Page 13 of Unforgivable

Lyri

I pull the soft cotton up to my thighs. I have no strength to stand up, yet. With a little wiggle, I manage to move the panties up into place. It's all I can do for a few minutes. My body is heavy. My eyes ache from the endless tears that have been leaking out all night. My limbs feel dead. All of me feels like it's not really part of me. My body is this foreign mass, just a tumor within a tumor. I lie back down, exhausted only from that little effort.

Sometimes I think that everything that has happened over the last three years is just an illusion. A terrible dream. Before thatnight, I believed that the rejection was a nightmare, and I would wake up, and my mate would smile at me, be with me, praise me, protect me, and love me.

My wolf knew before I did that it was hopeless. Our mate may be a strong, powerful male, but he is not ours. I would like to say that he is a terrible mate, but that's not true, is it? All of his praise, his protection, his smiles, his love, all of it went to her. Every bit of real affection was given to her while I begged and fought for the scraps. The sad thing is every scrap thrown my way I lapped up as if it meant something real.

Now that I am lying here, in someone else's house, on a borrowed bed in borrowed panties, I have all the time in the world to think about every encounter, every word, every look. Three times he threw his scraps at me. The first one, he told her friends once to stop calling me an ugly slut. The second, he stopped one of his friends from flirting with me. The last, he told Drew that it was partly his fault that we fucked.

What sort of affection was any of that? I'm not an ugly slut. Well, I wasn't an ugly slut. That's up for debate now that I have scars on my stomach, my thighs. My wrists, maybe my face, who knows? That second time? He had to defend me. He would have defended anyone. That was early in our game, just a year after I realized that he was meant to be mine and finally felt whole enough to fight for him. I started to train harder, study more. I grew in popularity because I thought I could prove myself to be good enough. Truthfully, I thought I could prove that I was better than her, than his Choice. When his friends started to notice me, pay me more attention, he stopped it. I thought it meant he cared, that he was jealous. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. In the long run, it hardly mattered. Now I am an ugly slut. I'm completely ruined as a female.

The last scrap of attention is the one that I wish I could forget. Minutes of true bliss only to be so shattered...

More tears slip out. Unlike last night it turns into real crying, my body heaving in ways that cause echoes of pain in my abdomen.

The door creaks open. Thjis walks back in. "Enough with the fucking tears," he grunts.

"Does it make me ugly?" I laugh. "Uglier?" I amend.

He doesn't care about my tears, and I don't care about my nakedness. What do I have to hide anymore? My virtue? A tortured giggle escapes and I clamp my hand over my mouth, breathing ragged because my nose is stuffed up.

He walks over and stares down while I stare up. I think I'm hysterical. I can't stop the tears or the giggles. Maybe Thjis will probably do what he has wanted since the beginning and finally get rid of me. I hope he doesn't ruin the pretty quilt with my blood.

I stare up into his dark, fathomless eyes. Abruptly he reaches out and plucks the button-down shirt Ezra left for me. Strong hands manipulate my body, putting one arm in, then pulling the fabric behind my back and tucking my other arm in its sleeve. Fast fingers button me up, ignoring the nakedness underneath.

He picks me up. My giggles stop, but the tears are still flowing. I hate this. I have lost all control of my life. Thjis doesn't care about my inner turmoil. He kicks open the door a little and carries me out and into the kitchen.

The other males are waiting. Sarj and Inuit stare in open-mouthed wonder as usual. Ezra shoots Thjis a scowl but says nothing. I don't see Rhet anywhere.

Thjis sits me down in a cushion-covered chair that was already pulled out from the table. It has arms, more of an easy-chair I would expect to see in my grandma's house.

I murmur a soft, tear-filled 'thank you' to Thjis. Good manners die hard. He pushes my chair in.

Strong fingers grab my chin and turn my head upward. My gasp can't escape from the grip on my jaw. Thjis glares down, a fierce, indecipherable look in his eyes. "You are beautiful," he growls out. His lips slam down on mine.

I don't know what to do. The kiss lasts only a second, but it carries a message loud and clear. Power and ownership.

"W-what?" I stutter.

"Rhet will tell you."

I look around helplessly for Rhet, even though I know he's not here. Ezra is smiling weakly at me. The pups are groaning, hiding their faces from the adult intimacy they have been forcefully subjected to for a hot second.

"You kissed me," I feel the idiotic need to point out. My wolf whines, circling in her den, unsure about whether we should flee from this male or not.

"Which is unfair," Ezra sulks.

When the door creaks open and Rhet steps inside, I feel a moment of relief. Saved by blue-eyes, thank goodness.

"Hey, guys," Rhet greets us all before leaning down and kissing me on the cheek. "Hey, pretty thing."

I've woken up in some sort of alternate universe. I should go back to sleep so that everyone can return to normal. I start to stand, but Thjis' hard hand on my thigh prevents me from moving.

"Where are you going, Lyri?" he asks sternly.

"Back to bed," I announce. "I'll see you all when everything is normal again. Normal... sort of. Sort of normal? Not this," I say, utterly flustered by how his hand is stroking my bare skin comfortingly, and his mouth is twitching in that barely-there smile.

"You need to eat, pretty," Rhet says calmly.

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