”

I’m not buying it.

Not after the way I sprinted away from Aren.

I didn’t hear him howl, but I have no problem imagining him growling at one of his enforcers to come after me and make sure I wasn’t running for good.

Smart.

If Aren had come after me, I would have kept running.

He has his hands stuffed deep in his black sweatpants pockets as he focuses on something in the distance. “I sometimes come out here to think. It’s far enough away from the house that I won’t bump into anyone. I can be alone.”

There’s a ring of truth in his words. I believe him. “Think about what?”

He flicks a brief glance at me. “Feelings. I come here to think about feelings.”

Wary of people after a lifetime of being taught to be wary, my unease about the reason he’s here and us being so far from anyone else lifts slightly.

And when I say slightly, I mean slightly .

He is still a stranger, after all.

“Mari told me you were trying to find a way to shake off the mate bond,” he says before I can ask him about the feelings I’m getting the distinct impression he would rather not have.

Melancholy hangs over him like a cape.

“Mari?” And then I remember. “Oh, her.”

“She’s not all bad.”

“When she’s not trying to hang people to death by their necks? Sure. I’ll take your word for it.” I turn to leave, not interested in being drawn into a conversation about Marisa.

“I love her,” he blurts.

Three words halt me on the spot. I twist around, face scrunched up in disbelief. “ Her ?”

He laughs and I wince when I realize how bitchy I sounded.

She nearly killed me, but she was surprisingly open about what mates meant. She didn’t have to be, even if it was guilt that was motivating her or maybe the threat of Aren punishing her by extending her time working in the kitchen. Silas, however, has never been cruel or mean to me. He doesn’t deserve my bitchiness.

“Sorry,” I apologize. “I didn’t mean?—”

“It’s okay. I can understand why you would think that.” His smile fades. “You wouldn’t be the only one. Mari doesn’t always make it easy for people to love or even like her.”

I frown. “She hasn’t tried to kill anyone else before, has she?”

Aren needs to watch her or put her in the cage if she’s a psycho. That behavior is not okay.

He shakes his head. “That was something none of us thought she would ever do. She took things too far, even for her.”

Would be nice if she apologized for it, but she must be made of the same, ‘ cannot in a hundred thousand years say those words aloud’ stuff as Aren.

The new bed was nice. I understood why he did it, and I woke up in the middle of the night and considered sleeping on the pile of clothes he’d put beside me. Especially since the floors were cold, and it wasn’t the least bit comfortable, even with wolf fur to keep me warm. I would have swiped at Aren if he’d moved me himself.

But I don’t want a new bed.

I don’t even want a dead deer because it won’t impress me or my wolf. Okay, maybe it will a tiny bit if it’s a four hundred pound beast that Aren brings it down on his own.

I just want an apology for having nearly killed me. Is that really so much to ask?

I take a step back, ready to leave Silas to his feelings about a girl with murderous tendencies that he loves who I can’t see why he would.

He chuckles. “Funny, isn’t it? The girl I’ve always loved wants Aren, and you, his fated mate, want nothing to do with him.”

When I look at him, his eyes are bleak.

I don’t know where that chuckle came from, but it doesn’t look like it came from him.

“Have you told her how you feel?” I ask, feeling sorry for him.

“Would you tell a person you loved them when you know they loved someone else?”

When you put it like that…

I shrug. “Guess not.”

I tell myself to walk away, but it’s like channel surfing and stumbling into a TV show that’s a little messy, and you know you should change the channel and find something else to watch. But you don’t just watch the whole damn thing, you binge the entire season and you’re there promptly, the following evening, ready to binge some more.

Messy is interesting, and my entire life has been sedate and just a little boring. Not that I would ever say that out loud. No wonder my wolf was so excited when the Gregson Campus murders started happening and she thought we’d go hunting.

So I stay.

“Why are you telling me?” I ask, leaning against a tree.

“You won’t pity me the way everyone else will.” He glances at me. “They all know how hard Mari tried to get Aren’s attention. She never hid how much she wanted to be with him.”

Not even from me. He doesn’t say those words but I hear them all the same and I wince because shit, that has to fucking hurt if she was going on and on about how much she loved the guy to the person who secretly loved her.

“And you…” How to say this without hurting this guy’s feelings? “Still want her?”

His smile is sad. “Have you ever tried swimming up a waterfall?”

I frown. “You can’t. It’s impossible.”

“That’s how it feels trying not to love her.”

“Are you mates like…” I can’t even bring myself to say it out loud. “You know?”

He shakes his head. “Not mates. Fated mates, for as precious they are, don’t happen as often as we all want them to. But she’s mine. In my heart, she has always felt like mine.”

That must have been torture to know she loved someone else.

I recall the new prospect from Indiana. “You could leave if it hurts too much. Start over somewhere else.”

“The way you’ve left Aren?”

I don’t respond.

He looks at me. “I heard you muttering to yourself that you hate him, but you don’t. Do you? Because if you did, you would have left days ago.”

And that, right there, is my cue to leave.

Yes, I’m still running from my feelings and no, I do not intend to stop doing it anytime soon.

I walk away.

“He won’t give you up,” Silas calls after me.

I halt.

Not because it surprises me. It doesn’t. I’ve seen more than enough evidence of Aren’s stalker tendencies firsthand. And I haven’t wanted to think too deeply about this, but at my graduation ceremony, as the crowd was applauding my speech, something had pulled my gaze to the back of the stadium. Some sense.

I’d told myself Aren couldn’t be there. He wouldn’t just watch my speech and disappear.

But it still felt like he had been there. Watching. And I wanted my speech to not only impress everyone else in the stadium, but also to impress him.

“Even if there was some way to sever the mate bond and you could go your separate ways without it killing you both, after what you did, he never would.”

I twist around, frowning. “After what I did? But I’m not the campus killer.”

He’s still peering into the distance. “Not the killing. Leo. You saved one of the pack. If there is one way to crawl into Aren Kasen’s heart and have him sit up and pay close attention, it’s that. You’re his now. And he never lets go of what’s his.”

“I’m not a thing for claiming,” I bite out.

“Shifters are possessive.” He walks away from me as he speaks. “The more dominant, the more possessive. Run if you want, but I think you know what would happen if you did.”

Aren would chase.

A wolf is a predator, and this predator likes to hunt.

I jog back toward the house. There’s no sign of Aren outside and for that, I’m grateful.

I veer toward the cabin with the silver cage inside. My old prison.

I stand outside that cabin and I remember what it felt like to be in a cage I knew was killing me.

Feelings nearly made me forget my anger before. I can’t let that happen again.

I won’t.