Page 38 of Ravaged Wolf
My heart beats faster. I feel raw. Exposed. Like I’ve stepped out of the shower into the cold. “Did he have curly hair and blue eyes?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t remember.” She smiles apologetically. I can tell she wants to ask me why I want to know, but she doesn’t pry. She has a healer’s way about her. I wonder if she studied under Abertha, too, before she became an entrepreneur.
“Have you visited Old Den yourself?” she asks, gracefully changing the subject herself.
The conversation continues from there, and it’s a pleasant, easy visit. No one bothers me on the bus ride back to Moon Lake, probably because all the males look like wrung out dishcloths, and half of them pass out before the bus even leaves Quarry Pack territory. Training must’ve been brutal.
I deliver the basket of herbs and ’shrooms to Abertha’s cottage before I head home. She’s not home, and from the size of the gravity feeder she left out for her cat, she’s off on one of her adventures.
I take my time walking back to the Tower, enjoying theglitter of moonlight on the lake. That’s one of my most frequent dreams—moonlight on water—although now that I think of it, I haven’t had that one in a while.
The entire time I’m making my way back to my parents’ apartment, and all night, as I toss and turn instead of conking out like I usually do, and for the rest of the weekend, I wonder about the male named Trevor at Old Den.
Una could be wrong. She must meet hundreds of shifters.
There are a lot of names like Trevor. Travis, for example. Trent. Tristan.
It’s too much of a coincidence that I would think to ask, and she’d have met him. I’ve read about how susceptible witnesses are to the power of suggestion.
I’m still thinking about it on Monday morning as I make my way to the infirmary for my shift.
What would Trevor be doing at Old Den? The pack didn’t even exist when he left Moon Lake. It’s more likely another Trevor, a relative of the old male. Males don’t tend to care for other males unless they’re related, and that’s only if there’s no female around to do the work.
How would Trevor have ended up at Old Den?
Where did he go? Or where was he sent? Why did I neverreallytry to find out what happened to him? I asked Mom and Dad, they told me to leave it alone, and I did. Because I do what I’m told. Like I did when they told me to wait to mate him.
Like I did that night when Trevor saidrun.
Chills run down my arms, and I tug my sweater tighter.
Why am I torturing myself with this? Even if it is my Trevor, what would that matter?
He’s not reallymyTrevor, is he?
Yes.
Yes, he is.
I stop in my tracks, right at the foot of the ramp leading to the infirmary doors, with my water tumbler in one hand and my lunch bag in the other. My wolf wakes up, her eyes wide and bright. She never gets up this early.
It’s not her voice that saidyes,he is.
It’s mine.
And I’m right. Trevor Floyd is my mate. He did a horrible thing, or a horrible thing happened. I’ve never really decided how to put it, but however you put it, he’s my mate.
Fate made him for me, and me for him.
And then she fucked everything up.
Or did she? It wasn’t all on her, was it? I listened to my parents and Uncle Howell and stayed away. Then, when I was too far gone to think straight, I snuck out. He begged me to go back home, and I didn’t.
Trevor wasn’t the only one to blame—that’s the cold, hard truth—but other things are true, too.
I did what I was told. I was loyal to my parents. Of course, I was. They’d trained me to obey them.
Every piano practice that bored me out of my mind, every tennis practice when I was exhausted from school, and every argument I had to swallow to keep Dad’s wolf appeased taught me how to ignore my own interests and needs and thoughts.
