Page 7 of The Enforcer’s Rejected Mate (Red River Rejected Mates #1)

Chapter

Five

CORDELIA

I pull at my dress and try to breathe through the crushing weight of my heat.

There’s no denying that I’m about to lose myself to the haze of hormones and biology that’s about to slam into me like a ton of bricks.

Seeing Keiran has made the whole thing…well, worse.

Somehow, even just seeing him has triggered something in me.

The edges of my vision flicker again and soften and this time I know I wasn’t imagining it.

The world is going soft—the effects of my heat making themselves undeniably known with the rosy tint the world starts to take on.

If I weren’t alone and aching for the one wolf I can’t have, the night would almost look magical.

I should move. Run right to Maud’s but just like always when it comes to Keiran I don’t go anywhere.

I swallow hard and watch him. He’s so beautiful.

I can still feel the way his hands felt on my body this afternoon.

His scent rises up around me and it’s not a whisper of a memory anymore.

Despite my efforts to scrub myself clean of him, I can smell him on me.

I sway on my feet and take in a deep breath.

For a blessed second Keiran’s scent is a balm to my heat.

Relief courses through my body. I stop moving away from Keiran.

Instead, I take a half staggered step forward, right towards the middle of the pack—I avoid the pack at all costs. Never in a million years would I choose to walk right through them but Keiran’s scent drags me forward. My heat hazed brain knows what it wants and it’s him.

Alpha.

Keiran can fix me. He’s the only one that smells right.

A big strong Alpha like him, one that I’m foolish enough to love.

He’s the obvious choice. I only make it another half shuffled step before reality comes crashing down on my head.

His beautiful mate leans into his arm and smiles up at him.

That smile is the bucket of water I need to snap out of the cloying heat haze, it’s enough to push back the rosy tint the world takes on.

I’m not safe. He’s not my mate. Not my Alpha.

Never mine.

I blink back frustrated tears. Gods what am I doing?

Why am I acting like this? Thinking like this?

There was no other way for this to play out.

Not in the real world. I’ve always known that but when Keiran turns his head in my direction I almost forget all about reality and just how ill-fated what we had always was.

It would be so easy to torture myself more than my heat is already doing but for once I don’t.

I look away when Keiran leans away from his mate and fixes his gaze on the back of the square and my heart stupidly pounds in my chest at the thought that Keiran would be trying to find me in the crowd.

Shifter eyes are far better than human. It isn’t entirely out of the question that Keiran really is looking at me but I’d rather not give legs to that thought.

Not with the way my idiot heat brain is screaming that it can smell Keiran from this far away.

I can’t scent him, not from here and even if I did, even if he was my perfect match, he would never choose me with his mate and his father waiting on him.

What am I thinking? This heat has only begun to hit me and it’s turning my brain to mush.

Keiran choose me?

I’m ever more delusional than normal. I duck my head and start for the edge of the square while the pack continues to chant and howl. I only make it a few steps before Alpha Ashford raises a hand to silence them.

“This night our moon run will truly be blessed by a joyous occasion.” He motions for Keiran and his mate to step forward, but what I don’t expect is Maud to step forward with them. “Never before has such a celebration come to us.”

What is Maud doing?

I stop in my tracks and crane my neck to get a better view.

Maud has a pouch in her hand and the crackle of magic tinges the air.

It’s easy to see the arcane power she’s wielding.

There’s a hiss and then the air around Maud’s hand moves.

I gasp along with the rest of the pack. It’s like the air is electrified.

All my life I’ve known Maud as a healer, not a witch.

I’ve never listened to them, not even when the pack calls her a witch when they think no one is listening.

But tonight I see why they call her a witch because the moon goddess above…

she’s an actual witch. I was wrong. My mouth falls open when she opens her pouch and grabs a handful of ingredients from it.

She tosses the powder in her hand on the bonfire and the flames glow a blinding white as they shoot straight up into the night sky in a pillar of fire and power.

The pack falls back with a few strangled shouts but Alpha Ashford doesn’t move an inch.

Neither does Keiran but the woman at his side shrinks into his side for protection.

Anger burns bright and hot in my chest, I can feel it bubbling up and I want to scream.

I want to grab her hands and rip them from her arms for touching Keiran.

Because I have no sense of self preservation, I take a step forward while Alpha Ashford continues to speak and Maud throws more powder onto the bonfire.

She’s chanting now, eyes skyward and on the moon but I can see a glow in her eyes that’s never been there before.

How is this the woman that raised me like her own? How did she keep this side of herself a secret from me? I’d be upset at the trickery but I’m too in awe of her. Maud is powerful and terrifying and I wish I had her power for myself.

If I had Maud’s power I could stop my heat, I could find my mate, I could change my life. But since I’m don’t, my heat rears its ugly head once more and reminds me just how much of a prisoner I am to my own biology.

I take in a breath and my lungs ache because it's not enough air. The night air dances around me, the sweet smell of fresh turned soil, woodsmoke and cool night air rolling in from the nearby lake fill my nose but there’s another scent there that should be impossible for me to pick up.

It’s citrusy, almost sweet–like the marmalade Maud makes when we get too many oranges but there’s a tartness of apples and cranberries that makes my mouth water.

I close my eyes and inhale deeply, the anger I felt fades slightly when I get another hit of the delicious scent.

It’s Keiran.

Luna, I really am smelling him. It’s not in my head. How am I smelling him from here? I’m too far away for that.

“Tonight we join my son with his one chosen mate, Bella of the Moonshadow Pack! Our Elder Maud will now invoke the Mate Bond rite to join them. Few have seen such powerful magic. Be honored that the Luna above has granted us a healer so powerful to call down the moon goddess’s blessing!”

I open my eyes when Alpha Ashford says that and anger surges in my blood.

If I had Maud’s power, I wouldn’t do any Alpha’s bidding but I would end the woman touching Keiran.

Why hasn’t Maud done that? I want to claw the she-wolf from Moonshadow’s eyes out and force her to bend her neck to me.

Maud’s voice rises, it echoes in the square as Alpha Ashford ushers Bella’s family forward.

They’re older, the male has salt and pepper hair but there’s strength in the way he moves and his mate is small and blonde like her daughter.

They look on with pride as Bella grabs Keiran’s arm with a bright smile.

The heat inside of me expands but it doesn’t make me weak like it did before.

I feel stronger, like I’ve just swallowed the sun.

My body expands and the space around me shrinks as I grow.

I stand steady as an Oak. The ground beneath me gives when I move.

It has no other choice but to relent. When I inhale, I taste the sweetness of the night on my tongue.

I feel whole. Connected. Power sings through me.

“Welcome the Alpha and Luna of Moonshadow Pack into our midst as our offspring are joined. Together we will make our packs stronger. None will stand before us!”

I expect the pack to cheer but that doesn’t happen. There’s a noise but it’s not words. I look around and see that no one is saying anything despite the sound. My chest rumbles.

Is it me?

Am I the one speaking?

I uncurl my fists to raise a hand to touch my lips and gasp when I see the blood smeared across my palms. How did I do that? I look at my hand and I see my fingers aren’t right. My nails are wrong.

They aren’t nails, they’re claws. Sharp as daggers and hungry for blood.

Maud casts the last of the powder from her bag into the fire and the fire shoots higher still. There are a few muted screams but my voice is not one of them. Warmth spreads through my chest and a calmness settles, a rightness. I feel whole.

Oh Luna. I feel whole.

I know it even before I reach to see if there’s more to me than me, and there it is. My wolf. I can feel her, awake and happy. She’s excited and pushing at the boundary between us so insistently that I can hardly hold her back. Euphoria fills every inch of me because this time I was right.

Finally, I was right.

She’s bursting with energy, her joy so big and bright that my heat doesn’t feel like it will crush me.

Right now, I’m invincible. Tonight is my night to become something more.

At long last, I have my wolf—I have the proof I’m not cursed.

That I’m just as worthy and deserving as any of the others in the pack.

I almost weep but there’s no time for tears with my wolf trying to force herself free.

She wants my skin but I can’t do that here.

I’m not safe with this pack and not with my heat bearing down on me by the second.

I try to tell her but she doesn’t understand.

My knees buckle and I almost go down from the force of her waking up.

Run. Run now. I beg her. Running sparks her interest and images of running through the woods, the exhilaration of feeling the dirt beneath my paws while I fly through the forest. What it would be like to swim in the lake, to howl under the moon…to hunt?

It all comes racing into my mind so fast that it’s hard to keep up. I wince under the onslaught and try to reason with her. I feel more wolf than woman right now.

“Not here,” I whisper. I have to get out of the square before we shift and run.

If the pack saw me shift they’d never let me leave in peace.

Memories of them sneering at me, laughing and pointing, pushing me, the constant bullying in the name of enforcing rank, their pursuit to never let me forget that I don’t belong floods into my mind.

No, they’d never let me leave if they knew I had my wolf.

Not without putting her through her paces to prove herself.

I curl an arm around myself. I don’t want them near her.

I can’t risk them hurting her but the thought barely forms before a growl rips out of me.

My chest vibrates, the motion of it soothing even if the sound is scaring the hell out of me.

I didn’t know I could sound like this. It’s low and powerful and I can hear my wolf in the cadence of it.

She’s not to be trifled with. Oh Luna, my wolf is strong.

I almost laugh when I press both hands to my chest and work to keep her in.

She’s pulled forward by Keiran’s sweet and tart marmalade and apple smell I caught earlier, she’s licking her chops trying to get more of it.

She wants it.

She wants to run free and play. The night is young, and the moon is bright with her mate waiting for her. Now. We must run now.

She wants her mate.

Keiran.

“No,” I whisper, suddenly understanding why I’m growling. Why I want to rip Bella’s head off her shoulders. It isn’t my heat that has me losing my head. At least not completely. “Oh no.”

Mate.

Keiran Ashford is my true mate.

I don’t know much about what’s going on around me but I do know that Keiran figures out we’re mates at the same time I do.

He has to, if the strangled sound that comes out of him is anything to go by.

He shakes off Bella and takes a step towards me.

I almost sob at the sight of him finally choosing me.

The crowd parts in front of him and Keiran walks towards me.

His father’s startled bark makes everyone sit up and notice just like I am.

Keiran is doing something unexpected.

He never does that.

“Keiran?” I whisper. It’s the first time I’ve spoken to Keiran in public.

Silence descends on the pack so heavy that it feels like even the world has stopped.

I hold my breath and stop too but Keiran doesn’t stop.

I almost swallow my tongue because the unexpected thing Keiran does is choose me. Keiran keeps walking right to me.