Page 75 of Her Second-Hand Mate

“No!”

“Yes,” he nodded sadly.

“No! How can you be sure? Are you sure?”

It was one thing for an unmated wolf like Charlotte to see what was out there, but a mated one, a Luna? Knowing her mate would know what she had done? It was insane.

“I wasn’t even aware of it for the longest time. Since they took her to the human morgue and then prepped her for the funeral, I never got close enough to her before the funeral to smell anything suspicious.

For almost a year, I had no clue that anything was off. I was messed up and grieving, but my wolf was justangry.I couldn’t figure it out. And then, one day, it randomly clicked that something wasn’t right, so I started investigating.

Looked at my hospital admission forms, looked at the timestamp on the police report, tried talking to Heather, though Lord knows she couldn’t remember anything useful and would just start hyperventilating,” he scowled.

“Could it have been something else?”

He shook his head.

“There is no other explanation, Penelope, and believe me, I’ve looked. In the end, the only thing I managed to find out was that a group of wolves skipped the dinner and went partying with Cassie. I poured over hundreds of files and transcripts and investigative reports from that night to try and piece everything together, but I still don’t have all the pieces to the puzzle. Heather went to pick her up afterwards, Cassie insisted on driving, and they crashed because she was drunk and careless like she always was.”

“I’m so sorry, Dominic. Have you tried getting the King to launch a formal investigation?”

“I’m not exactly keen on everyone knowing my mate cheated on me. I can barely look you in the eye as I’m telling you. I know it’s not my shame to bear, and yet I am deeply ashamed,” he admitted, more defeated than I’d ever seen him.

“And I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry that I was so obsessed with solving this and so scarred by it that I closed myself off from you. It messed with my head so bad. I didn’t want to show my insecurity to you, and I certainly didn’t want a repeat of what happened with Theo. I’ve been working on a lot of it with Vera, and now that I’ve said this out loud, I think I’m gonna confide in her as well and work through it in therapy as much as one can.”

“I hope it helps,” I said and squeezed his hand, which I hadn’t let go since he pulled me to the couch. He squeezed back. “Wait, what happened with Theo?”

He looked very uncomfortable.

“The day after you moved to the pack, he kept yapping about his new Luna, how the Gamma was the protector of the Luna, and how he’d take his duty seriously, and I was consumed with such insane jealousy that I immediately reassigned him to Campus. Not my proudest moment. I didn’t want to be that male, so I tried keeping my distance in a way, and I made a huge mess of things instead.”

“Oh.”

I didn’t think my brain was capable of absorbing any new information at this point; it had too much trouble processing what had been said so far.

“All of this is no excuse for how I treated you, but it will maybe help you feel less like you were unwanted or that my assholery was your fault somehow. Sorry,” he winced when I automatically frowned at his choice of words.

“I understand you a bit better now.”

“That’s good,” he smiled at me, his eyes gentle. “You are the most perfect mate a male could ever have and I’m sorry for neverletting you know that before tonight. If you give me a chance, I’ll spend the rest of my life rectifying that mistake,” he made his vow, and I almost lost my breath from the intensity of his love and conviction.

“Thank you for telling me now. Better late than never,” I smiled and then heard Gabriel starting to cry upstairs. “I better go to him. Thank you again for telling me about all this, Dominic.”

He just kissed my hand before finally letting it go.

“Go.”

The next day, I kept replaying his words in my head over and over again. It was all too much. Margaret’s confession and the thought of her poor mate, Cassie’s sordid double life, Dominic’s burden...

I nuzzled Gabriel’s soft neck and allowed myself to forget everything for a moment. We were lounging on the deck after lunch, enjoying the summer, him with my boobs for company, me with a glass of lemonade.

A feeling of panic and sadness hit me so strongly that I knocked over the glass. I checked my mental calendar. Dominic wasn’t supposed to have therapy today, he would have warned me. What was going on? I carefully avoided the broken glass as I went into the house.

Feelings of fear and anxiety and panic kept welling up inside me, but I was still managing to keep them contained. I didn’t even know which ones were mine and which ones were his.

I was just hoping he’d come home soon and tell me he had rescheduled his appointment with Vera and simply forgot to tell me. That I’d worried for no reason. That there wasn’t somehorrible thing I didn’t know about yet waiting to be spoken into becoming my reality.

Ten minutes later, he threw the front door open, the grief on his face clear as day, even without the bond. I immediately knew something was seriously wrong. He took Gabriel from my arms, and I sank into the couch.

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