Page 46 of Ravaged Wolf
Instead, I blubber through fresh tears, “Everyone wants to talk about it behind my back, but they sure as hell don’t want me to talk about it in front of their face.” The dam has burst, and I’m not even sure what my point is anymore. “Can I forgive him? I don’t know. Sometimes, I think I’m more to blame. Can I forgive myself? What do we do if we’re both unforgivable? Die alone?”
Over in the pool, the burly male is rising to his feet. Water sluices off his hairy chest. He leans over to kiss the tip of the female’s nose. They’re totally absorbed in each other, completely oblivious to the fact that there’s a female melting down a few yards away.
“I don’t know if I can trust him. I can hardly trust myself. But I’m not sitting around anymore like my life is already over. I’m done with that.” As quickly as they came, I run out of words. I straighten up, lift my chin, and sniff back snot.
“Here, here,” Nia says and raises her tea cup.
I stare at it dumbly.
“Sometimes you’ve just gotta break loose and let the pieces fall where they may,” Flora says, raising her cup.
Rosie lifts her cup. “We are the masters of our fate. We are the captains of our souls.”
I remember that poem from the Academy. “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley. “We’re literally not,” I laugh through the tears and clink my cup against theirs.
“Feel better?” Nia asks.
“Oddly, yes.”
I still have no plan, and not a lot of hope, but it feels, for the first time, like I might have friends. It feels good.
9
TREVOR
Izzy is beautiful.She’s still slight with bigger breasts and a rounder ass than you’d expect on a female her size. She wore the same office worker clothes, but her hair was messy from the wind, and her cheeks were pink. She always moved tentatively, like a mouse creeping across an open floor, trying not to be noticed, but she stood right in front of me with her back straight and chin up.
And I puked behind a tree.
One whiff of her fear scent and I was back at Moon Lake, staggering for the infirmary with her broken wolf in my arms.
For years, I’ve forced myself to replay every second of what happened, over and over again, until the flashbacks don’t have the power to knock me on my ass. I figured out early on that I had to master the horror and shame, or it would flow through the bond to her in a moment of weakness. I can’t afford to be weak.
I can picture every minute of that night without flinching, but her scent took me out at the knees.
I’ve got to get away from here, as far as I can, before Imess her up anymore. I saw her eyes when I walked away. Her hurt was sharp as daggers.
I need to be shifting and running for the hills, but instead, I stride for Alec and Flora’s cabin on autopilot. That’s where I was heading when I came face-to-face with her in the commons. Did she even speak? My head was roaring. If she said anything, I couldn’t hear. My nose caught her fear, and I loathed myself to the core again.
Where can I go? Not back to Salt Mountain. Leith is poison. He’s cruel to his new mate, and the stronger males in the pack have taken it as permission to indulge their worst natures. I will never let the fucked-up priorities of high-ranking males turn me into a monster again. I’m not even risking it.
I doubt any other pack would take me. There is a no-man’s-land in the triangle between North Border, Salt Mountain, and Quarry Pack, but it’s feral infested, and if my experience on the trip here taught me anything, it’s that I can’t take on more than three ferals at a time. If we’d been attacked by four of them, or if they’d been able to work together, I’d be dead.
Once upon a time, I would’ve welcomed a swift death—and sometimes still, in dark moments, I think it’ll be a relief when it comes—but if I die, Izzy will hurt, so I fight as hard to survive as a male who has something to live for.
I bring her face to mind again. Her eyes don’t eat up her entire face like they used to, and she wasn’t chewing on her lower lip like she always did. Maybe she still has the habit. I saw her for, what, ten seconds?
I picture her, tracing every detail to etch it in my brain. Her hair is the same length, but it wasn’t tied back. She used to wear it in a low ponytail. Until that night, when my claws tore her rubber band as I jerked her head back, and then later, when she was trapped by my knot, and I gently pulledthe strands out of the mangled, bloody mess I’d made of her neck, I’d never seen her hair down. Not until today.
My guts are racked with cramps, and I heave, but there’s nothing left in my stomach. I gulp down a series of deep breaths, and then, bent over with my hands braced on my thighs, I force myself to remember. My claws. Her snapped hairband. The jagged gash in the crook of her neck. Her blood. Her limp body. Her gray skin.
I cast the images up over and over as my wolf huddles in a whimpering mess in the furthest corner of our self. It’s punishment until I’m numb, and then it’s protection. For a little while, my shame and despair are muted, and there’s no chance it can hurt her through the bond.
I blow out a long breath and straighten up. I’m standing in front of the rabbit hutch behind Alec and Flora’s cottage, and I have no idea how I got here.
I blink at the scene. Several splintered wood planks are flat in the dirt. A rabbit didn’t do that. A gorilla maybe, or a bomb, but no rabbit.
I glance around. What do I do?
