Filed to story: The Alpha She Chose Instead (Serena & Ethan)
I have to admit, my heart warms a little. Kennedy I can see walking through the woods past curfew, but Mari and Annie are still afraid of ferals and bugbears. They were pups not that long ago.
“That short, squealy one wanted me to go down to the commons and talk to Ethan.”
“Mari’s-” Well, she’s hopelessly na?ve, but that seems cruel to say. “Mari’s a good egg.”
“Egg.” Abertha snorts. “You’re on the internet too much. You’re starting to talk like a human.”
I shrug. I don’t mind humans. They’re easier to deal with than shifters.
“You can’t live with them, you know,” Abertha says. My gaze flies up. She sees too much.
“I know.”
“You’d end up hurting one. Your wolf will never understand that they’re not prey.”
“My wolf listens to me.”
“Was she listening to you just now in the thicket? Or last night?”
I sigh and rub my temples. She’s right.
I breathe deep and let the scent of lavender and sandalwood calm me.
“I don’t want to be here anymore.” My heart tugs. No shifter wants to be alone. It’s not how we’re made. Still, it’s the truth. This place is tainted.
I can’t go back to the commons. I can’t look Haisley and her mother in the eye. Act like shame isn’t corroding me from the inside out. It doesn’t matter that Haisley’s mean and stuck up-she’s pack. I didn’t have the right to go after her. Not when she didn’t know she was touching another female’s mate.
And I guess, she wasn’t. Now.
Abertha sets a steaming cup of tea and a big bottle of sports drink in front of me. “Hydrate while your tea cools.”
Then, she shuffles back to the kitchen and comes back with a plate of muffins, placing them between us and easing herself into a chair. “You don’t have a choice. This is home.”
“I could ask for a trade.”
Abertha doesn’t bother to reply. She knows that’s a non-starter. No pack would trade an unmated female for me, not with my bum leg and doubt about my status, and we both know it.
“How do I do this?” I glance out a thick-paned window. The garden is peaceful, overflowing with green and bright bursts of red and orange and blue. It’s beautiful. Hours and hours of hard work and sweat, but it yields good fruit.
Why doesn’t my life work that way?
Abertha gives me a wry smile. “The same way you do anything. One foot in front of the other. One day at a time.”
My shoulders slump. I’m so tired. “He’s my mate.”
“He was.”
“I just don’t get it. How can he reject me? Mates are fated. Am I wrong? Is this moon madness?”
A primal fear chills my blood. It might take decades, but eventually, moon madness is a death sentence. Either it eats your brain to Swiss cheese until you forget how to breathe, or you’re exiled, or the pack puts you down because you’ve become a rabid animal.
Abertha nudges the muffins toward me. I shake my head. I can’t eat.
“It’s not moon madness. And mates are-complicated.”
I’ve noticed. The story is you sense your mate, you can’t resist each other, you fall in love, and you have babies. But there are a lot of-aberrations.
“So Ethan and I aren’t mates?”
“No. You definitely are.”
“I don’t get it.”
Abertha lets out a long, gusty sigh.
“Is this one of those things like the man and the wolf where everything I’ve been taught as a pup is wrong?” The more I hang out with Abertha, the more long sighs I hear, and the more life gets confusing.
“Yup.”
“So what? There’s no such thing as mates?”
“Obviously, there are. Don’t doubt your own experience, Serena. I thought I’d drilled at least that into your head.”
She drills a lot. Sometimes it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
“There are mates,” she goes on. “It’s kind of like-” She looks around the room, and her gaze settles on the tea and sports drink in front of me. I haven’t touched either, yet.
“So you’ve just run a marathon-that’s heat, right?-and there is a beverage perfectly formulated to meet your biological needs.” She points at the sports drink. “Ta da. Your mate. Nothing else will hydrate you. And, usually, a parched, um, runner will really, really dig the drink that quenches their thirst. What’s not to love, right?”
“Sports drink tastes like ass.”
She snaps and points at me. “Exactly. So when the sports drink doesn’t appeal beyond the physical, some people will hold their nose and guzzle it and suffer for life. Some people drink until they’re hydrated and then switch it up. Decide they prefer tea.”
“Like Dierdre and Jimmy.”
“Yup.”
“And Liam and Rowan.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And Haisley and Dermot.”
New Book: Veiled Desires of the Alpha King Novel
Dayson was the alpha of the largest pack in North America. Powerful figures from other packs sought to offer gorgeous girls as potential mates for Dayson. He steadfastly rejected these advances, he was not a pawn to be manipulated. But eventually there came a mysterious girl he could hardly say No. Who was she?