Page 33 of The Enforcer’s Rejected Mate (Red River Rejected Mates #1)

Chapter

Twenty-Two

THORNE

I ’m making my rounds when I feel like I’ve gotten kicked in the balls. The pain is quick and sharp, so much so that I stagger a few steps from the weight of it and have to brace a hand against the wall.

“What the fuck?” I look around me to see if someone just hit me with something but there’s no one.

I’m in the town square by the bakery, and was about to head on home when whatever this is nearly dropped me.

I pat myself down to make sure I didn’t get shot again but again, nothing.

I stand up straight and give myself a mental shake.

I’m fine. This is fine. I had a long day, that’s it.

I get three steps toward home when I actually do have to take a knee from how bad it hurts.

I breathe but the deeper I try to breathe the more it hurts until I’m left with shallow breaths.

The ache has moved now, it's in my chest, right next to my heart.

I press a hand there and instantly know what it is.

Who it is.

“Cordelia.” I stand up and take off at a jog towards Bloodstone Keep. It’s across the square and a good ten minute jog from here. I know my hunch was right when the pain lessens the closer I get to the Keep.

Soulmate tie.

I grit my teeth and keep moving. Of all the things to get from the lightning strike, I get a soulmate tie.

It’s strong magic. Old stuff that our pack sees as sacred.

I’ve only heard of it in stories. Someone’s grandma or great-aunt had one with so and so.

It’s never been anyone that we’ve known, no one living in pack history has a soulmate tie.

I didn’t even think they were possible but anything’s possible when you get hit by lightning, I guess.

There’s a few pack members who have been hit by a bolt here or there and that’s just brought them luck. There’s one fated mate pair out of it but that’s it. I thought a fated mate bond would be the worst of what I might get with Cordelia but this is serious now.

Anything she goes through, pain, sadness, happiness, anything that overwhelms her will come to me to handle. That much I remember from the stories they told us as kids.

“As two become one vessel so do they pour from one into the other.”

I didn’t know that it would feel like this but if it feels like this to me….then what the fuck is going on with Cordelia? This isn’t just being overwhelmed. I feel like I’m dying. Being hollowed out from the inside, like I can’t breathe without pain rushing in to fill the emptiness in my lungs.

Something’s very wrong.

I wince when another hit comes to me and go from a jog to a sprint. I have to get to her. I need to get to her. If anyone’s hurting her I’ll rip them apart and give her their head as a trophy.

I tear up the path to the Keep as fast as my legs will go. The steady hit of my feet on the ground is the only thing I can hear. The second the Keep comes into sight I push myself to move faster.

“Enforcer?” The Defender watching from the shadows calls to me. I can hear the alarm in their voice but I don’t stop.

I just hold up a hand to them. “Everything is fine. Stand guard.” I shoulder open the door to the Keep and sprint down the halls.

No one stops me which is lucky considering I’d probably run them over in my rush to get to the guest quarters.

The door is locked but I know how to get the door open in a pinch.

There’s a loose hinge that if you push the door just right will give you enough room to grab the door and lift it out of its frame.

Clover will be pissed when she sees what I’ve done but I don’t give a shit right now.

It takes me all of two seconds to get the door off and out of the way.

I keep moving until I’m in front of Cordelia’s door.

I saw which one Clover took her to when I was leaving but even if I didn’t, I’d be able to follow the pull of her pain right to her.

The floorboards creak under foot when I stand in front of her door.

I think I hear footsteps but a second later they’re gone so I sit down on the floor beside her door and… and I don’t know what I’m doing.

I want to pull her door open but that’s no good. She’s not being attacked. I’d hear if she was. The most I hear is the creak of her bed as she gets into it and the clatter of a mug on the side table a few minutes later. She’s fine.

I take in a shuddering breath and lean against the wall beside her door.

The memory of the pain I felt from her is almost unbearable.

I’ve never felt anything like that. It was worse than all the broken bones and sprains I’ve earned as an Enforcer.

I’d take a beating right now rather than feel that again.

What made her feel that way?

I look at her door, move a hand up to test if it's locked or not. The door knob turns under my hand and the door opens silently. I stare at it for a second before I push the door open wider to get a look in the room. In for a penny, in for a pound, right? I might as well make sure that Cordelia’s well and truly okay.

I crane my head to look into the room and see her under the quilts.

She looks small in the bed. She’s curled on her side, like she’s trying to make herself smaller, like she’s trying to hold in her guts.

I watch her for a minute, making sure that I see the steady rise and fall of her chest and then I watch her all night until the sun comes up and paints her in pale gray light.

I keep watch over Cordelia until the first hint of red and orange breaks across the sky.

Only when Cordelia starts to stir do I silently shut her door and get up from the floor.

“The prisoners are to be sent to Oak Fast. Get them off our lands. I want their weapons taken though. They’re banned from the woods, tell the Sheriff.”

Being banned from the woods is a hefty enough price to pay.

To hear the humans in Oak Fast talk about it, you’d think we were putting a mercenary hit out on them.

I think they assume our pack patrols in every direction for as far as they can see but when Ronan says banned from the wood he really just means Bloodstone territory.

The tributary south of Oak Fast and as far north as the High Peak mountain range.

From there we go east as far as the Red River runs but only until it ends at the hot springs.

The total land that’s ours runs about a few hundred square miles.

Maybe a little more. But with the ferals and more humans moving to Oak Fast and the neighboring towns, it feels smaller.

We’ve even had a few newcomers move to Red River.

Most are human but a bear family joined with them this spring.

It’s nice to see new faces in town when it has felt like we’ve been a pack continuously trying to rebuild since those nights.

The Blood Moon Days.

Anger flares in me like it does every time I think of the Frostclaw betrayal.

I’d only been a pup then, just eleven years old and not strong enough to do anything but hide while the pack we trusted burned our home to the ground.

It was a tenuous truce, one that was only made possible because of Ronan and his brother, the Ashford Alpha.

If they hadn’t been kin we would have never trusted them, at least that’s the way the old-timers tell it.

Ronan doesn’t say much about it at all. Wayne Ashford is dead to him. Ashford isn’t even his true surname. It’s the one he took after Ronan nearly killed him on the night of the fire. No idea where he came up with the name after he left with our young.

The Frostclaws took twenty of our pups. The memory of fire and of alphas shouting while screams fill the air while I crouch down low under a table comes quick just like it always does when I go near the memory.

I was almost one of the ones they grabbed.

One of the Frostclaw Enforcers rushed into the room I was hiding in.

I was in the Keep because it’s always been the safest place to hide.

The shifter turned, he’s an alpha, half-shifted and big, face mostly a snarling snout and sprouted fur.

I jerked back when he looked my way and hit the table leg.

“Come out, come out.” He took a step towards me and then another. I should have run but I couldn’t. I was too scared to move. I saw the tips of his claws when he reached for the table. He would surely fling it away and grab me any second. My legs were shaking. I was terrified but then I saw her.

She was small. Dark haired and stumbling forward from how fast she was running at the alpha.

She wasn’t like me. She’s not scared.

She throws a rock right at the alpha with a yell. “Go away!” The shifter growled as the rock bounced off him harmlessly and set his sights on her. He grabbed her up as the girl kicked and punched at him.

“Just like your mother,” he snarled. Her blows bounced harmlessly off him as he threw her over his shoulder and left the room with her screaming and thrashing the entire way.

I didn’t come out from under the table until my mother came and got me.

The Frostclaw Pack was gone by then and our town was being swallowed by the fire.

The girl’s yells haunted my dreams for years.

Her screams, the way she threw herself at the alpha without a second thought.

There was no escaping it. I never have escaped her.

Not a day goes by when I don’t think about the kind of woman she grew up to be with the Frostclaw Pack raising her.

Was she safe? Did she remember any of us?

I will never forget her. Could never forget her.

I pushed myself because of her. Day after day, year after year, I worked myself until I wasn’t scared of anything, until I was stronger than any challenger, until I was what others feared.

I became the alpha, the Enforcer, the boy that girl had needed that night.

Cordelia wakes up soon after I leave, so does Clover if the shriek I hear echoing from the Keep is anything to go by. I’m close by this morning. Going over details for the hunter’s return with Clyde, the pack Gamma, when we both hear Clover’s scream.

He stops and looks at me. “What is that sound? A banshee?”

Clyde is human. To him, Clover would sound like a Banshee.

I shake my head. “Nah, just Clover.”

“I didn’t know she had that in her.”

“It’s buried deep but she’s got the fire of the seven hells burning inside of her.”

“But she seems so sweet.”

The door to Clyde’s office slams open and Clover stomps in. “You! I know it was you!”

He holds his hands up. “I retract my earlier statement.”

“The fire of the seven hells,” I remind him.

Clover looks between us like we’ve both lost it before she throws her hands up. “I don’t care and I don't want to know but you better get my door back on the hinges or so help me, Thorne I’ll skin you alive myself.”

“It was a necessity.”

“And you left it off?”

“I didn’t have time to get it back on before I left.

” It’s true. I didn’t have much time to slip out of the visitor’s quarters before Cordelia realized I was there.

She’s awake. I can feel her. She’s nearby in the Keep, which is good.

I’d know that without the Soul Tie. No visitors are allowed to leave the Keep until they have a meeting with Ronan.

“But when were you even back in the quarters? I saw you leave last night. I bolted the door behind you myself.”

“I had business to attend to.” I’m not telling Clover jack all about the loose hinge or how I got the door off.

She’ll have it repaired and that will be the end of me being able to get in the quarters.

I have access to every part of the Keep and it’s going to stay that way as a matter of safety.

It doesn’t have anything to do with the omega ?

My brain taunts me because it’s an asshole.

I ignore my brain like usual when it comes to Cordelia and give Clover an apologetic smile.

“I’ll get it fixed. I swear.”

“When?”

“This afternoon,” Clyde interjects. “He’s got to run the prisoners to town.”

Clover bites her bottom lip. “By himself? That isn’t safe.

” She worries about me. A lot. Out of all my family, Clover is the one that’s managed to stick close to me.

I don’t mind it. She’s the first one I see when I’m back from patrol and it’s not just because of the food she always has waiting for me.

I ruffle her hair as I walk past her to the door.

“Don’t worry, Clo. I’m taking Lucian and a few Defenders with me.

I’ll be back in no time.” She opens her mouth to protest but I keep walking.

“I can’t talk. They’re waiting on me and the sooner I dump these humans, the sooner I’ll be back to repair that door.

And you do want me to fix that door, right? ”

Clover sticks her tongue out at me before she shoos me out the door. “Fine, fine but there’s going to be hell to pay if that door isn’t fixed by lunch. I don’t want Cordelia thinking that’s how we run things around here.”

“Ah, our newcomer. I heard all about her from the Defenders. How is she?” Clyde asks. I hesitate in the doorway hearing that. What did he hear from the Defenders? Did Lucian spill my secret about the lightning?

“Oh, she’s the best. I’m really excited for her to meet Ronan tonight. She’s so nervous but I told her she has nothing to worry about.”

“Nervousness means she cares. It’s good.”

I want to linger, come up with an excuse to listen in on their conversation about Cordelia but all it takes is Clover chucking a pen from Clyde’s desk at me.

“I thought they were waiting on you!”

She’s right. They are waiting on me.

I throw the pen back at her. “I’ll be back soon. Let me know if anything happens while I’m gone.”

Clover salutes me and Clyde nods his head.

“You’ll be the first to know, Enforcer,” Clyde says.

He knows why I want the constant updates.

For her part, Clover doesn’t give me a lecture on relaxing but she does shoot a worried look my way.

That look usually eats me up inside but instead there’s a spark of joy.

It doesn’t make sense, not until I feel the tug that has me walking out of the room and down the hallway.

It feels like I’m being pushed along by an invisible hand.

I don’t fight it. It’s Cordelia. I walk through the halls and out into the courtyard.

The sun is shining bright. Blue skies stretch out in every direction and beneath them in the green grassy courtyard sits Cordelia.

Her face is tipped back, there’s a beat up paperback in her hands and a smile on her face.

I’ve never seen anything so fucking beautiful.