Page 36 of The Enforcer’s Rejected Mate (Red River Rejected Mates #1)

Chapter

Twenty-Five

CORDELIA

T he dining room is beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it in my whole life.

In fact, I’ve never imagined something like this could exist. It’s like the forest has broken through the Keep and made its way inside.

The walls eroded until the forest spilled inside and made itself at home. The effect is breathtaking.

It’s just magic.

That’s the only way to describe it. I look up and almost cry from the way the ceiling shows me nothing but stars and the moon. The cold light of the moon shines bright and when I close my eyes my spirit feels calm. It feels at home.

Home is such a foreign concept to me but here I am recognizing it in Bloodstone Keep once again.

I spin in a slow circle to truly take in the room.

It’s wild and refined in the best of ways.

Crimson, sumptuous curtains hang over the few windows at the far end of the room.

There’s a throne there in front of the windows.

It’s on a raised dais. The Alpha’s throne.

It makes Frostclaw’s attempt at a throne in the main meeting hall look cheap and small.

That seat is an overstuffed work of red leather and too shiny gold gilded woodwork that sits under fluorescents and clashes with the room it sits in, but this?

The Bloodstone Alpha’s throne is simple.

It’s big enough for a shifter male to sit comfortably in.

It’s carved from dark wood stained black and from here I can see the Bloodstone crest carved into the arms of it.

The crimson moon stands out on either armrest but aside from that there’s no other adornment to the throne.

“Wow,” I whisper. I can’t help the smile that comes to my lips. I should be nervous going before the Alpha but it’s impossible with how at home I feel here. Clyde guides me forward towards a willow tree.

“This was the first tree planted here when we reconstructed the Keep.”

“Reconstructed?”

Clyde shifts uncomfortably and nods. “The fire destroyed this part of the Keep. The Alpha’s quarters had to be completely gutted and rebuilt. For years this room sat unused because of that but changed a decade ago.”

I nod listening to Clyde’s story but I’m doing math.

I glance over at Thorne. I don’t know how old he is but he seems close to my age, maybe a handful of years older.

He was here during the fire, wasn’t he? I bite my lip thinking about what that must have been like to be here in the aftermath.

What would it have been like to see this place burned and falling down for years?

“Once we had enough funds and a good amount of able-bodied shifters ready, we were able to start rebuilding. I think we’ve done a solid job honoring the pack and the past.”

Was it better to live with your ghosts or to be the ghost?

After years with the enemy, I didn’t know.

Clyde starts to show me towards the throne but that’s when we hear a door open.

I turn to see a broad-shouldered man with dark hair enter the room.

He’s in his forties with a peppering of gray in his hair.

He looks the same age as Alpha Ashford but there’s something different about this Alpha.

Where the Frostclaw Alpha exuded darkness, the Bloodstone Alpha doesn’t.

There’s a lightness to him that catches me by surprise.

I step forward trying to pick out my words carefully but he speaks before I do.

“Welcome home, Cordelia.”

That steals my breath away. Welcome home?

“You know me?” I whisper. Not exactly the greeting I imagined giving the Alpha. “I mean, hello, I-I’m happy to meet you. Thank you for having me, Alpha.”

The Alpha waves off my awkward greeting. “Of course, I know you. I’d recognize one of our own coming home anywhere, especially a Fireheart.”

One of our own.

A Fireheart.

I’ve never been included in the our before.

In Frostclaw, I was just Cordelia, and barely even that with everyone but Maud happy enough to call me an array of names: bitch, cursed whore, lost orphan, a burden.

Those names I know.

Fireheart is new.

“Oh,” I whisper.

He smiles and I realize the light that I was seeing is in his eyes. This Alpha has kind eyes. “Of all the lost ones we hoped to be returned to us, I never dared to dream it would be Amara’s girl that came home.”

At the mention of my mother’s name Thorne sucks in a sharp breath, so does Clyde.

I’m too stunned to even react. All of this feels surreal.

I take a step forward and my knees feel weak.

Thorne comes to my side and puts a hand on my arm.

His touch is unexpected but I’m grateful for his strength. I let him help hold me up.

Amara.

I haven’t let myself say that name in years.

When I first arrived in Frostclaw I used to whisper it to myself like a talisman when I was scared and alone in the dorms. I said it so much that it stopped sounding like a name at all.

The older I got the more painful it was to say my mother’s name, so I stopped.

“You knew my mother?” I ask.

“I did. Amara Fireheart has never been forgotten by me or this pack. Allow me to introduce myself properly to you.” He comes forward and drops low into a bow.

“I’m Ronan Stone, Alpha to the Bloodstone Clan and your mother…

your mother was very special to me.” I can hear the emotion in his voice.

There’s more here that he isn’t saying about my mother.

If I wasn’t feeling overwhelmed I’d ask him what he means but from the tender way he says her name, I think I already know.

Fireheart.

“I never knew her last name,” I tell him and my lips tremble when I smile at him.

“Thank you for giving me her name,” I take the hand Ronan offers me and we shake hands.

He squeezes my hand gently before he lets go.

“Your mother was a good wolf, steady and strong. The best of us. Taught our young better than any teacher we’ve had.

When we lost her, we lost a brilliant mind.

Losing you and the others has weighed heavy on me all these years.

She would be glad to know you’ve made your way home, finally,” he pauses and gives me another kind smile. “You look just like her, you know.”

Holy hells.

I look like my mother.

Her name was Amara Fireheart.

My world spins around me from being forced open with the information the Alpha has just given me.

I never dreamed I would be given a gift like this.

Apart from the basic features I could pick up from my one tattered photograph, I never knew I looked like her.

My throat gets tight and I can’t speak. Even if I knew the words to say to the Alpha, I wouldn’t be able to form them.

Amara Fireheart was my mother and she was here, she was known, and if the look I read in Alpha Ronan’s eyes is true, she was loved.

“Thank you for saying that.” My eyes water and smile at him.

“I didn’t know she was a teacher.” It’s true.

I had no idea what my mother’s life in Bloodstone was like.

What she did, who she knew, how she spent her time, all of it has been a mystery but tonight I’m starting to put the puzzle pieces together for a better picture of who my mother was.

I’m so happy she had a true life here, a full life with a pack that she belonged to.

I lean into Thorne. I don’t mean to do it and if I’m ever waterboarded about my decision to lean into the big shifter, I’ll claim temporary insanity.

Still, I do lean into him and the amount of comfort I get from that body-to-body contact settles me.

At least it does until Thorne leans in close to me and inhales.

He sniffs my hair. “You don’t smell like anything. Why?”

I jerk back to look up at him. “Did you just smell my hair?”

He lifts a shoulder in a shrug. “Well, it was right there,” he says, motioning with his free hand that I’m not grabbing onto. “What else was I supposed to do?”

I throw my hands up and jerk away from him. “I don’t know? Not smell me for starters?”

Thorne frowns. “Where is your scent? You’re an omega. All omegas have scents.”

“Well, I…just don’t. And you just can’t ask why an omega doesn’t have a scent.

It’s common decency and besides, I don’t remember you wondering why I didn’t have a scent in the meadow,” I tell him and step away from him with a pointed tap of my foot.

I don’t know where the fire in me is coming from but I’m not of the mind to stop it.

I let my anger settle in me. For once, I’m going to say exactly what I think and Thorne hasn’t so much as brought up the meadow to me.

Yes, I haven’t seen him and I was trying to avoid him but still.

We almost…we almost…my face flushes hot from the memory.

Mated. We almost mated in the meadow. If we hadn’t been shot and struck down by an act of the universe, I would have gladly had sex with him.

Taken him into my body and enjoyed every second of it, not knowing he would stonewall me the second we weren’t alone.

I clench my fists as I grow angrier. It’s so like Keiran that for a split second I don’t know who I’m angry with, who I’m talking to at this moment.

Keiran or Thorne.

Does it matter?

They’re both alphas that only wanted me when there was no one to see.

Alphas perfectly content to pretend we hadn't been intimate, hadn’t been more to each other than strangers.

I take in a deep breath as I wrangle my anger to the ground and force it down.

Clyde makes a sound that sounds like he’s agreeing with me while Thorne grumbles at my mention of the meadows.

“This isn't the time or place to discuss that,” he says.

I cross my arms. “I could have told you that, Thorne.” My palm itches to slap him. I take a step back because for a second I think I might.

Thorne tilts his head to the side. Dark eyes move over me while I put space between us. “What are you? A spy?” he asks and my mouth falls open with an audible sound.

“What did you just say to me?”

“Are. You. A. Spy?”

I see red when he slows his words down like he’s speaking to a naughty pup that he’s caught breaking the rules. “A spy? You think I’m a spy?”

He levels a stony stare my way. “You are from Frostclaw. I think I’ve got reason enough to suspect you of being a spy. I’m the Enforcer of this pack and I’ll not let someone like you ruin this community.”

A bitter laugh sounds in my throat. “ Someone like me ?” I ask and point at myself.

My hand shakes when I do but I pay it no mind.

“You mean someone like me that was ripped from my home? Someone like me who’s mother was murdered by the pack that raised me?

You think I would do them the kindness and loyalty of spying for them? ”

“Cordelia,” Ronan says, his voice soft. Gentle. He’s trying to smooth things over by soothing me but I keep talking. For so long I’ve kept what happened to me inside. I pretended it didn’t hurt, that it hadn’t scarred me in ways that I’ll never recover from.

“Every day in that pack was hell. It was an eternity. A prison sentence. I was beaten and isolated. I was stolen from and forced to eat scraps to survive. No one spoke to me but the Elder that raised me,” I say, refusing to give Keiran a place in this story.

Not tonight. He’s not what defines me or how I got here.

“I had no friends. Not one. All the other orphans joined the pack properly, they wanted nothing to do with who we were and that meant turning their backs on me because hey, someone has to be last, right? There’s no rank if there isn’t someone to step on.

” Shit rolls downhill and in Frostclaw the last stop was me.

“I came here to save my Elder’s place. The woman that gave me a home as best she could.

I saved her from being banished.” I look between Ronan and then Thorne.

“I left out of love for her and she sent me here as an act of love for me. She said I would be safe here. That this was my home, this was my pack, and she’s right.

It is.” I take a deep breath and drop my hands at my side.

My shaking hands tremble so much that I twist them in my skirt to try and stop it.

“So when you ask me if I’m a spy it really makes me wonder if she was right about me being safe. ”

Silence falls around us. Its weight is heavy.

No one moves a muscle and I can hear my own breath.

My heart pounds in my ears. I’m embarrassed.

I said too much, I know I did but so what?

I’m embarrassed for unloading like that but there’s a limit to what everyone can carry and Thorne’s accusation was the last stone I could hold.

It all came crashing down but it feels good too.

It can’t get any worse than this, can it?

Losing my shit in front of the Alpha when I’m hoping to make a case for letting me stay in the pack really isn’t the impression I wanted to give him but if Maud was right about me being safe then I mean to do it in a place where I’m not biting my tongue and swallowing my hurts.

I almost died in silence. I’ll live out loud now even if it’s not here.

Luna. It feels like the force of a mountain is bearing down on me.

Like if I moved I’d turn right into the silence made solid.

I look Ronan’s way. The Alpha looks pensive, almost thoughtful about what I just said.

He thinks I’m nuts, doesn't he? Clyde’s eyes hold pity, the man feels sorry for me. I look to Thorne.

I expect to see nothing. Stony stoicism, or for there to be a wall between us just like it’s been since after we left the meadow but it’s not that way. There’s something I don’t understand in his eyes. They almost go soft when he meets my gaze. Holy hells, why does he have such beautiful dark eyes?

Another moment of silence goes by with me trapped under the full weight of Thorne’s stare before I decide it’ll be me that breaks the silence.

I’m not going to survive another minute like this, not even with my newfound commitment to standing up for myself.

I’m not sure what to say but someone has to say something, and I’ll figure it out like I always do, except before I can speak, someone else does.

“I’m sorry, Cordelia,” Thorne apologizes.

Holy hells, am I dead? Did I die suddenly and everyone is standing over my body trying to figure out what caused my heart to stop? They have to be. It’s the only explanation for an Alpha apologizing to me.

“I was wrong, “ the Enforcer continues. “Can you forgive me?”

Yup. I’m so totally dead right now.