I tear my mouth away, breathing hard, my forehead pressed against hers. Her lips are swollen, her eyes dazed with desire, and for a moment—just a moment—I almost forget why I’ve been running from this.
Then, I remember.
The weakness. The quaking wolf. The way she crumbles under pressure instead of rising to meet it.
I step back abruptly, and the loss of my support makes her lose her balance. She braces herself against the tree, chest heaving, staring at me in confusion.
“This changes nothing,” I say, my voice harsher than I intend.
She suddenly looks as if I’ve slapped her. The desire in her eyes dims, replaced by something that looks perilously close to devastation.
“What?”
“This.” I gesture between us, hating myself even as the words spill out. “The kiss. The connection. None of it matters.”
She blinks at me, and I see the exact moment she crumbles. The exact moment I destroy whatever fragile hope might have been building between us.
“You’re still too weak,” I continue, each assertion a nail in the coffin of what we could have been. “Too inadequate for me to even consider as my mate. The bond doesn’t change what you are, Selene. It just makes it harder to ignore.”
Her face goes pale, but I’m too deep in the cruelty to stop now. The wounded animal in me wants to hurt her as much as she hurt me.
“And honestly?” I lean back against a tree across from her, affecting a casualness I don’t feel. “No other man is going to want you,either. Not really. Oh, they might take what you offer—like that boy tonight—but when it comes to something real? Something permanent? They’ll see the same thing I do.”
“Stop.” Her voice is barely a whisper.
But I don’t stop. I can’t. The words pour out like poison, each one calculated to cause pain.
“They’ll see a woman whose wolf can barely manifest. Who shakes when challenged. Who runs rather than fights. Who needs protecting instead of standing strong.” I pause, letting it all sink in. “They’ll see someone who is fundamentally…less than.”
The sound she makes is barely human, a broken sob that tears something vital inside my chest. But I’ve gone too far to take it back now.
Tears run down her cheeks, and she doesn’t bother wiping them away. She just stares at me as if she’s seeing me clearly for the first time—seeing exactly what kind of monster I really am.
“I hate you,” she whispers, but it’s louder than any scream.
Then, she pushes off the tree and runs away from me.
She crashes through the underbrush like something wild and wounded. I see branches catching at her dress, leaves tangling in her hair. I can hear her ragged breathing, her choked sobs, the erratic rhythm of her feet as she flees deeper into the woods.
Every instinct I have shrieks at me to follow her. To apologize. To take back the cruel things I said and hold her until she stops crying.
But I don’t move. I lean against the tree and listen to the sound of my fated mate fleeing from me, carrying my poison words with her into the darkness. The mate bond stretches thin between us, aching with her pain, and I wonder if this is what it feels like to truly reject someone.
Not the formal ceremony. Not the spoken declarations. But this—the moment you destroy them so completely that they never want to see you again.
The celebration continues in the distance, music and laughter drifting softly through the trees as if the world hasn’t justshifted on its axis. As if I haven’t just torn apart the one thing that might have made me whole.
I close my eyes and breathe in the lingering scent of her—of the tears and the heartbreak and the fading sweetness that will haunt me forever.
This is what I wanted, isn’t it? To push her away so thoroughly that she’d never look at me with hope again?
So, why does it feel like I’ve just ripped out my own heart and left it bleeding in the dirt?
Chapter Two
Selene
I’ve always been ordinary.
