Page 58 of The Enforcer’s Rejected Mate (Red River Rejected Mates #1)

Chapter

Forty

COREDELIA

I wake up in the morning feeling better than I should.

I thought I’d wake up feeling like a truck ran over me but no.

I’m refreshed and well-rested. A blessing from the universe to be sure.

I stretch and when I sit up, my foot catches the empty whiskey glass I set down last night.

I wince as it rolls towards the window and thankfully it doesn’t break.

I’m still wiping sleep from my eyes when I get up to pick up the glass.

When I stand, I realize that I’m right back where I was last night when I spotted Thorne on my porch.

It’s light out. Late enough that he wouldn’t still be out there, right?

I hesitate before I push open the curtains and peek out. He’s not there. I let out the breath I’d been holding and open the curtains all the way to let the sun in. It’s a bright and beautiful day, perfect for a pack meeting…I think.

In Frostclaw, a pack meeting wasn’t something I looked forward to.

Not when I was going to have to pull double shifts to help prepare for it and pick up after it.

Not to mention, I wasn’t never given a voice at a meeting.

I was lucky to keep out of sight and not get the wrong kind of attention on me when the whole pack was present.

There was the time I was accused of tempting the pack’s Enforcers.

There were a good amount of them that used the gym to train and I’d drawn the short stick, like usual, and had to mop and clean it that day.

Somehow that had turned into me trying to lure someone’s mate off.

After the Alpha and the Elders had heard out the complaints, which had somehow multiplied the longer the meeting went on, I’d been banned from the gym and forced into laundry duty.

Then there was also the time I’d brought up the lack of weatherproofing the dorms had.

That one hadn’t been awful because they’d banned me from sleeping in the dorms for two whole weeks.

Yes, it had been in the dead of winter but I’d just gotten to stay with Maud which was a win, really.

What will tonight’s pack meeting be like?

In Frostclaw, I knew to stay out of sight and keep my head down but this meeting won’t be like that.

This meeting is to introduce me formally to the pack.

There’s not going to be any getting out of speaking or having attention on me.

Anxiety starts to bubble up in me but I refuse it.

I hug myself tight and the pressure is enough to ground me in the moment.

“It won’t be like before,” I tell myself. “You’re safe.”

I stay there standing in the sun for a minute and then another while my heart rate comes down and I’m calmer.

When I’m ready, I leave the window and deposit the glass in the sink before I head to my bedroom to get dressed.

My sheets are still a tangled mess, a reminder of the dream I had the night before.

“A mate dream…what the hells?” I wonder aloud. It doesn’t make sense. I know who my mate is. I’ve dreamed of them all my life just to have them reject me. Just to have them be right under my nose the entire time while they knew.

That’s the part that hurts even now, sharp as a knife between my ribs. He knew what I was to him and he never told me. He lied to me every day that we spent together and he didn’t tell me the truth. How could someone hide that?

“He’s a monster.” It’s true. Keiran is a monster.

I know it but still…there’s an ache where he was.

I thought it was the bondrot and maybe it is.

I don’t know a ton about bondrot but Jo’s notes and books are a great place for me to understand what’s going on with me right now, especially if I’ve just had another mate dream.

One mate is expected in a dream, but two? I haven’t heard of it. The mate I’m supposed to cure my bondrot with is a chosen mate, not a fated or true one.

“You already had a fated mate. No one gets two,” I remind myself as I get dressed. It’s true. No one does, or at least no one in Frostclaw does. True mates are rare even for that pack—fated? Practically unheard of. What Keiran and I had was blessed by the moon goddess herself and for what?

I clench my hands into fists that shake at my sides.

“He’s not the one for you.” I know that, I’ve always known that even if I was foolish enough to hope but even if he was here begging for me, I wouldn’t want him.

The only things that come to mind when I think of Keiran are rage and disgust. I’m so angry that I let him have a part of me, that I gave myself to him freely for all those years.

“He was never the one for you. You’re lucky he rejected you.

If he hadn’t then what?” It’s true. I am lucky.

Better to be alone than saddled with a mate that doesn’t love or respect you.

For as bad as my rank was in Frostclaw at least I never had to answer to one alpha specifically.

There’s a haunted look in the eyes of the omegas of the pack, the quiet crying I heard coming from the bathrooms at dinner when they thought no one was there, of the beta females that follow their mates around with their heads down, shadowy bruises on their face telling on them for not sleeping through the night.

I’m so lucky. So very lucky I escaped. Maud didn’t raise me to be a fool and that means any and all mate dreams are not going to dictate my life. Not this time.

Never again.

Not even if the face I wish I’d see is Thorne’s.

“Hey, psst!”

I turn to look over my shoulder but there’s no one.

At least no one that I think is talking to me.

I’m alone. Well, not alone given that I’m with the pack but it’s a rare occasion without Thorne hovering around me.

He’s been absent all day as well. I think it’s because I saw him on my porch.

I hope not, but I bet it is. How would that conversation even go?

“Hey, I saw you on my porch last night?”

“Yeah, sometimes I like to sleep there?”

Wait…is he sleeping there?

A warm rush of pleasure settles in my chest. What if Thorne is sleeping there?

What if he had always been sleeping outside my door, wherever I am?

I wondered about it last night but I didn’t think too much about it, not with how fast I fell asleep.

It seemed almost silly to think about now.

Why would he do that? Of course he wasn’t the one outside my door in the Keep.

“Cordy!”

That jolts me from my daze. I blink and see that Clover is at my side with Piper in tow. “Where did you two come from?”

Clover gives me a curious look. “We’ve been standing here, space cadet. Where’s your head at though?”

“I-ah,” I clear my throat and then gesture to the clearing around us. “Just taking it all in.”

We’re in the Keep. It’s bustling all around us in the Great Room we’re standing in.

I’ve never been in this part of the Keep but it was easy to tell where the pack meeting would be from the chatter.

All I had to do when I was done for the day was close up and head towards the voices.

I’d run into them at the stairs and fallen right into the stream of other pack members.

No one had looked at me twice or whispered about me.

It was glorious to blend right into a pack.

I’d been soaking up my newfound ability to blend in with a crowd when Piper and Clover found me.

“Come on, we have to get good seats.” Piper charges into the crowd.

The Great Room is exactly what it sounds like, a big…

great room. It’s on the top floor of the Keep with a whole wall of windows that treats me to the prettiest views I’ve ever seen.

The forest spreads out in front of us like something out of a fairytale.

In the distance I can see mountains rising up from the trees, the lights of Oak Fast glowing in the evening light.

It’s stunning from here. Benches have been arranged in rows facing the windows in a semi-circle that spans the room.

There’s a raised dais with a podium, behind it are a row of chairs.

I don’t see a throne, which is interesting.

Alpha Ashford had a throne. It was gaudy, the kind of thing that made me think of the pampered evil princes in the fairytales Maud read me.

Interesting that Alpha Ronan doesn’t have one here for the pack meeting.

Just another example of how the two packs, the two Alphas, are worlds apart.

“Come on, up here, there’s some empties in the front,” Piper says and it’s like a bucket of cold water is thrown over me. Maud’s warning from my last fated Frostclaw moon run comes to me.

“No, Cordelia. You go near the front and they’ll go right for you.”

I dig my feet in and stop walking, I don’t even move when Clover tries to push me along. She’s behind me and puts a hand on my arm when she steps up beside me.

“Cordy?”

That name, that name that I didn’t tell Clover to call me but comes so naturally to her and all the wonderful souls that I’ve met since leaving Frostclaw snaps me out of my panic. I look at her and shake my head.

“I-I think the back would be better,” I tell her.

Clover doesn’t get it. “What? No, you’re being formally introduced into the pack. You cannot go to the back.”

Piper frowns and motions for us to follow her. She’s standing in front of a few open seats. “What’s going on? Come on you two.”

Still, I can’t do it. Even though I know they’re right, I’m too scared.

It feels like I’m being pushed right off a cliff.

My body is in freefall and there’s nothing for me to grab on to stop it.

I’m not here with Clover and Piper. I’m not blissfully blending into my new pack anymore.

I’m scared. I’m wishing I could disappear into nothing.

I’m back at the last moon run meeting and there’s no fixing it.

“I can’t. I’m sorry.” I back away from Clover and Piper and the front of the meeting room as fast as I can.

I turn, fully intending to sprint to the back of the room but the second I take a step, I run right into a solid wall of muscle.

Hands come to my hips, pine and frost fill my nose and I know it’s him.

“Thorne,” I whisper.