Page 29 of Plus-Size Bullied Mate

The drive to the isolated cabin takes less than twenty minutes, yet it somehow feels like the longest I’ve ever experienced.

Hunter doesn’t force conversation, which is the only mercy the evening offers. Instead, I watch the terrain gradually change through the passenger window, shifting from a treed-in landscape to something hillier, then the hills give way to real elevation. Trees crowd in denser and darker until the road narrows to something that barely qualifies as a road. Then the cabin comes into view, surrounded by rocks and a handful of old trees, as the sky darkens in the background.

It’s beautiful, but I don’t say that out loud.

The cabin is smaller than I expected. It isn’t crude, yet it has obviously been maintained with wood sealed against the weather. It’s a real cabin, and not some alpha’s idea of roughing it in luxury. There’s a porch that wraps around one side and disappears into darkness, and beyond it, even from the car, I can see the faint, pale glow and the rise of steam, which means the hot springs are exactly where everyone always said they’d be.

I bring my bag inside without being asked, and I don’t wait to be shown around.

The interior subtly smells of smoke and minerals from the water outside. There’s a single large room with a sleeping area at the far end, a fireplace already lit, and a kitchen that’s more functional than decorative. By all means, it’s nice, but not where I want to find myself.

Hunter sets his bag down and moves to the fireplace to maintain it with the practical efficiency of a man who has done it thousands of times, and I stand in the middle of the room looking at the space, trying to make my brain process the reality of what has happened.

I’m mated, officially, to Hunter Reed.

While a bond hasn’t exactly snapped into place yet, it’s official in the eyes of the pack, and that little snag is what this getaway is supposed to fix.

That thought alone fills me with so many complicated feelings that I can’t even begin to address them properly.

I’m in a cabin in the mountains with him, trapped in the enforced intimacy of a small space with no easy exits.

The numbness never leaves me, and even that doesn’t give me much to work with.

When my legs feel too weak to handle the pressure of this situation, I sit in the chair near the fire and watch Hunter work in complete silence.

He doesn’t say anything either, as he seems to understand, or at least to accept, that silence is the only thing I can digest right now.

He forced me into this. He didn’t give me a choice when it came to addressing the sinking feeling I got every time I looked at him, and it only feels worse now.

As much as I wanted to deny it, I knew he was right before. This thing between us… It has always existed to some extent. Like a quiet instinct in me that knew he was important beyond being the alpha-in-training.

I just didn’t want to acknowledge it.

The fire grows under Hunter’s care, and the room warms while steam from the hot springs drifts past the window in slow curls.

I think about my parents and the pack’s faces today, more so the performance of acceptance and the reality underneath it. I think about being a kid and learning that grief was something I wasn’t allowed to show in public.

The numbness doesn’t break yet, but it feels as if something moves beneath it.

Hunter has changed everything. He moved through my life like a catastrophic event. He made me his mate, put me at the center of the pack’s attention in the most exposing way possible, and stripped away the invisibility I’d built for myself.

Even if it was lonely, the careful smallness was mine and under my control. Now, it has been replaced with something loud and very, very public.

He did it without asking, and that feels like the farthest thing from protection.

I know his logic, since I’ve turned it over enough times to understand where it’s coming from. He thinks this bond will protect me from Hayes and anyone else, as if the Wraith Peak Alpha would bother coming back for someone like me.

But in ways, it feels more like a cruel joke, or his way of asserting his true dominance over me. Maybe in ways, he’s doing this to get back at me for what my parents did to his father.

The anger is coming back now. I can feel it from underneath the numbness.

He can claim me in front of them, he can speak the words, bring me to this cabin, and tell himself the bond is what makes everything right. But that doesn’t mean I’ll bend for him.

Even if it’s a small thing in the grand scheme of things, my thoughts are my own, and so are my choices and the version of myself I’ve been quietly building on the sidelines of a pack that never gave me much room.

Hunter thinks this is done because the ceremony happened, but when I look at the fire and let the anger take shape, a sense of clarity settles in deeply.

Hunter Reed is going to find out exactly how wrong he is.