Page 24 of Broken Rejected Mate

My heart freezes when Emin looks up, his eyes landing on Sarina. A dialogue between the two of them, their eyes meeting. My daughter and her dad.

I watch Sarina carefully. Can she tell? Can she feel it?

“You like to read?” Emin asks, voice low.

“Yeah,” Sarina shifts from foot to foot nervously, glances back at Kira as though for reassurance. “Kira said I could get a library card…”

“Come on,” Emin says, pushing up from the counter. “I’ve got something that can hold you over until then.”

When he turns and starts walking down the hallway, Sarina glances at me, a question in her eyes—should we follow him? Before he can turn back and see us hesitating, before Dorian and Kira can wonder too much about the pause, I nod,putting my hand on her shoulder briefly before we tail him down the hallway.

Emin pushes the door open to a study, revealing a large oak desk, a worn rug, and light spilling in from the windows outside. It’s gorgeous, and the walls on the left and right are both lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

“Wow,” Sarina says, mouth open as we step inside. Her eyes dart to Emin’s, and she says, “You like to read, too?”

“I sure do,” Emin laughs, running a finger along the shelf. He glances at his hand and seems satisfied that there’s no dust. “Though, our tastes might be a little different.”

“Can I—can I read any of these?” Sarina asks, and when Emin nods, she moves through the room, taking out book after book and piling it in her arms, like we’re in the library.

My heart is flipping in my chest at this entire situation, and I’m torn between being happy for my daughter and being terrified at the three of us, in this room like this. The soft, open look on Emin’s face as he watches her run her finger along the spines.

Luckily, a call from Kira pulls us all from this trance.

“Come on, you three!” she says. “The food is ready!”

Sarina and I return to our guest room so she can set her books on the end table, and when we come back downstairs, Kira and Emin are already seated around the table. Kira has one baby crooked in her arm, his face and her breast hidden by a nursing blanket, and Dorian comes back with the other, the little man held aloft in the air.

“Mission accomplished,” Dorian says. “Clean as a whistle.”

Dorian gets the boys back on their mats, then we’re all settling in at the table. There’s pasta, salad, a plate of roasted veggies, and even homemade lemonade that Kira passes around proudly.

“For that deep lemon flavor,” she says, “you want to macerate the lemons, not juice them. That’s the trick. These are from the lemon tree in our backyard.”

“It’s great,” Emin says, and Sarina asks, “What’smacerate?”

“It means I slice them up and cover them with sugar,” Kira mimes cutting, then sprinkling with sugar. “The sugar pulls the water out of them, making a sweet syrup.”

The conversation continues to flow around us, with Sarina asking questions of all the adults. Asking Dorian what it’s like to be an alpha leader, asking Emin how much his house cost. They’re all charmed by her, even when I try to explain to her that some questions are inappropriate.

“No, it’s okay,” Emin says, laughing. “Do you know what a mortgage is?”

Without meaning to, I relax. I smile, I laugh, and realize at some point in the night that I’m experiencing something I’ve never really had, other than with Willow and a few others in camp.

Community. Family. A sense of belonging.

Sitting up straighter in my chair, I push that feeling away—no matter how warm and enticing it is—and remind myself that this isn’t permanent. That being back here, in the Ambersky pack, is not what my future looks like.

No matter how nice it is to finally have a seat at the table.

Chapter 14 - Emin

Knowing Veva is just across the hall from me, I barely sleep.

Last night, I’d watched her war with herself, alternating between laughing and joining on the conversation and pulling back, trying to keep those walls up.

Kira was right—the food did bring her out of the room. But she’s still not ready to give me a chance. Even after that moment with Sarina in my study.

After tossing and turning for hours, drifting to sleep, only to wake up to some strange sound outside, I finally get out of bed.

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