Page 41 of The Fated Hunter Wolf

I ran again.

Stopping meant remembering her face when I’d rejected her. And remembering meant I’d tear my own heart out just to make it stop.

My wolf was running on pure instinct—no plan, no direction, just raw movement to keep from imploding. And I watched from somewhere deep inside, helpless as he charged through the forest like a rabid thing.

He wasn’t protecting me—he was protecting the shell of me. The broken thing. My wolf knew I couldn’t handle what I’d done, so he took over. Simple. Efficient. Brutal.

But he was running blind. Another day was passing.

You don’t know where you’re going, I said.

He growled.

We need to think. Maybe she lied about them being dead.

Another snarl—deeper this time, edged with desperation. A warning to shut the hell up and let him handle this.

I pressed anyway.We can’t run forever.

He didn’t answer, but his next step was slower. Then another. And another.

Until we stopped.

My chest felt like someone had reached inside and scooped out everything that mattered. The bond… even thinking the word sent lightning through my skull, white-hot agony that made my vision fracture.

My wolf collapsed. My legs folded under me. The forest floor was cold and wet, seeping through my fur, but I barely felt it. Darkness pressed in from all sides.

I’d never expected the rejection would be like this. Like dying, but worse—because death at least promised an end. This was an ending that kept going, a fracture that spread with every heartbeat.

I remembered my mother’s stories about the old days, before the Great Separation. About wolves finding their mates and feeling whole for the first time. About the strength it gave them, the certainty. The unbreakable connection that even death merely muted rather than severed. They were stories of the myth that was fated mates—they were never to become real.

“It is said the royal bloodlines were blessed with the strongest bonds,” she’d recounted to us, running her fingers through my hair while Logan and the twins played nearby. “Orion most of all. The Shadow Moon Goddess favored our line, blessed us with her gifts.”

Now I understood why rejection had never been part of her stories.

This was never meant to happen. The bond wasn’t designed to break.

Stars appeared between the branches overhead. Sparkling, as if they were laughing at the broken thing I’d become.

Stars, like the night my parents died.

I’d been eighteen. Logan twenty. The twins just fourteen with their gangly limbs and laughter. We’d gone hunting in the northern territory, tracking a stag throughout the day and into twilight. A family tradition from Father’s own youth that he insisted on us carrying forward. He’d stayed behind with our mother.

We should have been there when it happened.

According to those who survived, the attack came without warning. No scent of approaching enemies, no sounds of battle. Just the eerie quiet of the main house when we returned, drag marks from the door to the garden, and blood. So much blood.

They’d been dead for hours by the time we found them. Their throats torn out. Their bodies surrounded by ash and strange symbols that none of the elders recognized.

No challenge issued. No territory claimed. Just death, swift and silent as winter snow.

It hadn’t been a coup or a rival pack. Whatever it was, it had slipped past our sentries without triggering a single alarm. Something that killed our parents—the alpha and his mate—and left without taking what any enemy would have wanted: power, control, the right to lead Orion.

Logan assumed the role of alpha immediately. At twenty-five, he became the youngest alpha in Orion’s history. I couldn’t be his beta then. I was too angry, too damaged to think clearly. Too haunted by what we’d lost.

Then the twins disappeared.

And now this—a bond I never asked for, shattered by my own rage, bleeding me dry one second at a time.